Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks: Hearing Loss & Teamwork

Teamwork with hearing loss can help your holiday gatherings be more enjoyable. Dinner conversations at family events are challenging for people with hearing loss. It doesn't matter if they wear hearing aids or cochlear implants, background noise overrides who we want to hear. Cross talk is hard to follow because we have a hard time locating where sound comes from. We give you a few tips in this podcast.

Show Notes:
- -See our companion blog post: A Hearing Buddy for the Holidays
https://hearinglosslive.com/hearing-buddy/
--Planning Ahead podcast is in our playlist November 7, 2024.
--Companion Microphones for Hearing Aids & Cochlear Implants podcast is in our playlist November 16, 2023.
--Hearing Loss & Communication Boundaries is in our playlist March 23, 2023

Lipreading Classes are available.
It is important to have your family and friends understand their role in hearing loss. Take a strategies class together today: Hearinglosslive.com/register-for-classes

#TeamworkMakesTheDreamWork #HearingBuddy #HearingLossAwareness #SocialGatheringTips #SelfAdvocacy

Transcript

Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks, Teamwork. 

Julia: Good morning and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! We hope you are remembering to Like, Share and Subscribe our material. Let's get everybody in the know. If you haven't been to our new website yet, hearinglosslive.com, we now have big ass mugs for sale. Our stainless steel thermal mugs have laser engraved hearing loss. Live on it. I You can lost it. Oh, well, you could see it for a minute. I'll give up on that, right? Um, really well, balanced, clean really well. They will help support us in covering our let's talk to continue to be free and let us have a live captioner, which we really like to have. For the month of November. We always try to pick a social strategy, type training. I don't know training is not quite the right word, right? But on how to work together for better communication around social engagement. We all get busy at the holidays. We have lots of family coming and going. We have lots of friendsgiving, right? So we wanted to A- design some courses around social gatherings. Chelle has a class Saturday. I don't know if it'll be filled or not by the time this comes out, but please check it on our website. We'd love to have you. I will be rolling out friends and family. I think I will have one more if it's not filled on the 16th. I also have one on December 5th in the evening. Check that out. Those are great classes to get in the know. Descriptions are on our website. We usually pick technology or teamwork, and this year we picked teamwork, and we also talked about technology, if you didn't make it to our Let's talk. What are the items you have to work together, and what is a hearing buddy? I've been a hearing buddy, mostly my whole life, and not even known. It never even registered. I don't, you know, grandma, I didn't do everything for grandma. I didn't have to. She would look at me when she needed help. My hearing buddy nowadays, grandma passed away, of course, is more things like you gotta turn and look at Papa while you're talking to him. Go over there and talk to him. Don't talk from the kitchen. Little things that aren't taking over for what my family members might or might not need. It's more just directing the younger generation on what they can do to have better communication with whatever, whether it's grandma, great grandma, Papa, whatever that is, I think it's important to find a friend or a family member, it can be either, and it doesn't have to be the same person, right? I think I talked about this last month at an HLAA meeting, a question arrose around a book club and not wanting to put the onus on one person to help them. And I said, then ask Hey, can I ask you this month? Can I ask you next month? Can I ask you to be my hearing partner. So it can look different for everybody. And you gotta tell them what you need, that's the other key, right Chelle? I feel like you don't just pick it unless they're intuitive. You know, I'm raising my hand. Unless they're intuitive, they're not going to know what you need. So then they'll maybe take over and answer for you, or maybe they don't know the cues to cue you in and say, just don't worry about it. Give me some parameters that you like, Chelle, in having a hearing person work with you so you have great teamwork.

Chelle: I like hearing people to fill in only as needed. I have an exhusband, and this sounds funny. We're very good friends, and probably that's the way we should have stayed we, you know, that's the way it goes. He was so good with my hearing loss, and he's the only comparison I have to Julia. He was intuitive about when I needed the extra help. This was way back when I bluffed, and I was embarrassed about my hearing loss because I was in my 20s, so he knew the bluffing look, and he would say, "Oh, she didn't hear words you said, you need to stand here and look at her and repeat what you just said." And of course, I was. Horrified, but now I look back and he helped me be more comfortable with hearing loss in that regard. So that's I became more upfront myself because of him, he helped prove that most people are willing to help me. So doesn't sound like a hearing buddy, but he really was because he was forcing me to be more independent and upfront about my hearing loss. So years go by and and he, he knew my look of I didn't understand that, and I'm not understanding this, and I need help with this one. Never had to say a word. I all I had to do was look at him and he would fill in just that specific point I wasn't getting just like Julia says she does for her grandma. I remember even, you know, 10 years later, after divorce and friends and all of that, our son graduated high school, and I was at the graduation ceremony, and there was a joke told. Okay, there is a big we'll go on the big ass theme here. It was a big ass arena [laughter] with horrible sound. Speakers that weren't ever going to be clear enough for somebody with hearing loss and hearing aids. So somebody told a joke, and I'm there to support my kid. So I I didn't know about cart back then. This is even before I was introduced to that. So I'm there to support my son and do the "yay" thing when he goes across, and he would nudge me when it was close to Cutler's name, because they read off the names. And so I would-- I knew to watch. And then, you know, some point, somebody made a joke. I didn't hear it. All I had to do was look at him and he, he just knew it was he, and he filled it in. And that was that. And then we went back to watching. I didn't demand all his time. I don't want to do that either, even back then. So that was this. He was a really good hearing buddy. That's what I like to see.

