Laura Friedman
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Laura Friedman is the Vice President, Communications and Program Governance at Citibank.
Through her life and career, Laura has been an outspoken advocate for those with hearing loss. She believes that if people choose to participate in the speaking and listening world, it’s important that they seek treatment. She also believes this choice could positively impact their career and well-being.
When she was two years old, Laura’s parents took her to half a dozen doctors. They noticed that she was not speaking or responding to sounds and relied on lip-reading to understand what was being said to her. It wasn’t until 18 months later that she was diagnosed with moderate-to-severe hearing loss.
“Like 90 percent of other children who are deaf or have a hearing difficulty, I was born to parents with typical hearing,” says Laura. “I thank my grandfather for giving my mother this advice. He said, ‘If you don’t try teaching her language now, you’ll never know if she’s capable or not.’ From that day on, my parents were determined to have me learn to listen and talk. If I failed, I would have failed trying. It was then that my parents had me fitted for hearing aids.”
Laura’s mother fiercely advocated for her when she was younger, and was a great role model for Laura to look up to. When Laura was diagnosed, her mother did all she could to make sure she had the resources she needed and the right team of people behind her.
“My mom believed in me and my abilities, ignoring the so-called experts and naysayers who said I would never partake in the oral-communication world, learn language, or hear,” says Laura.
Laura has shattered stigmas and proven many people wrong throughout her life. She loves to travel and has been to 24 countries so far. She is currently the Assistant Director of Communications at Workforce Opportunity Services, and is heavily involved in her community.
Much of her community service has been focused on helping others with hearing loss. She is:
A member of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, Disability Youth Council and Hearing Loss Taskforce.
A peer mentor for children with hearing loss at the Center for Hearing and Communication in NYC
The founder of HearsHelp.com, which provides social advice for children and young adults with hearing loss
“Treating my hearing loss enables me to partake in any project and initiative I choose to take on,” says Laura. “While having hearing loss makes certain tasks more difficult like large conference calls, it also has its advantages. My hearing loss has made me into a very perceptive, detail-oriented and creative individual. Thanks to the challenges I endured as a child with hearing loss, I’m confident that I can overcome anything that comes my way.”
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Hi everyone. It's Gustavo, your host for the Enabled Disabled podcast. Today's guest is Laura Friedman. Laura has a remarkable history of making every organization or company she's worked in a better place base for her teammates, coworkers, and for people with disabilities. Some key highlights. Laura has volunteered at the New York City's Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities for nearly six years. She is currently on the board of directors for the Worldwide Hearing Foundation International and she is working in the private sector in communications and people strategy. Laura, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I am really excited to talk to you and really appreciate you being here.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here as well.
Awesome. So why don't we get started closer to the beginning? Tell us a little bit about your childhood, what it was like for you, and then we can kind of move into your story and get into your work and all of the amazing activism that you've done and education. I do want to talk about your thesis because I think that's a fascinating topic. But tell us about the beginning. Did you grow up in New York?
I grew up about an hour and a half outside of the city in Juan County, New York. But my family is deeply rooted in the New York area. So I grew up coming into the city, going up to Boston in DC. My family is all over the place now, but New York has always been home. And then about my childhood. So I was super sick when I was a baby and a newborn and spent my first month in the hospital. We don't fully know this was the car, but they gave me an antibiotic that is extremely strong and it's known to be autotoxic, which means toxic to the ear. And there's a high probability that that could have resulted in my current hearing loss that has been stable since diagnosis. So for reference to a lot of people who have hearing loss, that genetic. It progresses or gets worse over time. Mine has been stable since day one. And so that's another sign that the damage was kind of a one and done type of situation. That doesn't mean it won't get worse as I age with the normal aging process, but I would have seen dips at this point in my life.
So anyway, going back to that, so I was sick. I went home, had a normal childhood, like as a toddler, except where I really wasn't responding towards unless someone was speaking towards me or speaking. And as I started missing some developmental milestones when my brother kind of attacked them early, my mom didn't want to compare us, but she started something wasn't right in her gut and she started investigating. And this is back before the age of Google and Wikipedia and WebMD. This is when you kind of word of mouth and you go to the library and the book can be 30 years old. She took me to all sorts of specialists to try and diagnose whatever was going on because over time that wasn't improving. It became clear I was hitting two and a half, close to three felt like she needed to understand why I wasn't speaking or wasn't able to respond to words unless she was facing me. And she didn't want to take me to the school district because back then when you were labeled and you were categorized as needing special education, it could be really detrimental even if you have the capabilities.
It's a very different time and just wanted to make sure that she positioned me and my family in the best way. And she went to private doctors and it took over a year and a half of really random diagnoses. That just didn't make sense. I'm not ADHD, I'm not bouncing. I wasn't bouncing off the walls. As a kid, they told me had learning processing disorders that wouldn't explain the lack of speech or being able to pronounce things legibly and articulate them, and it wouldn't explain not responding. Eventually she did take me to the school district. She was out of option. Within five minutes, they figured out I had moderate if I found hearing loss. And from there, it wasn't the greatest thing to find out, but it was finally something that made sense. And from there, my parents, who both are in the medical field, my father is a doctor, my mom is actually a nurse. And so with my grandmother, they attack things like, okay, what next? They didn't sit there wondering or complaining or being upset that the world is out to get them, although there was obviously probably emotions involved. But they attack a diagnosis and like, okay, this is what is and this is what isn't.
How do we get from A to B and from when we get to B to C? And what are those steps? Who do we go to? What do we need to do? How do we get her what she needs? And I'm so fortunate that my family has that mentality because they didn't waste any time. And then from three onwards, it was catching me up. I clearly had the brain power to do it, but I lost three years worth of vocabulary, which is like looking back, that's when most vocabulary is acquired, how you learn, like basic words and sentence structures, and without even being not vocabulary test, it just gets integrated into your daily life. And then on top of that, I might understand what a word is or know what a word means. But if I don't hear you in a sentence, or even if I do hear it, but I don't process it like I hear it differently. It affected how I wrote and spoke and so all these things had a compounding effect. Academically, I caught up in a lot of ways, but I was behind in some ways. And over the course of, I guess like the following ten years of the diagnosis, with managing those gaps in my vocabulary and making sure that I have all the tools and resources I need to be able to succeed.
