Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks Mindfulness with Hearing Loss

Welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! This is our 15 minute podcast on how to be more mindful when talking to each other. Why mindfulness is needed in communication for people with hearing loss. We talk about planning ahead for the holidays and reveal a cute tip on intimacy with hearing loss in getting the conversation. 

Visit our companion blog post for Mindful Communication here:
https://hearinglosslive.com/mindful-hearing-loss/

Show notes:
Workshops in November:
Lipreading Strategies for Groups, Holiday Special $75 a person.
- Nov 9, 2024 from 2:00 - 5:00 PM Mountain time
- Nov 16, 2024 from 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM Mountain time

Friends and Family for the Holidays
Gather your family to learn better communication. One price for the whole family, $150 for up to 10 people. Yes, your family needs to change communication habits too. Reduce those communication breakdowns with Julia. 
-Nov 9, 2024 from 11 AM - 2:00 PM
-Nov 16, 2024 from 3:00 - 5:00 PM
-Dec 6, 2024 from 5:00 - 8:00 PM

Class registration is here: https://hearinglosslive.com/register-for-classes/

The 3 Golden Rules are here:
https://hearinglosslive.com/3-golden-rules/

Transcript

Hearing Loss LIVE! talks Mindfulness with hearing loss 

Julia: Good morning and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! We hope you are subscribing, sharing, bringing a friend with you to hearinglosslive.com learning. We are headed into the holidays, and we will have multiple options for classes in November and December. You can watch our web page, hearinglosslive.com, and register further those classes. We will be offering a family super event so it will allow you to bring your family members that you want to have better communication over the holidays with, and the class will be set up specifically for you. So check out our times. Keep in mind, we can't keep these low prices going and going, so get them now while they're available. This month, we talked about mindful. You're going to have to lipread Chelle, because I missed that.

Julia: I was just going to say, I also have a Super Saturday, and then it will be on lipreading strategies with the focus in group situations, which is always difficult for us, a huge challenge. Okay, I'll let Julia be mindful again.

Julia: Well, it's good because I I knew that, and it was in the back of my mind, but I was focusing on the family event I'm going to put on, right? So, yes, group setting, mindfulness, holidays. So this month, we did talk about mindful hearing and what that means. I say it often there's buzzwords right. Mindfulness is a buzzword. So people think of it and they think, Oh, I gotta sit and I gotta breathe and I gotta be happy and I gotta focus and I gotta Zen out. And the truth of the matter is, mindfulness is in everything we do. We have one of our students who talks about, you have to be present when you are speaking with someone else, right? We have the three golden rules, you got to face each other. You've got to talk straight at each other. You've got to look at each other to lipread. We need to see everything about you. It's about being mindful. Mindfulness can be tiring, right? So how can our hearing partners help us has been on my mind this whole month, and how they can help us is they can be mindful, not just mindful in the sense that you have to face who you're talking with and all of those rules. Can you help this holiday season with being mindful on what you're doing. How can you best help your partner with hearing loss, be involved, not be a wallflower, we talked wallflower. Have a better experience, right? You can do that by giving them some space. First off, sit down and talk. What do you want to know? Who do you want to talk to? Where do you want to go this holiday season? Make a plan. Secondly, be there. What can you help them with? What do they want help with? When do you need to repeat for them. Have have those plans ahead of time and take both of you down a notch at the family gathering, because we also hear from the hearing spouses, right? Oh, I have to, you know, relay everything, and it's such a pain to go to the family, blah, blah, blah, well, change the dynamics, right? So give me some thoughts, Chelle on on mindfulness and hearing loss.

Chelle: I like to use my spouse, family, friends where I can, but I actually don't want them to relay everything for me. I like to try to figure it out on my own. But this is planning ahead. We talk about anticipation strategies in our classes, and this is what Julia's talking about. Plan ahead, work out together, how you're going to talk to people. I mean, two people can come up with different solutions and compromise from there, right? The hearing person doesn't want to do all of it, and the hard hearing person doesn't want to be left out. So sign --Sorry. My hearing aids just hijacked or hijacked by my phone, and I hear my stuff, and I'm going to turn this off. Because now I heard my voice really loud. I hate when my hearing aids hijacked my phone and my phone hijacks my hearing aids. Anyway. Plan how long you want to be there, because the hard of hearing person has only so much energy. So talk about how long to stay and what works, have little hand signals for I'm done, like, you know, that quick little I'm done kind of thing, and I need to go and go separately if you have to. We talk about that every year. Being mindful in the holidays and groups is also sort of an I'm coming to realize a environment thing, like I have to be mindful of my environment and plan ahead for that too. I said it in the blog post last week, or whatever week it was now, and you have to you can plan ahead and ask the host how to make it quieter. If there's music and so many people Talking or hearing family and friends can be mindful in creating a quiet space to talk to everybody, and like Julia said, you can, who do you want to talk to? Go grab them and pull them into the quiet space. It's not hard, and being mindful that the environment will go a long, long way for hard of hearing people. Softer environments, less harsh, harsh acoustics, that would be amazing.

