I would like to take a moment before going into this post today, to pay my respects for all of those that have been lost due to the explosion that happened in China yesterday.
A bit of a grim start, for that I am sorry, but on to the post! We did it readers; I made it over the half way mark for the week. Which means the weekend is right around the corner! Hopefully some sort of plans have been made or not made if you are planning to relax. I myself was looking into checking out this antique shop that I had stumbled across yesterday while I was out at lunch. Going to be exciting.
I want to loop back around today with this post to the postings I made over the course of this week, focusing most of the attention on yesterdays and Monday’s. So communication and relationships, the two go hand in hand.
The ability to communicate well is a key factor in a stable relationship. Again this does not apply to just a boyfriend or a girlfriend although it is much more apparent as a factor, more so to all types of relationships that a person creates over time. I feel that most relationships have a falling out due to lack of good communication from both parties. Small issues that should be addressed early on end up compounding and becoming a driving wedge between the two.
Since I reflect a lot back upon my own experiences, I will use one as an example. Roughly a year ago today, I was working as a mobile developer for a small start up company making health and wellness applications, was in a healthy relationship, and had a trip to Seattle that I had been preparing for. A year ago today, If you would have asked me what I wanted to do for a living, with out missing a beat I would have told you with 100% certainty that it was to work in the game industry. I have already talked about that point in a previous post, and am currently working on a more expanded post on that matter, so for now I am going to look a bit past it.
The professional relationship I had was in a decent spot. Looking back, I noticed that there were opportunities that I had to grow it even more. Pitching in with an opinion at an all hands meeting, or stand up. Speaking with other team members more as well as just getting to know them better. I got along swimmingly with all the other developers, but would have enjoyed talking more with our graphic designer to better understand her vision of how the application should look.
Now a huge glaring communication problem that I can recall from my time at the job was our process with testing the application. An issue that could have been avoided by taking a opportunity early on and speaking with our core group of testers and learning about the process that they use. Well short version is I did not. Because of that, when we started to move into a heavy testing phase while implementing more features to the application….we may have ran into some complications. Mostly between myself and the individual who was in charge of testing.
There were heated discussions which ultimately lead to that really awkward feeling in the office. You know that feeling, the one where you see two people staring daggers at one another and you are stuck in between both of them, not being able to excuse yourself? Yeah, it was that type of situation. To be fair I was not upset after the initial discussion took place, a slight bit annoyed, but nothing like steam shooting out of my ears. It was not until other team members started asking if I was okay, multiple times that the discussion really started to grind away my patience and make me upset.
Everything worked out in the end, Ashley and I ended up sitting down and talking after the weekend and discussed how we could better the process for our application testing. Reflecting back on the whole situation, I know it all could have been avoided if I had properly reached out past my own team and learned more about the testing process, or the graphic design or anything really.
At the end of the day, not everyone has good communication. Being able to accurately communicate ideas to a team or problems to a partner in a relationship is a difficult process. A very difficult one due to a multitude of varying reasons.
I talked a bit yesterday about how the lack of human interaction is causing the loss of generating new bonds between others. Hopefully today with a bit of my reflection it adds more depth to that and shows that it is not just for communication on the surface level, but it also is a major pillar for a balanced life in other regards.
I am of the opinion that we all want better lives. I believe that we are going about it all wrong though. We are trying to find happiness, success, peace online when in really that which we seek can be offline and right in front of us.
I am going to wrap up today’s post with a quote that I see everyday as I walk into my office.
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us” - Alexander Graham Bell
Have a wonderful Thursday.