Real Talk for Real Life
However, if there is a silver lining in the dark cloud that is covid-19, it is the resilience of the Earth and the people fortunate enough to dwell upon it. With all the humans forced to stay at home, the Earth, which has been abused year after year, started to heal itself.
For effective communication to occur, there are three things to take into consideration – the sender, the receiver and the message. The sender formulates the message and “encodes” it in a way that the receiver should understand. However, along the way there may be “noise” which may distort the message during transmission. The result may be that the receiver does not receive the message as intended. When this happens, there can be confusion and other unintended consequences – effective communication has not taken place.
Niceness involves showing sympathy while kindness involves showing empathy. According to the Cambridge dictionary, to sympathize is “to understand or care about someone’s problems” or “to show support for something; to agree with someone”. Meanwhile, it defines to empathize as “to be able to understand how someone else feels”. To empathize you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes and imagine how you would feel in that situation.
When someone makes a request of you, it is your prerogative to say yes or no. You are under no obligation to agree to the request. If you say no, you don’t need to provide an explanation about why you said no. Think about it, if you were saying yes, you wouldn’t feel that you had to explain why you said yes. So why do you think you need to explain why you said no?
You don’t need to change your physical appearance to conform to someone else’s standards in order to be loved and accepted. Embrace who you are – the person who God made you to be, in all your glory. You were fearfully and wonderfully made; perfectly imperfect. There is only one you and the world needs you – just the way you are.
