How do you help friends, family, and colleagues understand your hearing loss?

Do your friends and family forget you have hearing loss, and you find yourself having to constantly remind them? 

What do you want your friends and family to know about your hearing loss?

What is the ideal balance: How much information do you tell friends, family, and colleagues about your hearing loss so that you can live happily and have effective interactions?

Your answer to these questions is personal and may differ from someone else living with hearing loss. Your preferences will most likely depend on factors such, as your personality, social habits, family environment, and work situation.

Here is a short exercise to help you start to understand the balance that works best for you and take control of a repeating situation you would like to change. First, we will establish the current pattern and response to the situation, and then we will determine a more effective pattern. You can then choose what changes you will make to help correct the balance.

What is the repeating situation?

Let’s first consider a situation that occurs regularly, where you wish your loved ones or colleagues knew something in particular (or remembered) about how your hearing loss affects communication.

Some examples of situations include the following:

• Your colleagues always talk over each other during meetings, meaning you leave the meeting unsure of what has been discussed, and the outcomes

• Every day, your partner calls you from another room, failing to first get your attention before addressing you

• A friend keeps covering their mouth when speaking to you

• Your friends make a restaurant reservation without considering the best place to enable effective communication—you end up sitting at a table in the middle of a restaurant, where it is difficult to understand anyone 

• Loved ones have a habit of turning their back to you when speaking

• Friends and family never remember that you need captions enabled on the TV

Establishing the current pattern and response

With this situation clearly in your mind, work through answering the following questions about how this situation generally plays out: your current reality.

Situation

What is the situation that causes you difficulties?

Thoughts and feelings

What does the situation cause you to think about yourself?

Action

How do these thoughts and feelings lead you to act?

Results

What are the consequences of your actions?

Determining a more effective pattern

Now, let’s explore what an alternative, more effective, reality looks like. Work through the following questions to help establish changes you can make to enable better communication and improved interactions when this situation arises.

Results

What outcomes would you like from this situation?

Action

In order for this to happen, what would you be doing, or not doing?

Thoughts and feelings

To take these actions, what would you be thinking and feeling?

Situation

What do you notice about the situation now?

Select your options and change the balance

So, now you’ve considered an alternative reality:

What changes in your response to this repeating situation would you like to make?

How can you implement the changes?

What/who could help you in making the changes?

What could get in your way? How will you deal with this?

When are you going to make the change?

NEED SOME SUPPORT? 

If you would like some support in getting the hearing loss balance right and enabling better communication and improved interactions, reach out to me to see if coaching could be for you. 

I offer a free 15-minute discovery call, so we can meet and you can tell me more about yourself and the things you would like to explore.