​There are many reasons not to watch the evening news. Their use of choice adjectives is one of them.
 
Next time you tune in, listen carefully to the words. See how they attempt to excite, anger, entice, frighten you about an event about to take place. The pick words to activate your senses. Their premise is to get you to watch, so they play is to your emotions.
 
Though my wife and I rarely watch the TV news, in the past when we have occasionally turned it on, we usually defaulted to NBC and Lester Holt. He was calm, his demeanor straightforward, his voice solid and unwavering.

But the words put in his mouth by the writers were (and are) a different story. “Stay with us tonight to watch this horrific tragedy unfolding in Whocaresabout, Alabama.”
 
“Coming up next is this marvelous story about a tremendously intelligent dog from Barksville, Tennessee. Don’t go away.”
 
“Stick with us. Our next story is a magnificent display of a fiery scene that outrages the residents of this quiet hamlet in Burnsville, Illiinois.”
 
The incidents can change. But the adjectives stay the same and are rotated repeatedly to get you sweating and contract your groin.
 
The spin defines a very, very edgy line between what is true and what is fiction. The adjective distorting the event makes it lean towards the misleading. What’s the split? Is it 75 percent truth and 25 percent fiction? Is it 50-50? The struggle is that it is on each individual viewer to weigh how the story is constructed and I’m not sure how many citizens have the skill set to decipher how the stories are put together to manipulate how they perceive an event.
 
If your only source for news is the television set, you better be an adjective watcher. Pay close attention to the word right before the noun and listen closely. Got it?
 
When you see the image of that wind off the coast of Florida, was it really “ferocious,” or was it just a slight breeze? Were those waves lapping the shore “titanic” in size or non-surfable they’re so tiny?
 
That new legislation being proposed in Congress – is it really so “controversial” or is it a run-of-the-mill series of paragraphs doomed for the basement archives within the next few weeks?
 
That “tremendous” explosion at the coal power plant in Nebraska – did it “shatter” the night or was it a small pop barely heard within the facility?
 
And, if you happen to watch wrestling and see Baron Von Raschke stalking the ring, foaming at his mouth, with his famed “maniacal” claw hold prepared to decimate his opponent, is it really “maniacal?” Would you submit in the match if he clamped it on your face or stomach? Only the opponent really knows.
 
Words are used to incite us through images. We lap it up. We become outraged, telling others about the good, bad and the ugly we view on the tube.
 
Choice adjectives paint the picture. The “remarkable” cat recovery was such a “marvelous” act of kindness to behold. I want to watch that one because it sound so nice.
 
Stay with us until your second cocktail tonight and your powers of observation are a little more skewed. Then we can really snow you.

​A few weeks back, my wife got a notice about an abnormality in one of our credit cards after she visited Walmart. Our credit card had been hacked on two separate occasions four or five years ago (maybe six), so the notice got her emotionally upset immediately.
 
It had something to do with double billing. The issue got quickly resolved. No problem. But the blood pressure went up for her (and me, by extension) for a short period of time until we went through all the hoops to figure out what was going on and achieved resolution.

These types of uncontrollable events cause angst, anxiety and anger for probably just about everybody in modern societies today. Using a credit or debit card implies trust that the company will protect your identity, not overbill you (or double bill you), won’t suddenly raise interest rates exponentially, and doesn’t share your personal information with others. You have to accept this on a trust basis.
 
For the HUGE majority of time, this all works. You use the card the way it was meant to be and get billed properly and nothing HAPPENS to upset you.
 
But all it takes is one event to shatter your emotional safety net. It can be something as simple as our Walmart incident. And, nothing actually happened. It was just the appearance that something was wrong that got us breathing too rapidly.
 
Electronic transactions do that to many people. There is a certain loss of control you have to accept based on the implicit relationship between the customer and the company that processes your account and bills you for the charges, while ensuring money goes to the business you just visited.
 
It’s that loss of control that can cause angst, anxiety and anger. When something goes awry, you first get the dreaded feeling – your heart dropping into your toes. You literally feel it sink.
 
Your face flushes. You instantaneously wonder, “What the heck is going on? What can I do to stop the problem?” A phone call to customer service often induces the anxiety that follows. Though you may often get the issue resolved with this individual, you also are inconvenienced by having to wait until the next available operator can get to you while you are on hold, steam tooting out your ears, your bowels loosening because you’re confident someone just stole $213 from your Visa account.
 
As you wait and ponder all the things that can go wrong, anxiety builds toward anger. “This shouldn’t happen. Who’s the f…..cker who’s doing this to me!?!?!? I’d like to wring his neck. Why doesn’t he put his thieving mentality into something productive for society instead of cheating the system? Why me?”

And, because you don’t receive answers to those questions (even though you get your problem resolved), you can go through the angst, anxiety and angle cycle once again the next time you’re confronted with similar circumstances. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution for how to deal with this logically given the emotions if involves for most of us humans.

Somehow you’ve got to come to a recognition that you’ve been through it before and everything turned out okay. Perhaps you need so say that over and over to yourself, “It will be okay. It will be okay.”
 
I’ll try that next time and let you know if it works.

​What is it with leaning into selfies? You’d think people would be experts in self-imaging with all the practice as our absorption with personal photos grows exponentially through social media intensification.
 
You’d think more of us would be experts by now. If you do anything long enough, you get better at it. Do something enough and practice improvement and you can become an expert. Why not selfies?
 
