THREE IMPORTANT SKILLS FOR LIVING WELL WITH HEARING LOSS

BY SHARI EBERTS

Hearing loss makes communication more challenging, but there are ways to live well with it. Below are three important skills that make the hearing loss life a bit easier.

KEY TAKEAWAY: With a healthy mindset, technology tools, and gamechanging communication behaviors, anyone can live more skillfully with hearing loss.

1. ADOPTING A SELF-ADVOCACY MINDSET

Our attitudes towards hearing loss impacts our emotions and behaviors. This is a powerful statement, because it means that life with hearing loss can be easier just by changing our attitudes. We call this change a MindShift.

The thought is "I want to hear better, the way I used to." The MindShift is "I want to communicate better, and it takes more than hearing aids to do this. I must use other skills and additional technology."

This is the crux of skillful living: shifting the goal from hearing better to communicating better. We may never hear as well as we once did, or as well as others do, but we can learn to communicate well. By changing the focus to a goal that is achievable—and one that we can control – we set ourselves up for success. It takes personal strength and self-advocacy, but when we adopt a can-do mindset, communication is easier, and life is better.

2. EMBRACING A VARIETY OF TECHNOLOGY TOOLS

Often the first stop on the hearing loss journey, is to a hearing care provider who may recommend hearing aids or cochlear implants. Both are miracle devices, but they are not silver bullets. People often expect hearing aids to correct hearing loss in the way that glasses correct vision, but it is important to understand what hearing devices can and cannot do.

Devices can improve speech comprehension (especially in a quiet environment), reduce listening effort and fatigue, and improve our own speech clarity and volume (because we hear ourselves better). But hearing aids and cochlear implants cannot deliver sounds as sharply or clearly as the natural ear. And, they cannot choose which sounds to amplify. This can be a problem in noisy environments because our devices turn up both the background noise, as well as the speech we want to hear.

The good news is that hearing aids and cochlear implants can also connect to other technologies to boost communication. For example, remote microphones bring distant sound (like a teacher at the front of the classroom) directly to our devices. Bluetooth connects our devices to Smartphones or computers for phone calls or streaming media. Telecoils are helpful for tapping into public address