Ep. 6 – TCI: Connected to Consumers

Watch in ASL

Hi. Welcome to the connected interpreter podcast, where we will explore ways of staying connected to ourselves in our work, acknowledging the impact of our practices and continue to grow as practice professionals. I’m Amanda Smith, an interpreter, educator, coach and creative, and I’d love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting the complexities of human interaction and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference. So today’s episode is specifically about connecting with ourselves and both from a personal and a professional standpoint. And so as you go into listening to this, I want you to think about the following reflective prompts. So:

• what if anything is sparking your care for yourself, the work and others?
• Do you feel moved to take any action? And if so, what and when will you do it?
• What questions arise?
• What insights and connections do you see to yourself and your work? So those are the questions to keep in mind.
• I will answer a few of them at the end as well, and let’s go ahead and get started.

Connecting with Consumers: The Foundation of Interpreting Work

So as I mentioned in the introduction to this entire series. This is all built upon a foundation from demand control schema and my years of engaging with learning about teaching DCS, as well as running supervision sessions and case conferencing and connecting to consumers, is one of the, I would say, obviously, most critical aspects of the work that we do, because it is fundamentally the reason that we have the work that we have is that these people have come together and Do not share the same language or modality, thus requiring my presence and my skill set to connect them. And there are a number of ways to connect with consumers. And if we think about the DCS constructs, right, if one of our initial controls that we employ as practitioners is to do an EIPI analysis environmental interpersonal, para linguistic and intrapersonal demands of whatever is happening. Then when we get from environmental to interpersonal, sometimes into para linguistic, we find out a lot about these consumers. We find out about how they use language. We find out about what their goals are. We find out about what their relationship is to one another. We find out about what their role is in this particular space. We find out a lot of things about them through doing this kind of analysis. And then we get into the pre, during and post assignment controls, and I’m going to spend some time there talking about how we actively employ connection in these pre during post stages of controls in order to do better work, which is ultimately the goal, the goal of us as individuals, the goal of DCs, frameworks, analysis, case conferencing, all of those kinds of things, is constructive dialog to improve our practice.

All right. So consumers come in all shapes and sizes, as we know they have all types of language needs, all types of goals as humans, all types of upbringings, education status, all of those kinds of things. And those are things that we are able to acknowledge and name in the EIPI analysis in the DCS framework, some of the tools for getting connected with consumers that I kind of want to talk about today, or maybe, maybe not even tools, but just kind of mindsets, starts with and you’ll find this a lot in this podcast, but it starts with connecting with yourself. So some of the things that we’ve done over connecting with ourselves in this podcast series around presence or conditioned tendencies, knowing ourselves really well and knowing how we show up in our work is one of the first places. So we want to connect to consumers from a really grounded and stable place. We want to be able to hold space for consumers from a steady place, not a haphazard place, not a place where we are unsure, not a place where we’re bringing this anxious energy. So there’s a there’s a concept, just because I said anxious energy, there’s a concept of non anxious presence that I think is a really powerful one as well, and I will link to it in the show notes. I have a blog post about non anxious presence, I think, if not holding space, which talks about non anxious presence, but we want to start our connection with consumers from this really stable ground where we have done the work with ourselves to be able to hold space for whatever this encounter becomes. And holding space means that I am not going to bring my own preferences or judgment to whatever is happening. I’m going to hold space for whatever unfolds there. So that’s the starting point.

Cultivating a Grounded, Stable Presence for Consumer Interactions

I’m going to connect from a place of stability, I’m going to connect from a place of groundedness, and then that’s pre pre work, right? Pre controls.

And then I’m going to connect with consumers on their humanity level. I know that I have fallen prey to just getting right to the work and skipping over like, yeah, yeah, I get that you’re a person, but like, what are the words you need me to know? What are the specific topics? What are Where are you going with this? Do you use words in a particular way? Right? We get right into the nitty gritty of it. And I think one of the important connection opportunities that we have is as people, as actual individuals and actual humans, to just take a second to connect, to just see each other eye contact. How are you doing today? It doesn’t have to be lengthy. You’re not becoming best friends, but just take a moment to absorb their humanity from your stable, grounded place, and then you can get into the particulars. How can we best work together today? How can I be most aligned with what it is that you’re going to say, do need all of those kinds of things?

Acknowledging the Humanity in Our Consumers

And then I think in a in a post assignment kind of way, where you’re still with the consumers is again leaving with an acknowledgement of their humanity, even if it’s just inside yourself, but just the idea of thanks, it was great to work with you today, or hope you have a great rest of your day. Good to see you again. Any of those little niceties that allow us to just take a second and acknowledge the humanity of another person again. It doesn’t need to be lengthy. You don’t need to be best friends. Just pause long enough to say, I’m here working with humans who have their own lives separate from me, and I can just acknowledge that right now, one of the other ways that we can connect with consumers, and again, this is going to go back to connecting with ourselves is paying attention to the sensations and understandings of what’s happening around us within ourselves.

So what is our read of what is happening?

Reading Between the Lines: Interpreting Body Language and Expressions

One of the things that’s really interesting in terms of how our brain makes sense of what other people might be feeling or thinking. So if you consider yourself a good reader of other people, or being able to you know kind of sense the vibe of what’s happening in a space. One of the really interesting ways that our brains does that is seeing another person looking at their body and kind of reading their nervous system, which happens on an unconscious level, like we don’t know that our nervous systems are talking to each other, but when we see this other person, we see their facial expressions, we see their body language.

