Sharing Language Templates Unlocks the Menu of Interpersonal Experience

Language templates were a common theme across 3 conversations I had this week. I shared or received (verbal / body) language for getting time to think before responding (in the moment or later,) understand client context faster, and initiating more intentional and timely conversations with friends than “catching up.” We’ve all only seen a fraction of the menu of interpersonal experience based on our cultural and career backgrounds. When we recognize this, we can make the parts we know accessible to each other.

Unlocking pages of the menu has been empowering and essential in my career switch. Unfortunately, finding support in this journey meant digging for needles in a haystack of criticism and doubt. In a zeit geist focused on authenticity and unmasking, skills are often conflated with nature, leaving the impact of nurture forgotten. While we need to know ourselves to know what’s likely to work for us, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

We can learn a lot from each other when we normalize sharing. This starts with eliminating comments questioning someone’s competence, age appropriateness, or neurology when they ask for tips about something you learned young. We were all privileged with some information and underprivileged with other information in our early lives, and it doesn’t have to define the scope of our later lives. I invite you to help make this language barrier an opportunity instead.