Here’s a familiar scenario. You’re out for dinner with a group of people you haven’t seen in a while, and you’re excited to catch up with them. You’ve been looking forward to this dinner for weeks. You want to let your hair down and have a laugh, but the restaurant is NOISY. As soon as you sit down, you know …
With the new year approaching, it is natural to talk about New Year resolutions, but I want to talk to you about Christmas (replace with your holiday of choice) resolutions. Let me explain. When the holidays approach, we look forward to spending lots of time with our family and closest friends. We’ll often spend entire days in their company. While …
Did you ever succeed explaining to people around you what hearing loss really sounds like? When people ask: “How deaf are you?” How should we reply? I heard people answer with a percentage number e.g. I hear 50%. This reply is easy to understand but not very accurate. It gives a false understanding to others that hearing loss can be …
Where do you replace your hearing aid batteries? …What? What’s with this question? Yes, perhaps it’s a weird one. But I have a good reason for it. The early days wearing my hearing aids, when I had to replace my hearing aid batteries, I used to go into hiding. During those early days, you could find Gianluca replacing his hearing …
Last week I wrote a piece on what all we really want, as human beings, and how hearing loss takes away the ability to connect with others. Once you’re armed with your hearing aids, your journey isn’t over. And it could be a tough one, if you don’t know where to start. To help you get you started, here are 7 key …
As human beings, what do we all want? We all want to connect, and by connecting, we feel included. We feel like we belong. It’s a primordial thing, to connect. It’s what we’ve always done, as human beings. Hearing loss is an attack to our ability to connect. It makes this instinctive behaviour impossible for us. And when we finally …
In my Hear Better in Six Weeks course we have a closed Facebook group where my students and myself share our progress in mastering our life with hearing loss. What my students like about it is that by reading other people’s challenges they feel like they’re not alone, and get the inspiration they need to believe they can live well …
EDIT: Very good comment on safety from one of my readers May Wood. I’d add a comment on safety for those of us who have severe/profound loss and won’t make out a word of what is said/shouted without our aids in the event of an alarm or need to evacuate the pool – do inform the lifeguards so that, in an …
This week in the Hearing Loss Community group on Facebook, a question was asked, and Peggy, one of my students, brought it to my attention. It seemed to interest a lot of people, so I decided to write a blog post about it, hoping that what I learned can help other hearing-aid users. Here’s the question: I wish my hearing aids were …
An Interview with Tina Lannin, founder of 121 Captions. I recently interviewed Tina Lannin, founder of 121 Captions, a UK-based agency that brings speech-to-text and remote captions to deaf people across the world. Tina is not only a successful business woman but also a forensic lip reader, an important role played by expert witnesses in the justice system. I was …