Julia: Yes. And I think there are ones that do it intuitively, and maybe even don't know that they're doing it intuitively. I honestly didn't until we had a business that I realized, oh, grandma's been doing this. She trained me for my kid, right? So, and in today's technology, if you haven't watched some of our technology videos, please go back and look at them. There is so much you can do. I think every student we have talks about the dinner table. I'm not going to hear at the dinner table. You're right. You're not. But there are apps that can help you hear better at the dinner table, there are microphones that you compare to your hearing aids that can help you at the dinner table. You may have to go to your audiology and push audiologist and push, I want this. How do I get it? You may find what you need in the Diglo online website, diglo.com, think that's right, diglo.com. So try all the tools you can find. One of my suggestion -- well, this wasn't my suggestion. This was actually, I think somebody said this at the night of Let's Talk. Get up and walk around the table. Trade spots with me. I want to talk to aunt Jane. Trade spots with me. I want to talk with Uncle Joe. And make your head-- you know, make your hearing I was gonna say headphones, make your hearing aids focus exactly who you're talking with. Wait until dinner is over. Are you stressed because you're not hearing the cross talk? Do you need to hear the cross talk? Grandma, often times during dinner, when we had family, family, cousins, you know, aunts, uncles did not do a lot of talking during dinner. She did a lot of watching, right? And not that she was trying to be out of the conversation. Because if she needed to be in it, we would, you know, she would know to be in it. Or we would, you know, touch her arm, get her involved. Maybe it's time to just see what your loved ones look like. Remember old times. You know, a lot of our family gatherings are about, do you remember when? And those can be important sometimes, but sometimes it's just being there, being a part of the family. Thoughts on that? Chelle?

Chelle: Yes, that that brings up a few things. One of our --at the dinner table. For me, I'm not as much into talking while I'm eating. If it's crunchy food, I hear my crunchy food more than I hear any voice. I have one hearing aid mold that's loose and it wiggles in my ear as I eat, and that makes noise, so I'm kind of out when I'm eating. And, and maybe, unlike your grandma, I like to observe people watching nets me a lot of stuff sometimes. I can be like, you know, they they were smiling, but they were tense at the same time. What was going on there? It's probably a lot like what your grandma did, right? I don't want to hear everything, and then most people say the same thing the over and over. So I can be out and conserve my energy for something else that I want to be In 

Julia: Love it.

Those are some great ideas to find your next teamwork is dreamwork buddy. Again, doesn't necessarily have to be a family member. Can be different friends for different functions. It can be different family members for different functions. What I really want to push look into the phone technology you have, what can help you with captioning, possibly when you need it. Can you get an extra microphone for that table? Can you find a quiet spot to talk to somebody maybe you only see twice a year who you're going to struggle to lipread because you don't see them every day. You're going to want a quieter spot. We have a whole bunch of strategies that every strategy is our class  around lipreading and communication talks all of this. Get rid of that centerpiece is one of the things we talked about. So you can see across the table if that's what you need. Get a hold of the host ahead of time. These are all the things that can help you with better communications. Oh, yep, where is the lighting so that they are have the lighting in front of them instead of behind them, so you can see their faces better. Figure out where you can sit. Work, work that out, and remember to take hearing breaks. I'm going to lie. You're going to need them. Set your set to your boundaries. If you, if you don't understand that, go to our blog and podcast on boundaries. How long are you going to stay at that meeting? These are all all things you can be thinking about. And if you still have questions, please join us for one of our classes. Live classes will roll out again in 2025 we're we're going to offer a couple different ways that that you can take classes. And I hope that we keep our social gatherings and friends and family at least once a month as an option too, so that you can get in the know together. That's such an important thing. And we wish you all the best this Thanksgiving season. Bye!