Correction

Perhaps I'd misjudged one thing I put down as a weakness in my last post. I said that I am a poor communicator. That is not entirely true. I am poor at communicating certain things. However, I am extraordinarily gifted at communicating others.

I have an ability to break down complex things into simple terms and to translate them into terms that are easily grasped by my audience. I am good at code-switching and tailoring how I speak to my audience. I suppose that comes with being very empathetic. I have honed this ability through learning to communicate with my mother and father. My mother and father are extreme opposites of each other. My father is very logical and wants to cut to the cold, hard facts. My mother is more concerned with emotions, how decisions make me feel, how they make her feel and more human considerations. I learned to gloss over details with her because she's not paying as much attention to the details themselves as opposed to the confidence with which I present them. My father listens to the details and may go off and research them himself later on, so my arguments to him are often more elegant, minimalistic, and fact driven.

I have been told that I am a very good public speaker, although I find it difficult to write and read a speech. I am excellent at speaking extemporaneously. However, I am only able to speak extemporaneously. Even in my public speaking class in college, for a long speech, I never wrote down everything I had to say, but rather, I wrote down certain points I wanted to be sure I hit, and certain facts that I wouldn't be able to remember off the top of my head. But I often ended up rearranging the order of things and elaborating on certain points that I didn't write down--which actually won me acclaim from my professors in subjects in which I had to give presentations because they said it showed a greater depth of knowledge and comfort with the subject.

What I am poor at is communicating emotion. I rarely show emotion and I am terrible at describing how I feel at particular moments. I'm often even unable to adequately respond to someone asking me what's on my mind. It makes me seem like a much colder person than I am--much more aloof and disinterested than I intend to be. That makes establishing and maintaining relationships with people difficult. But it is only one aspect of communication. So perhaps I should be more specific when I say communication is a weakness of mine. It's more complex than that.