It’s seems logical that if you took enough selfies, there’d be more good photos we’re seeing. But elongated foreheads and bigger-than-expected noses abound. For some reason, many us continue to distort the screen and post less-than-good shots for others to scan.
 
A bid of an aside: Before talking selfies, you must know how to actually use your mobile phone accurately. That took a bit of learning. Years ago, probably four or more (?), I was in a hallway at our home in Texas, stretching my arm as far as possible to try and take a photo of me for some strange reason. My wife or younger daughter (again, not full memory here), asked, “What the heck are you doing?”
 
“Taking a selfie. Why?”
 
“You don’t have to put your arm that far out.  Just flip the screen on your cell.”
 
“Huh?” They gave me a quick tutorial on hitting the top right button to switch the phone over to selfie mode. WHOA! A new world opens.

I’m not a big selfie guy, but yeah, occasionally take one. If you see those posts, you see the failure in photo accuracy that applies to the amateur league.

There’s the Mild-Lean-In Shot: As soon as you gander at these photos, you notice how oddly everyone is standing, like forcing themselves forward to make sure they get in the picture, cramping how it looks and making it seem off-balance.
 
Then you have the All-In: Everyone scrambles to make sure they fit. It’s like the screen is exploding with humans and invariably someone is looking at the moon or grimacing like they are in the middle of a constipated bowel movement.
You also have the Squat Shot: “Hey everyone, squat down here so we can get you all in this photo and Mount Rushmore in the back. Smile.” Click. Somehow you miss a few heads or devalue the spectacular background scenery.
 
Finally, you have the Big-Lean-In: This one is where you almost expected it’s going to turn out crappy. Everyone is major league over-zealous like they have to be the best face in the crowd, smiling clowning, doing something that overly demonstrates their love of being in the selfie.

The selfie is an odd element of our current social climate. It shows more and more absorption of self and a presumption that others care about every little thing you’re doing your life. I hugely respect those people who completely avoid selfies. I doubt the WWII generation holds much appreciation for the indulgence.
 
But you also have to respect those selfie-taking experts, who flawlessly pose and it looks like someone else is holding the camera and asking you to say, “Cheese.” A scenic photo, with superior clarity and color, catching some important event is always worth it. A good photo worth 1,000 words, and all that.

​The first time the thought about the importance of teaching age (knowledge) appropriately occurred almost 20 years ago when our son Kirby first started to play YMCA basketball when he was about six. I told the kids to go have fun, showed them how to dribble, told them to run the court hard and what direction the basket was. “We want to score in that one, not this one,” I told them, pointing in the direction of our basket.

When the game was close, and the kids were having fun, I would tighten the screws a bit and tell Kirby and another kid who was fast and had a sense for the ball: “Go steal the ball and score.” Away they’d go, running like greyhounds, pestering the opponents and then whipping down the other end of the court. They had fun.
 
One day, as I walked off, I overheard a coach telling his team of 6-year-olds: “Run play 36. Joe, you stand here. Billy, you stand there. Sam, you throw it to the corner. Devonte, you cut to the side, then curl in. Now run that play.”

SERIOUSLY? You think a kid that age can understand that. I looked at the boys and they stood there sullenly, bored. Big surprise. They didn’t understand what needed to be done. They needed to learn how to dribble properly and the direction of the basket, that’s about it. Then cut them loose to learn as they played and enjoyed themselves.

It seems to me there’s often way too high expectations of what kids and even coworkers can be expected to absorb based on our personal learning curves. The successful teachers, coaches and leaders intuitively recognize this and dial their message to the audience. They seek to have their message understood, not to dictate some structure, play or process.
 
Over the past few months I’ve been having the following type of dialogue because it seems there are an increasing number of examples of non-age-appropriate teaching or coaching visible either through the news or from a friend or coworker I’ve noticed. People in positions of authority assume that kids (or coworkers) are able to absorb lessons that the other person is unprepared for.

They may not be mature enough to understand the lesson. If it’s an adult who is supposed to hear and understand the message, he or she may not have a specific level of technical competency to get the message. These attempts to teach or communicate fail because the person imparting the message does not share information in an age-appropriate (or technology-appropriate) way.

The message sails over the heads of the intended audience. Everyone is confused. No one is happy. And people wonder why things don’t get done they way they should or why kids don’t learn a lesson from a teacher or coach as quickly as you think they should.
 
At work, people can presume you know things when you don’t. Journalists are taught to write at a sixth grade level to ensure their stories engage the widest audience. People use jargon and acronyms to obfuscate rather than explain. There’s a presumption of knowledge when we shouldn’t presume that at all.

In a past job, I remember needing to get some information which required going from one file to access another, which led to another, then a drop down menu, then clicking on another file to finally reach the necessary folder, where you still had to identify the specific document. Two women helped me find this my first or second week on the job. I didn’t need to go there often, so 3-4 months later I needed to locate another file.

I asked for their help because I couldn’t remember all the steps. They looked at me like I was the stupidest person on the planet. Paraphrasing, it went something like this, “I already told you. I’m busy, so go find it yourself.” I located someone else to help and wrote all the steps down, but had to go through the process multiple times to internalize the learning.
 
If we want to understand each other and communicate effectively for learning, know your audience, understand their capabilities and approach them in an age-, language- and technology-appropriate way. You’ll have the most success that way.