I GOT THIS IN AN EMAIL.. AN ADVICE WITH A GREAT PERSPECITVE. I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE GREAT IF I SHARE THIS WITH YOU :)

Dear Raheel,

A friend was telling me the other day about how she was talking to her mother on the cell phone as she was driving on her way home from work, when suddenly her mother said, "You know, you never call me except when you're driving around. It's as if you're squeezing me in and don't want to take the time to call me properly when you're at home."

Well, needless to say, my friend was taken aback. She never thought of it that way before. Have you had an experience like that, Raheel? It seems as if we often don't give our full attention to people when we communicate with them.

I know, for myself, I often find myself doing some other task, like watering the plants or washing dishes, as I talk on the phone to someone. Maybe it's because we tend to get caught up in the idea of "multi-tasking," and we feel we just don't have the luxury of doing one thing at a time. (And wouldn't you know it -- nine times out of ten, when you split your attention as you multi-task, all of those tasks you're trying to squeeze in aren't done as well as if you had simply devoted your full attention to one and got it out of the way, and then proceeded to the next.)

But no matter what, our communications with others deserve our full attention. After all, it's how we connect to others, develop relationships, and share information and a part of ourselves. As the author Herman Melville has said, "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

As for me, I'm rethinking how I communicate. How about you?