We see their we kind of sense their tension in different places. Our brain reads that and then maps it onto ourselves and says, If I looked like that, what would I be feeling if I looked like that? What would I be thinking? So the only way for our bodies to make sense of others is to map it back to ourselves and interpret it as if we were that way.

It’s a great tool. It’s a great skill. It’s not always accurate, because we are all so different in the ways that we are formed, the way that we are nurtured, the way that we are developed, the way that our brains work.

So knowing that that mapping happens, one of the things that we can do is try to map, even though it’s a totally unconscious thing, map with options, right? So, often times, if I see someone who looks the way I would look or the way I think I look, when I am mad about not getting my way, for example, if I map that to myself and I’m now mad. I’m now interpreting everything they say as if they are mad because they didn’t get their way. That’s going to show up in my intonation. That’s going to show up in the choice of words I make, that’s going to show up in how much space I leave for turn taking. That’s all going to show up because I think this person is mad, right? But if I can kind of interrupt that unconsciousness, unconscious, unconsciousness, unconscious reading and mapping and say, yeah, if I look like that, it would be because I’m mad that I didn’t get my way. What else could be true? Well, it could also be true that they are confused about what’s happening. It could also be true that they have an upset stomach. It could also be true that they had a fight earlier in the day, and they have kind of gone back to that in their mind, right? There’s all kinds of reasons someone could look the way that they look, and this is where the DCS kind of constructs of descriptive, non evaluative language about what’s happening around us is really important.

Operationalizing Empathy and Understanding in Interpreting Practice

So when we do the EIPI analysis, and when we think about, you know, potential controls we could employ, really thinking about, what is it that I’m seeing, not what I’m making it mean, but what I’m seeing. So I’m seeing this person with a furrowed brow and arms crossed and legs crossed, with the foot bouncing right, so that looks like pent up energy to me. And they did it, they just didn’t get their way, and so they’re mad, right? As opposed to, nope, they’re they just have crossed arms, their leg is bouncing and their eyebrows are furrowed. And then look for more information to guide the choices that you make in your interpretation, whether that is from a confused place, from a distracted place, from a different kind of kind of place, or maybe they’re mad because they didn’t get their way.

It could be that you were actually right, but it’s everything we do as interpreters is filtered through our own lens, our own thought world and our own brains, which means our own human experience. And we need that. It’s a really powerful tool.

It’s also a powerful tool to disrupt and question from time to time, so that we can really see the humanity in others and honor it through our interpretations. So hopefully that’s helpful in terms of thinking about how we connect with consumers from this grounded, stable place, but also from a place of recognizing that I’m going to make some assumptions, because my brain is wired to make shortcuts.

My brain is wired to conserve energy, and so if I want to be a little bit more accurate or a little bit more faithful, I need to spend a little bit more energy and convince my brain to give me some alternative interpretations. So yeah, hopefully you can kind of sit with that, chew on it a little bit, and see what you notice about how your observations and connections with consumers feels through this lens.

Conclusion

And again, I want to, I want you to think about anything that might have sparked your care if you feel moved to action questions that arise, what insights and connections you’re making. I’d love to hear from you about those insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click on the newsletter button in the upper right hand corner. So let me go back and answer some of these questions.

Amanda’s Musings on this Episode

As I have done in the past. I think I will choose a question, yeah, a reflective question to kind of opine on for a minute. I think I’ll do the what questions arise. So. As I was talking, I was just thinking about, you know, some of the things that I said are not necessarily things you can do in the moment. There’s something that you would do in retrospect or in a pre a preparing kind of way, a pre assignment control. And I think that this is one of the values that I definitely see from supervision, particularly group supervision, where you have the opportunity to hear from other people about, like, oh, well, if I saw someone who looked like that, this is what I would think it meant that. This is what I would think it would meant mean. So it expands our understanding of, you know, I see this thing, and it doesn’t automatically mean x, it could mean a, b, c, it could be an XYZ. And so then I have these options open in front of me. So I think the question that is arising for me is this idea of, how do we take some of these concepts and actually operationalize them? And it’s often not in the moment. So it’s not in the moment of interpreting that I am saying, Hold on, don’t automatically interpret it according to my lens. Let me think of some different ways, right? It’s the work that we do after and before, with other colleagues, even, or other consumers, or that consumer, to really get a sense of what is happening and what could be happening, so that the next time we’re in a situation and we see this kind of behavior, we can think, well, it could be one of these three things. So let me see if there’s more information to give me a sense of which direction to kind of go with my interpretation. So I think, yeah, the question that arises is, where do we actually go to operationalize these things now, just the acknowledgement of other people’s humanity and the niceties of, you know, introductions and those kinds of things obviously happen in the moment, and that’s a practice that needs to happen in the moment. But the idea of how we interpret other people’s body language and word choice, I think, is something that happens outside of the interpreting assignment that then impacts future interpreting assignments. So those are my thoughts. I’m super curious what your are.

So those are my answers to two of the questions, and I’m super curious to hear yours.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai