Learning Communication from a Baby

My wife and I are in the process of teaching our son (who is almost 10 months old now) "baby sign". This is a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL) and the concept is that a baby actually has things to communicate at a very young age.

These can be things as mundane as "eat", but can get to the point where a child under a year old can tell you he wants medicine because his mouth huts (teething). Even though we have been teaching him some of the signs (like "eat", "more", "milk") I had not yet gotten around to reading the booklet that came with the "Baby Sign" program.

So this morning Nathan happened to sleep in later than usual so I figured I would take that time and catch up on the reading that I should have been doing several months ago. As I began reading I couldn't help but draw parallels between the idea of a baby having something important to say to the parents and how the internet is developing to allow more communication between teachers or coaches and students.

As parents we learn to pick up on the cues of our kids and by knowing thier patterns and the time of day you can pretty quickly figure out that he is hungry, needs to be changed, is teething, etc. But sometimes he will get upset and you have no idea what is going on. That is when it is great for him to be able to give some feedback in the form of baby sign to tell you exactly what is going on.

The same thing can be said of coaches and students in today's two way communications on the internet (some call it "Web 2.0"). In network marketing it has traditionally been the case that the coach has spoken from on high and just delivered the information to students and new distributors without a lot of feedback. Typically people have been too timid to say "hey, this isn't working for me" and so the coach has not had reason to change what is taught. They just figure people drop out but don't really know why.

Now with all of the communication tools being put to use by the modern network marketer, the coach can get feedback from all of the students and make adjustments where necesary so that everyone gets what they need and the coach doesn't need to guess what those needs are.

In the spirit of this concept any comments, questions and suggestions are encouraged and I'll try to address questions in future posts.