Tamara Jackson

So one of the things that I find really interesting is two people can be in the same conversation and they will hear what is said completely differently.

It happens in personal relationships.

It happens in professional relationships.

You're thinking, well, I just said X, Y, Z. And then I'm like, well, I felt like you were attacking me.

You're like, what?

Attacking you?

That totally wasn't on my radar.

That wasn't my intent.

And so being able to read a room, being able to understand how your communication style works,

or your lack of communication might be impacting other people and then having the fortitude to adjust and to recognize that, you know, one of the things that I've learned is as the communicator, the responsibility is on me.

And I didn't know that initially.

Initially, I thought, well, hey, this is what I intended.

So it's something wrong on their end if they didn't get it the way that I intended for it to be received.

But what I've learned is, wait, that didn't land the way I hoped it would.

Maybe I need to think about how I'm communicating.

Where could I have been more clear?

Where could I have been more empathetic?

Maybe I should have started with some questions about how they were instead of jumping into the thing that I wanted to talk about that day.

Right.

And those are things that you learn when you practice reflection.