Using Your Eyes (Part 2): Watching and Being Watched

The first thing I noticed about Bruce was what I saw as he entered the room from the corridor. I’d been waiting for Bruce to arrive for our meeting. We’d met before, so I recognized Bruce straightaway. Recognizing him was instinctive. So was noticing him. And although I didn’t consciously at the time “notice myself noticing him,” what I did notice had an immediate influence on how I entered the conversation with Bruce. What I noticed was that Bruce was not noticing me. His head was buried in his phone. Even as he entered my “space” and encountered my outstretched arm, his eyes were still down, focused on a text-based message from someone else. Try as I might not to feel ignored, my emotional response was to feel offended and unimportant. As Bruce encountered my hand (now conveniently in his downcast eye-line) he broke his step, looked at my hand, looked up at me, forced a polite smile, and said “Hi.” And then buried his head in his phone as he made his way to his seat. “Wow,” whispered a colleague after I’d also sat down at the table. “Did you see that?” I’m guessing you had the same reaction as we did. And you probably also recognize that Bruce was unaware that the behavior everyone else in the room had observed had such an influence on our perception of him and his attitude towards us and our meeting.