I'm learning what that was because I'm part of a generation. Maybe the generation before me a little is really the first generation, but I'm really part of the generation of part of hearing folk that are part of our workforce and our normal culture versus being institutionalized or not having the right resources and technology to allow them to succeed in our typical world that we live in and our human centric world. So there really wasn't an example or a framework of like, this is what works because it's work than this person part of a generation that was establishing that. And so I look at the kids today, they got it so good. You get diagnosed at like, birth, and sometimes that's not the case, but they get implanted with cochlear implants and you don't hear the speech impediment. Don't you skip a beat from the get go. It's like a seamless integration. Now, I understand there's politics involved in all of that, but taking the politics of the death and heart of healing world out of it, it's just like I am envious. It would have been such a different experience. But I also really am proud of how hard I've had to work because the payoff, my challenges and hurdles, I get to think back.
I'm like, I did all of that. I lived a life before my life began in the sense. Right?
Well, it's really a couple of interesting things there that stand out to me. But one third thing that I'm just so curious. It's not a super important question, but it's one of those nagging questions. So why do you think the school district was able to diagnose what was going on so fast when all those other doctors missed it? Was there ever like, an answer for that?
It's a fantastic question. I have absolutely no idea. I couldn't answer that for you. Maybe no one else did a hearing test because they didn't think of it. I don't know. I don't remember this. This is all anecdotal. I don't know. I don't even know if my parents stopped knowing how they are about things. They probably just like, well, that explains it. What are they going to do, go ask for a refund?
No, but I think it's a good I don't know. You're right. There's probably no practical advantage to answering that question, except that maybe the next time you go into a doctor's office or the next time there's something that they can't figure out, you can learn something from a mistake that was made. That's all. In terms of growing up, though, I think that our parents obviously have such an influence on our behavior, on our values on how we think about the world and react to it. I would imagine that it was also super advantageous to push you to catch up to say, like, look, these are the steps we're going to take. Did reading help? Like, did speech therapy help? What were some of the things that helped you effectively catch up to everybody else?
I don't know if I would use the word advantageous so much, but in the first few years activated speech therapy for a long time. But I will get to that in a second because I probably didn't end up needing it for as long as I had it. But I won't answer that part in a second. But starting with speech therapy, I need to learn what sounds were and how to pronounce them properly. They hear things differently. And so my mom used to sit on the couch and go and, like, teach me sounds and apply them to words and try and which is what you when you do this with little kids too, you don't just want to use one word, you want to use funny or comic, and you want to follow up with a few words that mean the same thing. So that I have exposure to other vocabulary because certain words and certain sounds were really hard for me to hear. And so I might have heard things, but I didn't necessarily put them together. That was a big focus. My mom spent a lot of time doing that with me, and I'm fortunate that she was able to do that.
And then with the decision of when I got my diagnosis, they actually said I was never going to hear it speak, but I had hair loss. It wasn't completely death, so it was a confusing diagnosis. So the next question was, do we teach her sign or do we teach her language? And my whole family had typical hearing, not typical eyesight, but typical hearing. And that was a decision my parents had a grapple with. And my grandfather, who is if you don't try, you'll never know. They are trying, and then we all learn sign language and we take a beat. But if you want her to live in the world that you live in, and again, politics is that other people feel differently about that, then you're going to have to try and never look back. I don't know sign language. I could learn it now, but it wasn't something that from then on, it was just go. And what go wise meant different things at different points. So the great thing about the school district is that at least back then I can't speak to today's world. They equipped you with a lot of resources that they paid for my speech therapy, which was three times a week.
And they also paid for her to get certified in hearing loss because most speech therapists deal with kids who are language delayed or have autism. But the human lost aspect of speech therapy, especially like my suburban town an hour and a half outside the city. There wasn't a specialist, but we identified a boost therapist who wasn't my first. But once we had her, she was in my life. From then on, I'm still very much in touch with her. She's like a part of my family, but we identified that she was the right fit for me. She had the right mentality, she was smart, and she got certified and the school district paid for that certification and that upgilling. And then they also paid for her services up until I was 18. And I utilized her in different ways throughout different parts of my life. Probably towards the end of middle school, high school, we did speech exercises to warm up my mouth, but it was more focused on vocabulary. So I would sit with my back towards her and she would say words and I would decipher them like I would do in the audiologist office, but use Sat words.
Or we would go over how to use words in a sentence and words that I might know or read in a book, but because I don't necessarily hear them applied. It's the auditory aspect of things that kind of make everything come together and better for worse. That part of me doesn't work properly. So it was just about recognizing words that I might hear in the classroom or we utilize and form that made sense at that point in time. And she was gained by anything I would say that was advantageous towards the end, probably from a speech therapy standpoint, didn't need her. Why was I going to give someone up who is such a resource and became a part of my family? And then some things that we learned along the way was the school district paid for my work hearing AIDS. And while those are self funded, the devices called FM units that amplify a single person voice, so my teacher would wear one. So anything that would be advantageous using your word again in the classroom was also funded by the school district. So in high school I had a note paper so I could pay attention, focus my energy, paying attention versus taking notes and missing the next thing, especially as things move a lot faster.
And that was something that was really useful. And in College, people volunteered to be note takers, right? They're usually kids in their class, so I had someone who wasn't a kid in my class who was doing it for me in high school. But once you hit College, there's always the school tends to enlist volunteers to help with notetaking, so that definitely helps. And then the last thing I'll say, if someone with a parent, with a kid with listening to this is being able to get the syllabus ahead of time so I can have a first look at some of the words or some of the contacts that will be discussed in the classroom because without contact, sometimes words don't make sense if I miss certain parts of a sentence, but if I have contacts, I can fill in the blank. And maybe if I do miss something, I can ask a question to help me fill in the blank without any context to a conversation or to a discussion where maybe I won't be able to hear everyone behind me talking or can't always look around. This way, I don't feel that I have to spend an additional excess energy and trying to figure out what's going on around me, at least from an academic standpoint.
