Thumbs Up If You Can Hear Me: The Lost Art of Communication

You know, you learn a lot of tricks from working with kids.  For instance, if you have a class of kids under 10 who are all talking over you while you give instructions, you might try yelling “thumbs up if you can hear me” to get them to respond to your desire for them to refocus.  Thumbs will go up around the room, and kids will be as quiet as kids can be.  It’s an imperfect science.  

To be very blunt with you, I kind of wish I could do that with adults sometimes.  Sometimes, all the time.  

I answer LOTS of emails and phone calls every day.  This week, HUNDREDS of emails a day.  Not exaggerating, hundreds.  So when I send out a few important personal emails for myself and family members, can’t people just respond to them for me in a timely manner?  Like within a week, at most?! [Can I get an amen?]

I don’t want to resort to being the person with the read receipts on emails.  I just want to know that the people I email care about getting my questions answered.  I would sadly even settle for them pretending to care.  

THUMBS UP IF YOU CAN HEAR ME.

A couple of months ago I was hanging out with my friend, Bryan, and he did something completely foreign to me… he didn’t look at his phone for the entire 4 hours we were together.  (Yes, people, I pay attention to things like that).  On one hand, maybe his phone died.  On the other, maybe he was entertaining a social experiment in which he was clocking how long I could talk without stopping and had to throw the towel in at four hours (because newflash blog readers, I can talk FOREVER).  Maybe he thought I was crazy and was afraid to move.  Regardless, we can all admit that kind of listening is sadly absent from our media obsessed culture, and more personally from our friendships.   [And we can all admit that Bryan sounds pretty cool].  

THUMBS UP IF YOU CAN HEAR ME.  

Nothing feels better than being heard, am I right?  My Pastor always says that the simplest way to make someone feel loved is to just listen to them, and my 6.5 years of college coursework suggest that, too.  

So maybe, just maybe, this week we can all try to put our phones away when we’re spending hard-to-come-by in-person time with our friends and family.  And maybe just maybe when we get desperate emails from people, we can answer like we’re desperate to help.  

They say the art of communication is dead, and that may be true, but can’t we try to revive it?  

I’m in if you’re in.  

Thumbs up if you can hear me.