Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks What we Learned: Tribe Bucketlist

Finding tribe is a "you too!" moment for those of us with hearing loss. Finding meetings and socials with others helps us grow learn and spread knowledge.

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Transcript

Juila: Good morning. Welcome

to Hearing Loss LIVE! This month we've been talking about tribe. And if you came to our let's talk, we started out talking about conferences and tribe and we ended up on a whole other conversation before the day was done. And that's okay. That's what these are about. We'd like to present something in a workshop style to give you guys advice and help you and we love that we're able to put together a booklet for you to use to journal. This month's workshop will be a more like a bucketlist journal and what you can learn on your adventures with your hearing loss tribes. I am not feeling the greatest. So I'm gonna let Chelle kind of take us in if I have a thought I will pop it in. Otherwise, I'm going to turn it over to you, Chelle. Help talk to us about how important it is not just it's important to attend conferences, I think, if and when you can. But what else is the importance behind everyday tribe? I think that's kind of what we learned this last Tuesday.

Chelle: This is Chelle. I do enjoy my tribe time, we can get it online. You can get it in person. You can get it in email. You can even get it on social media. Every once in a while I scroll through the different social medias. And I look at look at what people are posting, see if I have any advice to offer. I'm always thrilled when I see, you know, like somebody had 27 comments and I'm like, oh, good people are really chipping in here to help this person with their issue. We have a lot of online meetings during the pandemic and it gave me a chance to connect to several other people with hearing loss that is it -- you know what otherwise, I would never have been able to connect with these people. I enjoy my connections so much. The tribe, I call it the tribe, but it's also my connections. Because we all have something unique to offer. And it's like a cat -- I have a little category in my head where I stashed little connections and what people do so that if I heard it can, I can connect them to the proper person you know, "oh I know somebody who likes that. Here let me connect over here." That's one of my favorite things to do is connect. We have our monthly talk about it Tuesdays, as Julia said. Every first Tuesday or 6pm Mountain Time. Anyone is welcome to join us. We do it with Zoom. We have live captions, a person doing live captions on the other end, so the captions are accurate. We we start off often with a topic. This month is -- this year has been heavy topics. So this was our first one that wasn't really a heavy topic. And normally we do half presentation and then we just sort of open it up for people to talk about whatever they want. This last one we started with, I had a whole list of things going on I was gonna talk about it. And at a certain point, it went to a whole whole nother topic. And that was, that was okay, we like that. That's fine. It doesn't have to be just what I say. And it ended up being a very good discussion between all the attendees. And it was how do we get our children to respect our hearing loss and our communication needs and the stories that came out, several of us with kids with family how we kept with that. How hearing people are sometimes our support and make sure that kids are helping us different experiences all over the place from someone who didn't demand respect and her kids were not very thoughtful about her hearing loss in the end. To like me where I had hearing helpers all the time when my kids were small, to what else to something in between. So we talked about family gatherings and how to take turns and hearing breaks come in to it too, Julia? I can't remember, sometimes that pops up in the family discussions too how we need hearing breaks. 

Julia: We did talk about hearing

breaks, but now I can't remember why. There was something about?

Is that a work issue? Maybe that was a

work issue needing a hearing break. I think that was a different little one on one, because we do offer one on one classes, where we discussed how to work break. Like when you're, if you're a phone rep, and you're continuing with that as your employment, you need to schedule a break in between calls. You're going to need more hearing breaks throughout your work day in order to process. Because it's the processing behind each call takes so much energy right. Is that Is that the one is that was that on? I that's what I remember. And I can't remember if that was a separate conversation to. But hearing breaks are important with family too, right. Work and family. Huge thing huge, huge.

Chelle: Yeah, I was remembered one of our other local friends here, who talks about hearing breaks and how she excuses herself to change diapers and stuff such a go. So I wasn't sure if we if we discussed that or not. Because you know, a lot has happened since we had our workshop. And it's hard to remember everything. So let's see what's on my list. So we do meet once a month, but we go with the flow. If you if you have a question, bring it in. We also had another person who came into the workshop, and and had a question about how to handle a phone call within a government program to make -- that she couldn't hear and how to gain access with that. And it was amazing how many other people stuck in to give her a bias. It wasn't me and Julia, actually, it was the other attendees saying, This is how you can handle it. Maybe try this, try that. So there's a lot of options when you get together with people who have hearing loss. In fact, I was out of town, out of state this last week, and I got to meet up with two other hard of hearing people. And for hour and a half we talked technology. We shared apps, what apps we like to use, you know helping each other find the app and download it and how you can get it back. And we shared -- all three of us had a Roger on. So we all had our Roger ons on the table, and discussing how to connect how much battery it uses and the hearing aids. And that led to a whole little discussion there. We love our technology, including which phone call app we use for captions. We did that and

let's see. We just support each other. It's such a supportive group. All the hard of hearing people encouraging, supportivem everyone we talked to, we're like, yeah, you know, if you have an idea, and you want to present it to the world, we're like, yes, go for it. There's not enough of us out there talking about hearing loss, and there needs to be a whole lot more of us before we become everyday knowledge how to deal with hearing loss. So we encourage and support each other often. Is there anything else I'm missing? Okay, go ahead, Julia.

