This is the first post of my first series on this blog - Liv's life lessons - as my gap year has been full of lessons that I really want to share!
We've all heard the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover" but how many of us actually live by this mantra?
No matter how hard I try, I know that I don't always...
Recently, I was walking to work and it was pretty dark and cold. In the distance, I could see a hooded figure coming towards me carrying what looked like a knife. Me being me, I sped up my walking pace and avoided eye contact with the guy so that he wouldn't hurt me.
A few minutes later my phone rang and it was an old school friend. The first thing he said to me was "Why did you ignore me?" I had no idea what he was talking about and thought that he was talking about a snapchat he'd sent that I hadn't seen yet.
It transpired that he was the hooded figure carrying the "knife". The knife turned out to be a baguette that he'd just picked up on his way home from work. Plus it was pretty cold and he didn't have a hat hence his hood being up.
Clearly I couldn't have been any more wrong about the mysterious hooded figure and this made me think back to other times when I'd been so wrong about what people are like.
We're all guilty of jumping to conclusions about people's character based on how they look.
Examples include: thinking that because someone reads a lot of books they're going to be boring or if they're blonde that they're going to be stupid or even because a person's got lots of tattoos that they're going to be violent.
Who we are on the inside usurps our external appearances. Things in life are rarely as they seem and people are no different.
Tip to takeaway: In order to prevent our prejudices from affecting how we interact with others who may appear different to ourselves, we should try to adopt a "blank slate" i.e. seek to wipe our minds of pre-conceived opinions about a person's character until they reveal themselves to us.
It may seem like a pretty hard thing to do, but I'm sure if we all try, we'll be amazed to learn how interesting those around us really are ☻
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