And so those were really big, small but big things that help bridge some of the gaps. The gap will always it doesn't matter what you give someone who has different needs. Gas will always exist. It's about minimizing them. And so even though this all sounds like I had quite the support, it didn't mean I didn't feel like I was missing things. It didn't mean I didn't miss things. It didn't mean that my speech isn't perfect. And I know it because I can only articulate the way I hear sounds. And that is unfortunate. But I did everything I could to do corrective actions. So certain things, well, better. It's just never going to be equal. But it's figuring out how to, how to, like, minimize that gap. That's the best way I could summarize how we attack everything.
I think that's really thank you for sharing that. I think that's really powerful. I don't know, but I feel like I'm a little bit older than you. So like, I was born in 1976. You don't have to tell us how old you are, but I came from a similar experience where my parents also basically instilled that idea of we don't know any other people around here like you. There probably aren't any. And this is what you need to face the realities of the world. This is what it's going to look like, and it's only going to bend so much. And if you want your place in it, you're going to have to go and fight for it and compensate or however, I know that it's not the trend today, and thankfully, things are changing for the better. But I don't know how it seems like you feel the same way. Like it was hard, but at the same time, being that kind of pioneer and having that drive and that desire to fight certainly has brought a lot of different things to the table wherever you've gone that have helped you right. It's not just a one way street.
There's good things that you developed character wise, the drive that you have the passion to just develop something and be somebody. Those are really important skills that a lot of people don't have.
Except for I feel like I am going to put an age on me. I was born in 89 from 32 except for I feel like I'm exhausted. I don't know if you feel this way, but I do have a lot of drive and I have seen a lot of successes and major failures in my life. I'm exhausted. I would like to not have to fight so hard to be on the same equal footing. And I know everyone has their own I'm going to use the word Mr. Goss, right? Like their own stuff that goes on in their life and the grass is always green on the other side. I get that. But I don't know if I can say my normal or my typical hearing peers had to fight their way through things quite the same way. They probably had junctures where there were moments in their lives there wasn't a constant. And I think that's the difference at least. And I can only speak for myself. I think that's the difference about a disability experience. It's a constant. It will never get better. It can only get worse. But it's a constant in my life.
It's never going to go away. It's just how I deal with it, whether I'm going to let it exhaust me or be empowered by it. But that takes energy being empowered by it. I think that's the hard truth is my constant is my ground zero and my experience. And it's unfortunate that this world for me is a very auditory focused world. Now we have closed captioning on Zoom and TV shows, and we're seeing the world be more accessible, but it's still not accessible. It's just like it's not built into our daily lives the way like universal design should be. Hopefully we'll get there in the next 100, 200 years.
I hope it's less than that.
I hope it's a lot less than that. But I think it's going to take a couple of generations to not care whether or not you have a disability status. I really think we're heading towards that deduction, but we still have systemic and systematic discrimination, and it's not necessarily over. It's just there because our systems are not accessible. So we don't know how to deal accessible. And so we always have to talk about how you can help me rather than it being an eight. And that will hopefully change in a generation. So maybe not 200 years, but maybe it's like 50 or from now where we'll see a drastic sense of change and seamlessness and how our cities are built. We'll be building our infrastructure in the modern city. Hopefully we'll be way more accessible for all, not just because we have to rebuild. And that's an opportunity for us to think about what that means and how do we expand, how do we make our city inclusive? And that means a lot of different things.
I know you said you feel exhausted and that it's constantly like it's energy consumption. And I've had certainly plenty of times in my life where I've felt the same way for me. So I have two questions. For me with my disability, there are some points in time where it feels like it's hardly there, and then there's other points in times where it's a big deal. It just kind of varies. It's not as consistently present, maybe in my mind, but do you feel like that constant fight? Right. I've got to minimize these gaps. I want to do these things. I want to be included. I want to participate. Is that what drove you, at least in part, to working at the mayor's office, being a disability activist? Is that like you just felt this had to change or should be changed?
That's a great question. So yes or no? So a story back when I was in preschool, I was in a language, like a specialized preschool for my first year entirely, but then split my second year with a typical nursery school. I was about three and a half, and I was diagnosed. I'm four years old, like, let's say, six months in, everything's pretty new. And they wanted to put me they had me in an ASL only class that was a qualifying kid, and that was must have been when my parents made the decision to teach me language and they pulled me out and put me in the language delayed class. And because of the qualifying campaign funding, the school lost its funding for the ASL class. And I don't know all the details because they're going to ask a lot of details. But long story short, I know my parents had a hire a lawyer, and that lawyer, it was completely death. And I grew up learning that story by hearing anecdote parts of that story that really resonated with me. And I had every intent to be a lawyer and to fight for people who didn't have the support system or the finances or the family doctors to fight for them.
I'd be intent to do that with my life. And then when I came to go to law school, I needed a break between College and making that decision. And I never actually went back. I realized I'm still being a great lawyer. I've been called the lawyer. I'm really good with details and my eyes are good. I noticed things. I'm sure I'd make a great lawyer, and I'm sure if I wanted to, I could go back and do it. But kind of not the point. The point is I realized I could use my skill set of knowing how to say things succinctly, at least on it and paper and write and be creative with my word choices to powerfully move the message forward. And that illegal Kobia may not actually be so much of a policy change career. So it was a suggestion to get into communications. And I kind of used my skill set to help various causes that are meaningful for me, like expand their messaging and their reach, which in the sense is the first catalyst of change. So hopefully that means that that, like, influences public policy or you turn the heads and the opinions of a few stakeholders, then maybe changing the law or seeing like, you kind of first have to start with the movement.
And so that's sort of how I got pivoted my career into communications and utilize the skill set of various nonprofits, one of which was here and last nonprofit. I volunteer on so many committees because it's really important to me that the lives of those who don't have the resources that I have or the support that I have, especially children, get what they need so they can be successful. That's something also a nice little fun fact. My mom was able because I was in the school district, and so it was my brother, but I'm younger than he is. She was able to volunteer as a parent advocate for the special education. And so she would sit and be paired with families who have a child with need but don't want to accept that the child has need or accept resources from the school district. And she would literally be fighting with the families, not with the school districts, offering them resources to try and get like, your child needs this, which will make them allow them to have a life, a self sustainable life, and be contributing members. I understand you don't want them to have this.