Julia: Well, and I think we've talked about this before, but you know, before COVID and I'll give an example. HL-- Hearing Loss Association of American chapters, met in person. And so it was just kind of local chapters, right? Where now there's so many of them still online, using zoom and combining chapters and presenting so there's many different ways to get involved in just monthly talks, there's us there's, there's, you know, if you go to HLAA's website, I'm sure you can find some there, including our own Salt Lake chapter that is still doing a lunch and learn. And then, you know, having a social, every three months, and so that way they can reach the rural areas of Utah as well, for education and others from other states can join if there's something they want to learn about. Involve your family in these projects, when possible, especially your hearing partners. Sometimes I think hearing partners think it's your problem. And no, it's everybody's problem. And you need to bring yourself to the table and learn what you're going to need to know whether it's to raise a family with hearing loss in the family. Whether it's to to, you know, have better communication. Understanding the difference between your family dynamics and hearing loss and what, you know, what's that layer of, of that stinky onion? Is it this layer is hearing loss? And so we're having this communication fail. And we can fix that and throw that bad layer away? Or is it you know, some other family dynamic that you need to work on with somebody?

I think

what's nice is that each of them have all, one thing, and that's hearing loss related group information. Whether it's ALDA, HLAA, Hands and Voices, SayWhatClub, us, there's always that root of how to make hearing loss be more commonly knowledgeable, as well as knowing your rights when you have a hearing loss and what that looks like. But I like that each of them share something different. There's a different perspective and different roots in them. I thought I was thinking about this earlier, you know, a lot of HLAA and ALDA are very legislatively lead. They get involved with legislation, they work to better law, federal laws. There's a lot of work, you can look up there, you want to help with it. Does that kind of make sense so that they have those great roots in helping with legislation. And what that looks like, and so it is Hands and Voices for a children area. But SayWhatClub is more just the people, people sharing experience. And if I'm wrong here, Chelle, you can kind of guide me, but it's that personal experience, hey, I had this happen, has anybody else and you can just talk about it's not about selling you anything. It's not about whatever. It's all about what we can do together. I like ours, because again, it's grassroots, right? Chelle said something, I don't remember which workshop it was. We don't have to necessarily go to the legislator, legislature and make big change, we just need to make the change for ourselves to create the ripple that moves it forward. I'm kind of putting in words there. But because I can't remember the line, which is on one of these pieces of papers on my desk somewhere, But it's just all the knowledge that you get to move forward. And ours is we are a little more grassroots. Our goal is client base to help you with your hearing loss and bring your hearing partner along so that you guys have tools to, to make your life as how you want it to look. But I do think every I think like Chelle said, every time you get together at a conference, you file something away. And so you're talking to somebody and you're like, oh, where, I heard that before, where did I see it? And then you can guide them to where they can get more information. And I think that that's why it should be an important bucket list for you. Especially if you like to travel. I'm not saying you have to do it every year, maybe pick one each year and say okay, this is the conference I'm gonna go to [timer buzzing] and this is going-- oh I don't know how I always get to 15 minutes and we're still I'm yakking about nothing, right. But you know, so So pin it, put a map up, ooh, I think the workbook might have a map and you could put pins in it, hmm. I have to think about that some more. Chelle sorry, I'm not even sure if that had anything to do with what we were talking about. But that was my thought is, each one has something different. So get involved with as many as you can.

Chelle: This is Chelle again, and I think that what we want to do is I want to empower the people at the lower level. I want people to know their options. I want people to know how to advocate and get the proper access to communication day to day, person to person at work, at home, out in public and stuff. So, that's, that's where we come in. I just want to reach the people. What was I going to say, hearing small voices, we talked about children. And I just wanted to remind everybody that we have a podcast and TV podcast, YouTube podcasts, sorry, blog about hearing smart voices, if you want to go back to that, you can look for that. We are going to be doing a coffee tour again. And we're going to be heading up through Oregon, Washington to the SayWhatClub convention in Vancouver, Canada. So if, if you want us to stop and you're along the way we will do our best to stop have coffee. We're going to meet for sure in the Eugene Springfield area to meet with somebody that we've gotten to know and we will have pictures and blog and probably everything about that later. Then we're also stopping, we'll stop in the Seattle area because we know one or two people there as well. So if you want to join us feel free. We'll, we'll be out for coffee, it will be easy, relaxed. It's just fun to get to know people. When you find other people with hearing loss, it's like ah, less lonely. It's "you too" you know, the "you too" kind of thing when we share experiences. So we're happy for that-- Oh, yeah, I was gonna talk about the SayWhatClub workshop real quick that I am doing. We're going to talk about accessibility through apps on our phone and out in public and at work. So I'm looking forward to giving that workshop. 

Julia: Yeah, that will be a good one.

Apps are our everyday life anymore. So yeah. So we will be traveling, as Chelle said in July and we have some vacation plans coming up as well. We want you if you're not already part of our newsletter, sign up for our newsletter so that you can find out what our adventures are. Follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn wherever. We will be posting our adventures as we traveled to the SayWhatClub and make our little circle up through Oregon, Washington into Canada and come back down through Montana and Idaho. So do reach out to us and we'll have more information in our newsletter before we leave so you can try to contact us and set it up or send us an email at info@hearinglosslive.com. There was something else anyway. So remember to subscribe and watch us and and follow us so that you can get all our adventures that will be also on our shorts down the line as we go into the fall. We have a lot of new classes coming out in August we're super excited. So watch for those. Again if you're on our newsletter list, you get first privy on what we're going to do. We will not have a Talk About It Tuesday in July. Because we're traveling. But we will be back August 1 6pm, for our the rest of the year workshops. So watch for our new content on what we're going to do the second half our workshops and workbooks have started to roll out as well for purchase. Am I forgetting anything, I'm going to need to stop talking I might gonna start coughing so I promise I don't have COVID [laughter] but we hope you see us next time and join us.

Bye.

Chelle: Bye.