How to spot a genuinely happy waitress

I think understanding yourself deeply helps you understand others. I made a prediction that our server was genuinely happy at her job, & I was right!

I asked my friends: “do you think she enjoys her job?”

friend: “She’s definitely good at it”

me: “I think it’s more than that. I don’t know, she just seems to have this great energy? Like she’s just happy about everything she’s doing?”

friend: “I think she’s really charismatic, maybe?”

• • •

A year ago I would have stopped there. Every now and then I encounter a waitress I really connect with like this, who seems to be pleasant to be around, and I’m never sure exactly why.

But these days, I’ve been practicing how to listen to my body. So I pay attention: what do I feel?

• I feel like I can trust her

• I feel like she is not annoyed at me, that she is not in a hurry (even though rationally I KNOW she must be, it’s a very busy restaurant and she’s running around a lot)

  • But I don’t feel that at all

• When she says “you’re welcome” 4 times at our table as she refills our water, it doesn’t feel like she’s saying it out of obligation. There’s a warmth that feels like how a friend having me at their home might say it, genuinely.

How do I know this? I don’t! At least not “rationally” or “consciously”. Some folks are really good at reading people, I’m not one of them. All I did here was to just think about how I feel.

I felt happy when she smiled. Was she attractive? Yeah, but there’s other people I’ve found attractive who didn’t make me feel like this, the trust & warmth etc.

I couldn’t explain it, I didn’t know what she was doing to make me feel this way, but I knew I felt this way.

This is an example of how “your body” can know something that your rational mind does not know. There’s no logical reason that you’re aware of that you should trust this person more than any other waitress.

But that doesn’t mean there IS no reason. There is an emotional one, and that (apparently) carries some real, concrete, verifiable truth.

Now I’ve lived my whole life not trusting my emotions like this. I would never make a decision just purely on gut feeling, I need to have a rational reason that I can articulate.

So I just decide to test it, am I right about this woman? Did my body detect something that can be verified as real, objective truth in the world?

I ask her.

Hey..can I ask you something?

“How long have you worked here?”

“I’ve been here about 7 months so far!”

“Do you like it? I mean..do you enjoy your job?”

She said yes!

Now of course she did. What else would she say?

But she didn’t just say “yeah it’s a great place! I love it here. Would you like a refill on that?” (I would have taken that as a “no”, that I was wrong).

Her response was to pause in the middle of her busy shift to muse about how you really DO need to find joy in the every day work you do. That, if you can’t find that joy, you burn out quickly.

She talked about how for her, the shifts go by really fast, how she loves hosting people & interacting with all the people that come through here, etc.

I think this is a very strong signal that what she was saying was true. This is above and beyond what she needed to say (it’s also very specific, not generic).

What did she do to make me feel those feelings?

Of course there are rational reasons to explain all this:

Her smile was symmetric. Her body language was relaxed and “open”. Her tone of voice was not agitated, nor was it repetitive, she varied her tone if she was saying the same thing over and over (like “you’re welcome”). There’s probably a ton other signals like that I wouldn’t even know to look for.

You can spend a lot of time learning about signals & body language, to try and consciously pick out these things. But it’s much easier to just practice listening to your body. You already know all this. You literally have a feedback mechanism that tells you, in real-time, how genuine every human interaction you have probably. Just start paying attention to it.

Side note: I think it’s near impossible to fake being genuine.

The really exciting thing for me here is: if just listening to my body helped me pick up, essentially a whole new skill set (one I’ve been developing my entire life, I just didn’t know I had it), what else can I do with this? What else does my body say throughout my day? What does it think about it?