I don't want my daughter to have here in life either. But she was able to have such an impact on so many people's lives. I actually joked I was like, I'm going to have a kid just so you can do this for another 18 years. Once I ate out, she wasn't allowed to help. But yeah, it's pretty remarkable how my chaotically negative experience really isn't so negative. When you look at how many people my mom's been able to help, how many people I've been able to help. And like, the impact we've had, you kind of have to see, like, the silver lining of it all. So that's been really impactful to me. I think she's incredible that she kind of just rolled with it and found peace with it in a way that could help other people.
Absolutely. That's a powerful story. We had another guest and a friend on the show, and his mother actually came on the show because she was a big advocate for him in the school system. And she shared a bunch of things that we haven't released the episode yet, but we recorded it and she shared a bunch of things that she learned going through the school system out in California for him. And she still helps other parents. And I think that's the most, like, you really hit on an important point that she echoed too, which is that idea of acceptance, right. Like, this isn't what we want. Let's deal with it and the way we deal with it. But that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is let's focus on what do we do next? How do we give Laura, right. Like the best opportunities to be successful in the world. And that's the key right there. My parents did the same thing, and it's huge that you bring that up.
Yeah. And it's not just to give her the tools to be more successful, given how the world is not built for people like you and me. The tools can be successful in the world that didn't have us in mind. Yeah. There's been various points where that doesn't always work or what we thought would happen next was not what happened next at all. Like graduating top of my class from one of the best schools in the country. I couldn't get a job. I could not get a job. For the life of me, I would get to the final. And the reason I know someone else pointed it out, you got the final down twelve times. You're not the problem. They didn't want to take a chance on my hearing loss. They can't overtly. I mean, that's discrimination. But you don't get to the final job interview twelve times and always something you did wrong, you got to the final round, either the top candidate or the second. Like, it shouldn't happen like that twelve times. And it was really hard in my early 20s till I was in my second job comfortably. That really that discrimination and not holding me.
I didn't know I was going to be where I couldn't imagine. I was where I am now at 32, at 25. It just didn't seem possible. But I've always been like nitty goody and resourceful and made something out of nothing type of personality, whether it's in my personal life and the work that I do or a product of working in nonprofit for six years. But I like to joke negative budgets. So I got a way to do it and save us money in the same time type of mentality that's paid off in spades. But if I look back even 5710 years ago, yeah, it didn't seem possible.
I get it. My journey was very different. I did used to apply for jobs and volunteer, but I think I knew and I've never shared this before. I think I knew when I was getting out of College that it was going to be really difficult to get to work. And so I went back to school and then I went back to school again. Right. I wouldn't call it hiding, but I was thinking, okay, I'm going to become a professor. That's going to be safer. They're going to hire me. It's going to be easier. I think that was subconsciously always in the back of my head. And after I got out of law school and decided not to practice having that, it was a different world and entrepreneurship had already started to actually happen. And so that just seemed like, okay, why don't I become my own boss if I have the opportunity to do so and build the team around me and try to do everything I can to make this company succeed? So I think it's really interesting. I was always kind of avoiding that because I sensed all of the things and probably more that you're talking about.
Yeah, I think I've spent my whole life trying to be accepted in a world of, like, the popular kids, which what it sounds like is you just made a life and then crack me if I'm kind of like, okay, I'm not going to beat you guys see at that table, but I'm going to create my own seat. I'm headed there, but I can't really talk about what I do. But finally, at a job where I actually left my nonprofit public sector life, I was like, I'm going to doubt I can't do this 24 hours a day all the time. It's just I need it out for at least a little bit. But I had all these skill sets that I knew were applicable to the corporate world, and I interviewed for jobs about six months. So I interviewed for this job. The job description nailed had me in mind when they wrote it. It just. And obviously they felt the same. And I started and a lot of things can't, like the phone system. I need a special device to connect. And, like, some things came out where they were more than happy to accommodate. But it was going to take some time.
And it was the first time in my entire life where I didn't have to apologize for having my hair in loss. If there's a way to accommodate me, no question. It just might take forever in corporate America. But it was this mentality that, like, if there's a solution, we'll find it and we'll get it for you. And that has made me so put at ease other things in my life that don't put me out of this, but that part is put to bed, right? They're just like, oh, you're taking the stuff off my shoulders. I can walk a little taller, a little lighter, and that gives me hope. Doesn't mean they get it right all the time, but it gives me hope that we're headed towards the direction where companies realize that everyone has something. And whether you need maternity leave or you need FMLA to take care of your sick uncle, whatever it is, like someone needs something at a different time. The goal is to make sure they can be as productive as possible. They've already identified that they're good talent and that they are a good fit for your company. And they bring a skill set.
And I don't like culture, but they get along with the people that they're going to work with. They understand the job, and they can do it. So the easy part is figuring out how they can be as productive as possible could send you both ways the mentality companies fail to have or the world fails to have.
It's really encouraging to hear that you're saying that. It's a beautiful thing to me. My reaction is it sounds like the company you're working for now has taken a broader perspective as to what talent is and what a whole person can bring to the table towards helping out the team, which is really critical. And that's where I think a lot of human beings fall short, is not being able to see the talent and the abilities and what a person is bringing to the table. It's just a very narrow subset of what they're looking for. And I think if we broaden out a little bit, it's going to help a lot more people like us make more of an impact in the world.
Yeah, I agree. I think we need to get out of this mindset of have to fit a cookie cutter mold. Diversity, as you know, take different shapes and forms. And what people need at one point is different than another. And you make it into a sheet tray rather than a cookie cutter mold. You allow things to be a little bit more free flowing. Right. I just came up with that right now, but great way to put that thread out of the mold. Right. And maybe you'll get something equally better, but I hope more companies have that that mindset because I think it opens up from a consumer perspective. Like if you are more inclusive to various people disabilities, otherwise you are marketing better to them. There's just so much money on the table in the disability community that's untapped. If you employ people with disabilities, then they have spending power. They're going to tell their other friends that I really enjoy working for this company. They've done well. Like they're worthy of your dollar, that concept, too. And then it's just able to be more accommodating of everything. So again, that's the future I hope for everyone.