Julia: Teamwork is dreamwork, right? So, November 5, we are going to have an open workshop about teamwork, how to work together through the holiday season, and what works for others and what they've tried. Question and Answer at our Let's talk,  6pm Mountain Time, so you have to adjust for your time zone. So it's always a great way to get together with the community and find out strategies. Right? We can share strategies, join us for a class for strategies. It's amazing what people learn from this stuff that we we put out there. I'm always amazed in what they find out, and then try right and come back and say, oh my gosh, this made a difference. I had a thought about spouses, and now it's totally gone. Shoot Chelle, read my mind. 

Chelle: Yeah. Sorry,

I can't predict where you'll go like half the time. [laughter] I did want to remind people that conversation needs to be more mindful with your hard of hearing partners, and it's got to be less casual and more, I want to say this to you, don't talk from the other rooms. Don't talk with your back turn, because seeing is hearing for us, even if we don't know we're lipreading, we are using a lot of the strategies that go with lipreading, and if your back is turned or you're in another room, there's too much noise far away, all of that stuff interrupts the conversation process.

Julia: Thank you. You're right. That's kind of where I wanted to go. This is where we just can be more mindful. You, we've talked in the past about, you know, we've lost that secret sharing in our ears, intimacy with hearing loss, right? But this is another way to be intimate in that situation, having conversations with each other in a close environment can be intimate in its own way, right? I'm going to share something one of our students said the other day in class. It was super cute. She says, I take my husband and I hold him and I give him a kiss, and I say, "now stay right here and talk to me." And that's how she keeps him focused on talking directly to her. You know, we talk about the six foot bubble for her, it is a three foot bubble because of her eyesight. So she likes to be closer to have conversation. That is how they can have even if it's an intense conversation, they can have an intimate you. Set up to a better conversation. I'm not all lovey heavy bubby, but that's that I thought that was super cute, right?

Chelle: Yeah, I didn't. I missed that. I missed a lot of classes this week due to other things going on, so that's super cute, and I might have to try that with my husband. I like to grab'em part, pulling them closer. Ah, yeah. So we teach classes on lipreading strategies, but students teach us different things all the time. It is definitely a give and take in all of these classes, I think, and it is wonderful how much we learn from each other. So do grab your hearing partner and make that November workshop of ours on the fifth have them come in learn how to teamwork together for the upcoming holidays. That's important. I said, I don't want my husband to help me all the time, but I do need his help sometimes, because some people don't talk well and they don't move their lips, and I don't necessarily, you know, need to tell them, because I only see them once a year, or something like that. So I don't really need to coach them. He can tell when I'm getting tired and when he can kind of step in to pop that out too. And I thought there will be a lot of tips and tricks for the couples on in November.

Julia: Yeah, awesome. Join us. November 5. Join us for one of the classes, a family style, better conversation in groups with Chelle. I am still working on my schedule right this minute, so I don't have all the dates, but we'll have a couple of weekday options, some some weekend options, some lip shape options for those classes, if you want to do strategies, and then at least start working on your lip shapes for the holidays. And if you can't join us, we do have them recorded. It's a lot funner in person. But if you're not ready as a family, buy that strategies class, and sit down together and work on it. Buy the lip shapes class, there's more than enough guidance for you to sit down with your family. Watch it whenever you want, whatever time works for you. So keep that in mind. There's many different ways to take our classes. Anything else before I sign us off for the evening.

Chelle: So important to grow your no together. Teamwork definitely works better, but I know that not all spouses are actually good at that. So if that doesn't quite work for you, enlist a friend, bring a friend, bring another family member, bring a kid, bring a I'm and I'm saying kid, and I'm talking like an adult kid. But because they can help make a difference too. It doesn't always. It isn't always the spouse, and we know that.

Julia: And it might be bring your grown adult kid and your grandkids and figure it out together, because even though they're a little more difficult and it's harder to get them, I do guarantee training young kids, you don't see it right away, but I said it once before, and I'll say it a million times. I was able to train my boys to understand hearing loss, and they knew the rules before we even called them the three golden rules. And they they, we use them still today with other family members, I reminding nieces and nephews face Papa. So it does sink in.

Chelle: My kids grew up with my hearing loss, and they're awesome, awesome about helping me only when I need it and not not all the time, and taking over. So kids, kids grow up well with this stuff. Teacher. Teach them young. That's a good one.

Julia:So we hope you'll join us for many things in November, we will be talking teamwork all of November. So see you later.