Day #61: Raising Your Voice

When I was a kid, there was only one way to be heard in my family.

You had to yell.

Until the age of thirteen, I barely said a word, because the thought of yelling over my parents was...well, unthinkable actually.

Then the teen years rolled around and the unthinkable became VERY thinkable.

I learned to hold my own in the yelling arena, and ever since then, I've been a proud destroyer of silence and listening.

Obviously, with this project, I had to change that.

It's no big psychological mystery where yelling and cutting people off and talking over people comes from.

A feeling like you're not being heard or you're not going to be heard.

The trick is to realize--you are being heard, but most of the time, you're not hearing.

I am, without a doubt, one of the worst listeners I know.

I concentrate more on what I'm going to say than what people are saying to me, and it's a habit that has to go.

So is there a trick?

I've found one that works for me.

I repeat back the last thing that was said to me before I add something else.

That way I don't do that annoying thing people do--people being me--where someone says:

"My Mom has cancer."

And I say--

"Oh my God, did I tell you about what happened to me last night?"

I force myself to segue, and if I can't, it just means that what the person is telling me is more important than my night at karaoke.

And when I argue, I try not to raise my voice.

I find that when you raise your voice, you've lost the argument. You're allowing yourself to get angry and you signal to the other person--

"This is where I stop caring about your opinion on this."

So instead, I try to get quieter. Again, I repeat back--

"You're saying that what happened bothered you. Okay, I get that."

It's amazing how civil things can say when you let someone know they're actually being heard.

Staying calm keeps you from yelling which allows you to have a conversation rather than a shouting match.

We didn't have many conversations in my house growing up, but recently I managed to have one with my mom.

And you know what?

I think she actually enjoyed it.