Hello again, as you now know, my name is Douglas Goforth. I am a 47-year-old retired Combat Medic and former Corrections and Medical Officer at the Glynn County Detention Center. Currently I work as a security officer on Saint Simons Island. While I am very proud of my service to my community and my country, without realizing it, they shaped they way that I interacted with people. Or what I now understand as they formed my rhetoric that I would use in future interactions. A rhetoric that I would have to learn to reform for my current environment.
As a former soldier and supervisor in the military, I had a set way to interact with people. However most of the time this does not translate well to the civilian side, especially as a civilian supervisor. Part of the issue is that as a soldier, I usually communicated in a direct, blunt and authoritative manner. While in the military this is usually understood, in the civilian side its really considered somewhat rude. When I would give a directive to a civilian employee, I would treat it the same way as if I gave an order to a soldier, no discussion no conversation. This is what I want and this is how I want it done. But as Mrs. Kate Nasser states in her article, 7 Steps to Go from Brutally Blunt to Helpfully Honest: “Be open to other possibilities. What you say is rarely an absolute fact. There are other perspectives, conditions, opinions, and possibilities to consider.” And it took me a while to sort of change gears and open up to conversations. Instead of me just doing the talking. What I know now, but had absolutely no clue about then was that I had to observe, adapt and change my Rhetoric because my environment had changed. So now I could give the employee a directive, and if they asked me how I wanted done, then that would be an opening to a conversation. In this conversation we could both get our ideas and point of views across. Thereby creating not only effective communication but also building team moral because we came up with the solution together as a team rather than me being a dictator.
Another instance of where I had to learn to alter my rhetoric came from a time that I worked at the Glynn County Detention Center. There I was a medical officer and responsible for providing needed medication to inmates. Unfortunately, there were times where inmates would make up or fake ailments with the intent to acquire medication. This is called Medication Seeking behavior. And usually it came from inmates who had a previous drug dependency or habit. While I did my best to be a professional, and treat people fairly medically. It did not stop me from casting judgement on them. One of my constant thoughts being “Well if they didn’t do dope then they would not be here.” What I failed to realize at the time, is what Jude Parker states in their article, “How to Talk to People” they state, “When you are quick to judge people and situations, you hinder the natural process of communication.” It was not until I started working at the Gateway Crisis center that I began to see that there was another side of the story that I did not or maybe would not see at the detention center. You see at the “jail” I saw the end result that was it. Basically, instead of reading the book I went to the back page and read the dust cover. Just enough to get the bullet points. At Gateway though, I got to see the story. The human story the fight with addiction the shame of each failure, and every once in a special while the victory of conquering the disease of addiction. I began to see that it was not one battle but a constant fight, because even after they won that desire would still battle with them and they would have to fight it each and every day. Because of this I started to give people more time and respect. And found that by doing this simple gesture, it made their day better and my job a bit easier.
The partly embarrassing thing for me is that before this, I thought I was a person without judgement or bias. And before January of this year Rhetoric was a question that I asked you to get a point across, not for you to answer. Over time I learned that in many ways I was not as “Right” as I thought I was. At times that realization was pretty embarrassing. But over the course of time, I learned to change the way I speak to people for the environment that I’m in. I also learned to stop before I judge someone and try and read the book, get to know the person, before I make a critical and lasting judgement of them. The proud side of this is understanding that I can and did make the changes needed in order for me to conduct positive communication. Or to put it another way, you can teach an old dog new Rhetoric.