I can hear you.

I can hear you.

Why we all need to stop shouting…

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My daughter, Annie, is starting Kindergarten this year. And because it's 2020, that means she's not actually starting kindergarten. Instead, she'll be required to do it virtually for the first three weeks of the school year. For now.

As we prepare for what that will look like, we bought her some headphones for her online "classes." And because she's a 5-year-old little girl, we made sure they matched almost everything else she owns: they're small, pink, and they have fake cat ears. And they were only $15. (Thanks Amazon.)

This week, she started testing them out to make sure they worked and were comfortable. We plugged them into her little kids tablet and fired up a show. They were perfect. The chord was the right length, the look was pretty darn cute, and she could hear everything. 

Or so we thought...

About 10 minutes into our little experiment, we tried getting her attention. We called out her name — twice. Nothing. We snapped our fingers and waved our arms. Nothing. She was engrossed, and the headphones made it nearly impossible for her to hear us. 

Then something hilarious happened: She looked up and said, "These are great!" Except she didn't really say it, she shouted it. The noise in her headphones was so loud to HER that she thought she had to talk even louder to get us to hear here.

Does that sound familiar?

Friend, you and me are often like Annie. How many times are we actually shouting at others without realizing it? How often do we take the noise we're hearing or experiencing and assume that's what others are hearing and experiencing as well, and then yell even louder to make sure our voices aren't drowned out? 

I know I've been guilty of that in the past, especially when it comes to social media. I've shouted, thinking that I need to and because I need to make sure I'm heard above the noise. But you know what that does? It just ends up  turning people away and turning them off. 

It's not just on social media. It can happen in relationships, too, where we're so focused on getting people to see things, events, and circumstances the way we see them that we end up alienating the very people we're trying to convince. And in the end, instead of winning them over we get more focused on winning over them. 

Here's what I want to tell you: Many times we need to lower our voices and take our headphones off so we can listen. So we can have a conversation. We need to realize that the noise we're sometimes hearing is only in our ears and not in everyone else's. That's especially important as we head into an election season and the uncertainty that the pandemic continues creating. You can yell all you want, but I've never seen anyone change their mind when they're being screamed at. 

So the next time you find yourself at a standstill with someone, maybe try checking if you still have your headphones on. I think it will help.