Imagine:

You are a movie star, and a close friend of yours has a new movie coming out, so he invites you to its premiere show. You both arrive at the theatre together, the whole location booked just for two, and the movie starts playing.

But there’s a twist: you are self-obsessed. So, during the 2-hour movie of your friend, you frequently reach out for your phone, just to play one of your own movies on it. Your friend notices you doing this, and out of embarrassment you put your phone aside, but not for long. As if addicted, you keep playing your movie again and again.

Once your friend’s movie ends, you realize that you have no points of discussion on his movie. You never paid attention! In fact, even your friend does not expect anything from you anymore. He just leaves.

Slowly, the strong bond of friendship is replaced by mere formalities and namesake interactions.

Any thoughts? Would you like to be this self-obsessed movie star in real life? Would you ever want to discuss your own life with someone like this? What’s your advice for him?

Roses are Red

A famous children’s rhyme goes like, “Roses are red, Violets are blue,…” But if you dig deeper, it reveals a truth about human nature. To make sense of the world we interpret things. Now, if your brain had to consciously make sense of everything it came across in a day, how exhausting would it get? And that’s where generalization comes to our rescue.

Are all the roses red? No. But red roses are most common, and if this association of a rose to red color helps you describe a rose to someone else, especially a child, it saves your energy. Simply put, this is a generalization. The problem arises when you become unaware of your generalizations and hold them as the only truth. In fact, such an extreme case is called over-generalization.

We all live in our own realities. Where number 9 is considered bad in Chinese culture, Hindu culture regards it as auspicious. Some cultures see red as good; others call it bad. Now imagine, if so many differences exist at a cultural level, how many can exist at an individual level, where experiences from a whole lifetime come together to shape one’s worldview.

Hear the Voice

Often, we act as the person in the visualization earlier, refusing to watch any movie other than ours. Even when someone is telling us about their own life experiences, we close our mind’s eyes and switch back to our own thoughts instead. And this leads to misunderstanding, as we missed the whole movie of our friend that they tried to show us. And there’s only one solution to this problem: empathy.

Often, people say while arguing, “You are not getting my point!” or “You are impossible to talk to!” Such scenarios mostly arise due to a lack of empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from their perspective. It is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

When someone states a point, praise, or complaint, it is based on how they see a situation. In these moments, if their point does not match with yours, the depth of your empathy becomes a make-or-break factor. If you have empathy, you will be open to keeping your perspective aside and try to see the situation as they do. But if empathy is missing, you are likely to get into an argument about how the other person is wrong for not thinking like you.

It was exactly this empathy that was lacking in our movie star earlier, failing to watch any other reality than their own version of it. And sadly, the world is full of such people, which is probably one of the reasons behind its many problems. Can we do something about it? Yes!

The change always starts with you, and the best starting point is to try not to become like that self-obsessed movie star. Here’s how.