It shouldn't matter that we have differences.
Yeah, it really shouldn't. I think that's really well said. Do you feel like just as a quick tangent, because I wanted to ask this question a little while ago. I know that in schooling systems. Right. We have to learn a second language. So some Spanish or French seems to be the ones that most people learn in school and then they kind of most people forget it later. Do you think it would be an interesting idea to explore learning American Sign Language as a second language instead of something else, just to give students the option? Because the reason I say that is I want to learn ASL I think it's an interesting way to communicate. It seems more interactive, there's more gestures. It seems very friendly and forward facing and engaging. What do you think of that idea? Do you think that's something we should consider?
Well, I know, some schools do. I definitely had friends that knew from different school districts that ASL was an option. I thought you're going to take this question completely differently. I realize not everyone knows name is American Sign Language. You go to England, it's British sign language. They are not the same. And there is a universal sign language, but it's mostly nationalistic. So while it probably is useful to know ASL if you're going to live or communicate with people who are completely deaf and utilized ASL, and I don't want to diminish its impact in those communities or its usefulness. Can I say it's more useful than knowing a native spoken language? I struggle with that one. But there is a language or like a way of speaking called cued speech where some people utilize hand gestures that are not quite sign language but that complement spoken speech. I think everyone could probably be more adaptive to that because probably hand gestures in Q speech, and I'm not familiar with it, but I've seen it in action a few times. That'll probably be more universal than styling words. And so if you're speaking about food, this is universal for food.
But yeah, I don't have a strong opinion either way. I think we should be giving people the option to make that choice for themselves. But the use of ASL is probably way more limited than being able to speak Spanish or Arabic or Cantonese or whatnot. That doesn't mean it's not useful. So I don't want to say no.
But I like the idea of giving people a choice.
Yeah. People want to learn American Sign Language. They should be able to.
Is there anything like in your day to day, technology wise, or just we talked about universal design a little bit, and I've spoken about that a lot in the podcast. I think it's a huge concept. But what's missing that would make adapting every day and interacting every day easier from a technology or a building perspective in your life.
Yes. So you mentioned it earlier, but I've been involved with the mayor's office and I was a previous board member of the Transit Authority of New York Accessibility Committee. And one of the things we're looking into, whenever I take the subway or the tube or whatever the mass transit is in the city, very rarely I have to listen to the announcements. And even if they are in New York City, like in the middle of the train car on top, that does tell you what to stop you at. But people who are tall might block it. It's not necessarily prominent enough where if it's a crowded subway, you're going to see it. I have to pay attention to the announcement. And it's less important for the stop because I know my way around New York at this point. It's more important, like if there's we're going to be skipping this stop and need to get off this train because it's going to go on a different path than what this train track is supposed to. And I don't get that because I can hear it. But it's not audible like the actual words I don't hear, I don't capture the content.
I hear the noise. I don't hear the content. So we're exploring ways with a major tech organization that I'm not going to name to create closed captioning on advertising billboards rather than just having static advertising as the subway cards get updated. Why don't we make the advertising like those rotating ad billboards with digitally? And so when there are announcements, you remove the ad and you use that space for the announcement, because sometimes there's no WiFi, so you can't have WiFi enabled announcement to someone phone. What if someone doesn't have a smartphone? Bluetooth is a little too you need to be connected to the Bluetooth, and that might not work on a broad scale. I'm in hearing loops. It's not a great technology for a subway car. It still doesn't take away that. Like if you even with a hearing loop, which is basically a stream of sound into my hearing AIDS with black meal noise, I might still miss the message even if it's supposed to be allowed. And the capsule aspect of announcements benefits everyone unless you have low vision. But it benefits a lot of people. And yeah, that was an idea. Someone is going to go out and make it happen.
But that's an idea I had is rethinking how we build a subway car so that you can sell more advertising. If it's rotating ads, you don't have to just have one ad from one company at one time. You can have three ads rotating, but then it's known that the ads go off when you have a message to put out. And it's about safety, right? It's safety first, and then we find that safety aspect through advertising. I think it's a great idea.
But I do too.
For something like that to happen.
Phone Systems Are you surprised that we're still using traditional phone systems as much as we are? Because those have to be. I know I had another guest on the show. She was great, who also has a hearing loss, and she said that one of the she's always hated telephone. She's never been able to use them effectively, so it depends.
I have a device that I've learned a lot about Bluetooth. Let me preface this, because there's apparently two different types of Bluetooth, and most technologists don't even know this, iPhone and iPad, because I have Apple. They have both types of Bluetooth, but a desktop phone at the office has only one type. And so my Bluetooth device, which uses a different type of Bluetooth, I can't connect it to my desktop phone without some sort of third party device to make the two connect. But my Bluetooth system connects straight to my hearing aid, so it's really a live stream. I'm like completely deafened to anything else around me, which has its fault. But it means that it's like surround sound in my ears, and that if I can't connect to the desktop phone effectively or with confidence. And I'm stressed out, wasting time trying to connect or being afraid that I won't be able to participate in a meeting. And that time wasted enough productivity loss. So that's, like the big thing for me with the phone. So when that's happened at multiple jobs and what works at one company doesn't work at the other because they have certain settings turned off from a security standpoint.
So a way to bypass that was my boss got me an iPad so I could then do Skype calls. Now we use Zoom. At the very least, that's my backup. And then we got all the configurations. So I can imagine someone who doesn't have a Bluetooth compatible hearing aid or is even more civility, hearing impaired or death than I am. I can only imagine that utilizing a telephone at the office, desktop phones tend to be less powerful than our cell phones can be a real struggle and you don't know what you don't know. I am hopeful with all these hearables coming out and technology getting really exploded in the hearing space, both from a hearing aid manufacturer level, but really, like the hearables that we will see that is completely normalized to not have a phone on you at all, and that there's, like, ways in which we can talk to each other. We're all going to have hearables in their ears, and that will maybe help normalize some of no big deal because we always have hearables in our earlier news in one year and we're having conversations. I think that's the future. I think we're ways away, but I do think we're going to be moving away from the typical over your microphone devices that people use at the office.
