So, I bought a condo in Midtown a couple months ago...

So, I bought a condo in Midtown a couple months ago to use as my private office space. While I've had a lot of fun furnishing it over the past few weeks with all that man-cave type crap I'd never put in my real house, today I finally hung a very special piece right across from my desk I've had in storage for a few years. I call it my "Stop Bitching" mirror.

As the story goes, I was working in South Florida in 1997 at a restaurant on Las Olas Blvd that James Andrew Sands and his partner owned. At the back of the restaurant, there was this bigass mirror over the console where we kept pretty much everything to operate the front of the house.

That little area was our congregating place, and we would often lean against the console and look in the mirror to hold every conversation with each other while the restaurant was in full swing. We even had our work schedules and contact info for everyone taped to the bottom corner of the mirror. It was like your standard refrigerator door, minus the magnets.

One night on a particularly busy Saturday, I was having a great evening but I didn't realize how my communication was coming off to my coworkers. Apparently, it was a big problem and I didn't know it. I always had a tendency to make fun of certain petty things, complain about things that I THOUGHT others also found annoying, and just whine in general.

At some point I walked up to our manager, Phil, who was standing at the console in front of the mirror with the seating chart looking pretty perplexed. I thought I'd lift his spirits by telling him how completely unfair the last five minutes of my unprivileged life had unfolded. I opened my mouth, stared at his reflection in the mirror and started my little diatribe.

He looked up and back at me in the mirror and said, with an expression of total exasperation, "Rob.... please.... stop.... BITCHING!"

I was so completely stunned I couldn't speak.

I didn't engage in much conversation at all with anyone else the rest of the night except with my customers.

At home that night I thought about what happened, and I realized he was right: I bitched and complained about everything! Everybody was wrong, everyone needed to be cut down, every person was evil and out to get me, and by God I was put on this earth to bitch about it.

All of it. All the time, always.

Well, not anymore.

I went back to work the next day with a new attitude. Every time I looked in that mirror -- about 200 times per shift -- I was reminded of how stunned I felt when Phil called me out. I didn't talk much with my co-workers over the next few days, mainly because I hadn't come up with much else to converse about now that the bitching had ceased. It took a while, but I finally got the hang of it, and life moved on.

Over the next couple of years, although I got another day job and put my parents' investment in my college degree back to good use, I still worked at the restaurant on nights and weekends whenever I could.

One day -- coincidentally a week or so before I moved to Atlanta -- James told me they were closing the restaurant in a few days because the landlord suddenly wanted to bulldoze the whole block to make way for a ginormous Cheesecake Factory. He said they were going to auction off all the contents the morning after the last day of business and call it a day.

So I worked the last shift on the last day the restaurant was open. The next morning, I grabbed my tip money, drove back to the restaurant for the auction, and I placed the winning bid on that mirror. I paid for it, popped it in the back of my jeep, hugged everyone goodbye and the next morning started my trek up to Georgia.

Every time I look in this mirror I am reminded that we sometimes don't realize how we are being perceived. Not just by others, but even by ourselves. Until we look straight at ourselves and confront what's going on, we may not know how poisonous our words, actions and deeds are to others unless we reflect on them. And we don't know what we are even doing to ourselves until someone reflects with us, helping us by looking in the same mirror together, and telling us to just STOP IT.

Having this mirror across my desk is just my constant reminder to stay positive, live in the moment, be grateful, always take the higher road, empathize vs commiserate and always keep an open mind.

I'm not perfect... then again, no one is... but it's the reflection that counts.