Practice noticing.
Pay close attention to people by paying attention to how they make you feel.
During my bouts of employment, I would maintain notes about the behaviours of people that I worked closely with and respected. You can greatly improve your own behavior by emulating others.
Some people are worth writing about. And not everything is worth writing about! How do you know? Pay attention, bring into awareness, notice, how others make you feel. A strong emotion signals that it's time to learn. Feelings are a signal.
To illustrate, an example
I attend recurring meetings where a few teams are represented, as one does. One day, at near the end of one of them, an engineer named Patrick quickly interjects and works through something. When he interjects, I feel Something. The air changes. The meeting's time is running out. He is slightly frustrated. The odd background of his workshop comes into focus. The tone and speed of the meeting changes. And before you knew it, a useful decision is made. Patrick is a high ranking engineer (as measured by my opinion of him). And this feeling is my signal to pay attention. It's time to understand what happened. I open my notes and write "Patrick gets what he needs at the end of the meeting". Yes, it's quite literal!
I recall previous meetings, and notice that Patrick usually only drives decisions at the end. That's odd! Once more, I move the blinking google doc cursor forward.
"Patrick gets what he needs at the end of the meeting, because he leaves his point to the end."
I start emulating it. Before each meeting, I write down what I actually need from meetings. I let people take most of the time, to get what they need. I find that I often only get a minute at the end. This makes it challenging! I learn to speak up. I learn to be fast. Eventually I am able to make it work.
To my surprise, the lack of time itself forces everyone to make a decision quickly. Decisions actually get made, instead of being stuck in bikeshed limbo! By emulating Patrick, I find myself driving more decisions.
Amusingly, I suspect that people with behaviours worth emulating aren't even aware of their productive behaviours. Sometimes, it's accidental. Maybe Patrick does what he does because he's distracted for most of the meeting, and then is like "oh shit".
It actually doesn't matter. I paid attention. I copied. I learned something useful.
Notice when someone makes you feel a feeling. Notice the source of that feeling. Write about it. Prod it, be curious about it. You might learn somethifng useful. You might integrate something new.
Pay attention!
[You can find me on substack. You can also find the draft of this on my site at yacine dot ca]
But that's just the thing, we are noticing:
https://files.catbox.moe/qaz3op.png
That post was worth NOTICING 😉 Thx a lot for explaining your point on a concrete example, it added value and make me, as a reader, very happy. Good stuff!