I would give it ten years. I do see that it's going to be cost efficient and productivity efficient to figure out a different way to have phones exist. Audio sharing exists in different formats.
What about it in your home, like with something different sensing technology? And again, I know this depends on everybody's. Hearing loss varies, but I would imagine that having, let's say, lights go on in certain rooms or getting some kind of haptic feedback, like when somebody comes in, like whatever it could be a friend comes into your home or you don't know the other person's in the other room, you're not necessarily picking up those low level background audio cues that other people can. Right? So you're getting either a visual signal or a haptic feedback signal to know, like, okay, there's somebody in my house, there's somebody here in this space, and I need to be aware of it.
So I live alone. So for the most part, I know when people are coming in, but it's a fair point. But I think the two big things that I come out of that question for me is fire alarms so high frequent. My loss is high frequency, which is like whistles, fire alarms, birds, chirping, Ch is all high frequency sounds, especially if I'm not one of my hearing AIDS. It's especially hard for me to hear them not mean it's impossible, but I can sleep through them, essentially. And so the big thing is and I should probably get one of these, like with fire alarms. They have stored lights that you can get, I believe, from your fire Department. So when the fire alarm goes off, there's also a light that flashes, so even if you can't hear it, you know what's going on. The other thing. So in my previous apartment, I lived in a studio and doorman intercom system is really old, and even with my hearing AIDS, I didn't necessarily hear it. Like if I had the TV on, I don't think anyone can hear it, to be quite honest. The problem, and I thought about getting one of those flashing lights where it would pick up noise and then my light would flicker.
But because I was in the studio and I lived right off of the elevator bank and the trash room, I was concerned that the light would come to go off from noises outside, not just the noises inside. I never looked into it, but I was like, that's a great concept if it works properly, but it might not actually be able to distinguish noises because the intercom system is right next to the door. So I had my door man call me, but it's not bad. Like in the beginning, that really kind of frustrated me, but it really wasn't. It's not a bad thing that they know that you have here in loss that you have in need, because when you do need help or something is going on, you are top of mind when you talk about being kind of conscientious of the fact that you might have to carve your own path. I've always been like what's called covering a cover, where I didn't want people to treat me differently or not acknowledge my presence as equal because of my hearing loss. So I wouldn't disclose it. So I've had internships where I never told anyone, depending who you were, people tell me that they had no idea, which usually means they don't have great hearing themselves.
People with perfect pitch tell right away. It's really interesting when you get those compliments I'm complimented, but you should probably get your hearing check if you can't hear that. I have a little bit of a speech impediment, and it's happened enough times where I know it's not people being nice, it's really people. Just like, I had no idea or I forgot or I'm really good at faking it. And that has probably been great in some respects, but probably really limited me and others. So I'm not always the best advocate. I could use a little bit more of my own advice in my daily life. But that's where the exhaustion factor comes in. And why do I have to tell people every single time I meet someone new? Or why is it their business when no one talks about, I wear glasses? This is what I need from you, because I wear glasses. I know they're different, but we have normalized certain things and we still haven't normalized others. And there's a general assumption that, oh, you have hearing a loss. People don't know what that means. Yes, it might mean I miss what you hear.
No, it doesn't mean I'm oblivious or rude. I think they need to be. But it's not my job to educate everyone. And I guess in a sense it is. But that's where the exhausted part of having a disability is. Like, you are the token person to ship because I am articulate and I'm able to articulate it. I am that person that they go to when they need education. And there's a lot I don't know. And if I don't want to be that one person in the world, I know I'm not that can give them the information they need. I want people to go and figure it out for themselves. Then maybe they come back to the table with a solution that I never thought of. That's probably better explain the production part that I mentioned earlier.
I think that those are things that the more people I talk to and the more I read, I see a lot of that very similar sentiments. I feel that, too. I guess I just learned to pick my battles and pick where it feels meaningful to say something or to not say something at all. And again, I'm not the best advocate either. And I'm human. I mess up, I do stupid things, I say the wrong things. It's all part of the experience. But what I do think is interesting is I'm and important to talk about a little bit is you said that we normalize some things and then other things we don't. I had a friend, she has a disability, and she was reaching out for personal care, and she had reached out to potentially see to some people in the deaf and hard of hearing community. And she got back a lot of responses that said, well, we don't even think of having hearing loss as a disability. Like, it's not a disability. It's just something that we don't have this sense and we adapt. It's not disabling to us. It's just part of our experience.
I don't know if I fully agree with that one.
Right.
And I know I'm cutting you off. I don't know if I feel like I'm disabled. This has actually been a really hot topic among some colleagues, and I was whether or not we want to accept the word disabled versus disability. I have always said I am not disabled disabled means I am completely limited or I'm partially limited from doing all the things I want to do because of the way I am. I don't feel like I have any limitations other than I probably shouldn't become a pilot or can't become a pilot of a plane, which is great because I hate flying. So it doesn't really matter. But I am someone with a disability. My experience and how I have to pivot and adapt my life to fit and assimilate into the world. It's a great word, assimilate. I have to assimilate into the world that is not accessible to me and figure out ways to navigate with no one holding my hand. At this point, when you're younger, you got your hands, hopefully some resource. But I do it on my own. That's the disability experience. It's like you figure it out and it feels second nature.
But to say that I don't have a disability that I just learned how to adopt is personally minimizing all the work that I've done to get here, and I don't want to minimize that. I've done that enough myself. But it's important in these formats to talk about it and to have those moments where you recognize yeah, my childhood looks very different than my brother's. My brothers look very different than his friends because probably a lot of my mom's energy went towards me, and there's probably feeling that whether or not he knew that was the right thing, he was a kid sometimes we missed his baseball games with speech therapy. I'm actually pretty good about that. But I'm sure that there's feelings there. Right. If I didn't need speech therapy, for whatever reason, my mom would never have missed a baseball game to minimize it. I'm failing to come up the word, but I would love to say I've just adapted my whole life, but I don't think that's really the case. I mean, that is the case, but I don't think that's enough of a word to constantly everything the experience and the hardship, because in some places, I probably didn't adapt well.
