The importance of communicating

10/22

Recently, I’ve made it a point to explore my personal weaknesses and in that exercise I’ve identified two very interesting quirks. I’m going to talk about the first one and leave the second for an upcoming post.

I am not the best at communicating (in sub-optimal situations)
This is an interesting observation.  I pride myself on being able to communicate and I think that for an engineer I do a fairly good job. Colleagues in the past have credited me for being a geek that they can talk too.  I simply credit that to my general social nature and less so with my ability to be a wordsmith. But there are situations that arise that cause me to breakdown in communicating.  These breakdowns are especially tough (and cause me the most amount of trouble) because they center around stressful situations.

A recent example would be one that centers around a personal project that I was completing for a monthly event called Mindshare. This is a great geek gathering of all sorts.  Artists, engineers and those that want to be groupies get together once a month to talk shop, drink and have a good damn time. This month I was tasked with creating an installation based on a previous talk that I gave on Neural Impulse Actuators.  In short, I built a game not so creatively called BrainPong (it’s pong, that you control with your brain).  Needless to say, things that work in the lab (at home) tend to work better than they do in the field.  In the rush of getting it all put together I was poor at communicating when I would arrive (if at all) to do the actual installation. When I arrived, computers and EEGs in tow, my friend Douglas who runs Mindshare wrote me off as not attending and was surprised when I showed up.

BURN

So, how do I solve it?

Therein lies the problem; I don’t quite know.  People seem to recite the Nike slogan more then anything else… that I should “just do it”.  That you knuckle down and just push through it.  I sit here thinking that I’m silly for having such a simple problem to solve, yet I am certain that I am not alone in this.  However, I am working on it and one of the first steps in solving a problem is identifying it.

Will I fix it?

Lord knows, I hope so.