This Week's Lesson Brought To Us by: Communication

It's been an interesting week, for sure.  Not the best, that's also for sure.  However, there is one life lesson that was driven home this week:  communication is key.  Whether you're in trouble, unhappy, misunderstood, or frustrated (or really any kind of emotic description), communication can save your day.  Or your week.  Or, really, your whole life.  Communication starts recovery and from recovery comes progress and from progress comes change.  Do you see an excellently productive pattern here?  You should.

Lessons in Communication (learned first-hand by Yours Truly)

1.) Be positive.  Exuding positivism yields positivism.  This comes in the form of being nice, initiative, and accepting.

2.) Acknowledge when you have done something wrong or that there is uncomfortability in the air.  Swallow your pride.  This is the hardest part, but I have learned that you can essentially start over if you do this.  Sometimes, the other party just needs to know that you understand what happened.  From that, common ground is developed.

3.) Ask for things you want.  Do you want to be involved in something?  Ask.  Do you want to be perceived a different way?  Ask.  Explain yourself.  In a word: communicate.  No matter how you're feeling (in my case, frustrated and regretful), nobody knows until you tell them.  Sitting quietly and wishing for change just makes things more uncomfortable (I know this).  I needed an improvement, so I asked for it.

4.) Use "I" statements.  "I feel this way because..."  "I am sorry because..."  "I want to fix this because..."

5.) Come out of your shell.  In my particular situation, I wished that the offended party would just know that I was not the type of person I felt as though I was perceived.  In honesty, she probably didn't.  I had to tell her how I was feeling and who I was, no matter how uncomfortable (and let's be honest, it was). 

6.) Make an effort, ask for forgiveness, and be the first to make the next step.  Practice being inviting.  Get over the uncomfortable hump.  Strike up a conversation.  Send an email.  Show that you mean what you said.  This is actually the best part.

In the end, what I knew all along was that it was up to me to fix a problem.  While I wished it would go away and things would just to back to how they were, it didn't and they didn't.  I owned up.  I bared my soul, essentially.  And I cried and I cried and I cried (this part privately).  I apologized without making excuses.  I may have groveled.  I held out an olive branch.  What did I get in return?  A clean slate and a renewed sense of faith in humankind.

Lesson learned.

Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone:

Kindness in another's trouble,

Courage in your own.

-Adam Lindsay Gordon