So, yeah, but I don't want to minimize your friend's experience. That's her experience, and that's unique to her. And she feels that's what hearing loss is about, adaptation of that for her.
I don't know what the answer is. I'm still exploring that for myself. It all depends on how you think about and frame disability in your own life and your own experience and what that word means or doesn't mean to you. And there's probably no right answer. It's just interesting.
Probably not right.
It's just interesting to see how all of us think about it a little bit differently and come at it from a different angle and have something important to bring into the conversation.
Yeah. I'm thinking and saying all the things I just said. I do like the word adapt. I do think certain things about having here and last when you're young and you spend your whole life adapting. And then I look at people who are in their Seventies and 80s or even 60s getting hearing AIDS for the first time, and they have a mild loss in comparison. But it's so disabling and their brains don't know how to adapt. And auditorial rehabilitation isn't a thing. Right. I was taught how to listen for the sounds I don't hear. But when you're an adult and you get and you acquire here, I lost over through aging. Their experience almost feels more disabling than my experience. And we don't do enough to help them adapt, and there's no reason why they shouldn't. And so I think it really depends on, unfortunately, when you have acquired your disability when it comes to hearing loss. And I hope that changes as we see, baby, when we need hearing aid more and more and we need them to remain productive because if they're not productive, they're not part of our society in a way that we need them to be.
It's going to hurt us in the end in various shapes and form. We need to make sure everyone has the ability to adapt. I do like that word. It's going on. We need to make sure resources are not limited to just those who are young and in the school district. I think that's something that I see as a need in our world, that universal design and help alleviate that burden a little bit. If we just think about the whole person and like how they evolve and we design for that whole person and that evolution, then it would be a seamless people can seamlessly progress through life with different experiences, and for the most part, the world kind of molds around them.
At least you're giving people a better chance, a much better chance to still, like you said, be productive, participate, live a life that isn't still fulfilling to them. You seem like you're very driven, very goal oriented. Without, again, getting into the specifics of your current job, where would you like to see yourself moving forward? Let's say in the next five years, ten years? I know that's a difficult question, but at least within your career, but also being able to help people.
Yeah. I've never been someone who had a 510 year plan, and if I did, I could never have predicted where I'd end up. So I know that goes against the modules of today's society. You need to have a vision board, especially in the last five years. I do what makes me happy and what that is. It could be a different thing every day of the week, but I follow what brings me happiness. And I don't know how to answer that. My career has been built around communications, and right now I do communications and people strategy, which is really thinking holistically from a different length. And human resources about how do we attract, retain and really foster the employees that we have and also create an environment where everyone can bring their full self and be productive and not just talking about disability, but that is one lens of what we focus on. I would like to do more of that. I'm always going to be a communicator at heart and marketing. Communication is actually like the groundwork for anything getting done these days. You have to be able to articulate your vision and do it in a way where people understand it and they see value in it.
And so that's Go says I'm going to be able to apply that till the day I die. But I'd like to think more about the experience people have in the world that we live in and how we can better it. I'm not a designer, so universal design from an architectural perspective isn't what I'm going to bring to the table. But I have vision. I can envision a world with different things. I would love to work on the new city, right. Like if we had a blank slate, like a desert. I know they talked about this. I'd love to help them build a new city and think about all the things that don't work for me and be part of that. Money was no object and we could do whatever we dreamed of and build it up to be part of something like that. That's like a pipe stream. But I would love to help build our model city so that I could do anything else that would be it interesting.
I guess to some degree they did that in some of the Middle East or the Dubai's of the world, but I don't think they maybe in the next one they'll consult you at least more people with varied experiences to make it more universal design friendly.
Yeah, I know they were talking about taking a piece of the desert in that area of the world. They're thinking about it more from a water sustainability perspective. Like how do you build a city when there's no water? But yeah, if we could build a modern city with the universal design aspect embedded in it, I would sign me up.
Awesome.
Where money is no object. So maybe get one of the billionaires in the world to come find it.
I would love to be a part of that too, but I guess we'll work on that. Hopefully one of these multi billionaires takes that up as their next mission. What have I missed that you feel is important to talk about? And that could be either something maybe that you've worked on in the past that you think we could dive into and get some appreciation for, or maybe something it could be something work related, a project that you've done, anything that you think we should talk about that we haven't.
The only thing I'll add is the one thing that having a hearing loss and growing up with it, I always counted on myself. I have my family I can count on. But you kind of learn to be, like, selfsufficient and independent emotionally with things. And I learned over the course of my career the power of collective accent and the power of voices together to amplify a message, and that there are people out there, even if I don't always feel like I do want to see people like you and me succeed, that they are willing to fight for us regardless of no connection, that there are good people out there and like, you just have to open up your heart a little bit to believe that they exist. Because I know from my experience most of the discrimination I based young, old has been systematic and systemic in the organizations that we build. So whether that's being the school district of principal telling me he doesn't want to put me in advanced class simply to make it easier for me, when I was the number one kid, I was like, this doesn't make sense. Why would you ever kick out the number one and number two kid out of the advanced class if they didn't have hearing loss?
That obviously didn't stick. But the mere fact that I know that conversation was had, and that is the mentality that people have is problematic. That sticks with me, that sticks with me through my whole life and everything, the compounding of those microaggressions, whatever you want to call them that time, discredit me, discredit my capabilities of being able to be on an equal playing field, let alone exceeding. But that will always exist. Unfortunately, there will always be bullies. But if anyone one thing I want someone to get out of this is that that's not the norm and that we need to believe. We only believe in let people prove themselves as allies. We do need to educate. We need to be allies, need to also learn from the education and ask questions, more specific questions so that we can get farther in the conversation on how they can be better allies to us. But there are a lot of good people like you and Faye who want to make the world better, and we just need to find each other. And so I think that's for me, something I've learned over time that I'm not going to be able to make change.
No change happens with one person.
Can you talk a little bit more about that, like the specific example, who was it in your life that showed you that or that became an ally that maybe you didn't expect or just had that? When did you first learn that lesson?
I think the example I'm thinking of is not really the lesson. The lesson was really learned at this past job, which I spoke about earlier. But I am specifically thinking back to an experience I had my early twenties working for the Hearing Health Foundation, the CDC. There's like, I want to say, every five or ten years survey on disability like a census, but it's just focusing on disability and trying to get numbers on the prevalence. But in order to be accessible for people with Tianan law, they had to have what's called a Tty number and they didn't. And so how are they going to get an accurate number of the number of people with deafness and hard of hearing if they were not able to actually reach them? The number dispute. And so we created a Change.org petition that to send letters to the person at the White House who was responsible for this large study and demand a redo. I know that's expensive, but I don't know if we ever got a redo, but they definitely got the message because for every person and I think it was over 26,000 people signed the petition. They also got mailed to them and her inbox got flooded.
She definitely got the message. And we weren't the only ones. But it's one thing for me to write a letter to my congressman. Right. It's another thing when you have 200,000 people writing the same letter to the same person. The power of voice. And it's not about signatures. You want individual letters in the mail. The power that has to change, to change perspective, to really put numbers behind a thought I might be the one writing the letter, but I still need other people to take on the challenge with me. And that really stuck out to me. I don't exactly remember the outcome of that. I think conversations where I had. But the mere fact that people got behind and rallied and they may not have had hair loss or any connection to hear loss, it didn't matter. It was the mere fact that it was a really flawed study and it could never accomplish the goal that they were seeking to accomplish. And that people agree it's validating. But it's also really powerful to see so many people come together.
When we are educating people or talking to people. I think the ability to show, at least for me, to show vulnerability and to not have it feel like a weakness, but it's just simply I'm expressing something that could be better or I'm trying to show somebody that I could accomplish all of these things or do all of these things if this thing was changed. Right. And so when I got that experience in College where my closest friends I was able to talk about pretty much anything with and they were open to it and they were curious and they wanted to help. And that's when I saw that sharing these things were not a weakness, that they could be a strength and that they could help us all understand each other better. So not to the same scale, but I think it's a really important message. And you're right. We do try to take things on our own too much. At least some of it I do anyways. And you do too.
Yeah, you, like, highlighted two small little pivots I wanted to add. So recently I was on a panel on Allyship and how to be a better ally and some do's and don'ts. And something I mentioned was, every time I talk about my disability, I am being vulnerable. I'm sharing something I'm uncomfortable, I've come to terms with. But at times I'm uncomfortable with. And that is a forever struggle. And I'm asked to bear that with random dangers all the time. I'm asking them to accept it, but they don't necessarily share. And what an ally can do when they receive a vulnerable message is to find competition, but maybe match it with something like that. That puts the vulnerability on an equal playing field a little bit. Like take some of the vulnerability blade in off of us because it's not so much what we're talking about. It's the fact that we feel exposed. And if we can take away some of that exposure and not just normalize it, but match people on that level, I think that's probably a really big part of the issue or the experience. It's not so much that we're uncomfortable with our disability.
We feel so exposed by it. Sports exposure. And then I'm really lucky that I grew up with some really great friends. And very quickly we learned that when my teacher wore the FM unit but forgot to turn it off when going to the bathroom, I had insights into all the Huawei talk, and it was like everyone would just be silent. I was like, well, I need to hear right now. And I would know all the dirt. And it was really funny. It was like aesthetic in a sense. And I knew when I got the bathroom, I was like, oh, shoot. I was like, my hearing AIDS ring. I was like, I just take them out and then I'll turn them off. I was like, I don't need to put up with bathroom experiences for the sake of keeping everyone else comfortable. It's pretty much like that was the demeanor in the classroom. So we were the quietest class whenever the teacher wasn't there. And probably the noisest class when the teacher was that's my son. They're being kids and they didn't think anything of it. But looking back, that is next lesson of acceptance and realizing that I bought something.
I had Sonic ears. Like, I brought something on the table. No one else did. I had a superpower, and they loved me for that, but they really loved me for me. But it's just like something I had that they didn't. So rather than you have something that I don't, the table got turned a little bit. I can't say everything in life, but like that. But when I think back third grade, that's pretty much what I remember. So there's a flip side to every story. Someone was probably jealous that I got all the talk in the hallway in that classroom, right? So never really said it. That's just, like, so lucky. I'm really not lucky. But, sir, you can think I am.
I think that is like there's always another side to it. It's like a double edged sword. But that just shows that I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier. A little bit of that broadening our idea of who we're supposed to be and what mold we're supposed to fit into is like, look, you have this cool ability that I don't have that's awesome. It doesn't make your life it's not about better or worse. It's just you're bringing something new to the table and your other experiences bring something new to the table, like just a fresh perspective, Whatever that may be. And if our environment can be more pliable, more adaptive, more inclusive, I think that hopefully that idea of filling the gaps Just gets more and more minimized and we can just be different, but not in such a negative connotation.
As often as we consider different, it's not equal. And those two words are not synonymous because you have different needs. A different way of doing things doesn't make you less than the other person. I think that's the big difference. When we can change that perspective in our world, we'll be in a much better place 100%.
So where can people connect with you, Laura? Where can people find you? Are you doing any writing on the side? Are you doing any other work Where people can reach out to you?
People can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm currently not writing on the side. Kind of time to enjoy. I work a lot and pandemic work is bombardled, but maybe I should start writing again. I've written a few articles for various magazines And I don't always think I have a lot to say, but everyone else seems to feel differently, so maybe I'll decide to start writing again on a more official level. Courage everyone to let me know if they want to see my writing and then maybe I'll make it happen.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the time. I want to see your writing. I want you to start writing again. I hope we can have you back on the show soon. Please stay in touch. I think you're brilliant. I'm so happy we did this and just thank you for sharing and for being so open and generous with your time and everything we talked about.
Of course. Thank you so much for having me. I'd love to come back.