I have a hard time putting together the information that I’m given unless it has a clear end goal. In a real estate transaction, it’s pretty much a 1-2-3 process from start to finish, with many different potential problems that all have common, repetitive solutions. The hardest part of real estate for me, is maintaining relationships.

The hardest part of relationships, particularly romantic, personal relationships, is communicating effectively. That’s what’s hard for me. It may not be for you. I am intuitive, creative, and intelligent, but the way my brain works is different from others. I’m not saying I’m the only one who is like this. What I am saying is that in order for me to understand what it is that the other person is saying, who may not understand the difficulty I face in piecing together their words, I have to slowly process each thought or statement one at a time. When I say slowly, I mean slowly. I am not a debater. If I have knowledge of how something is supposed to work, then I can recall the solution and present it, but if you pose a question in the heat of the moment that requires me to deconstruct the words, interpret their potential meanings, and re-assemble them into a coherent sentence, and you expect me to do it on the spot, I will tend to explode all over you, without meaning to do so. So, processing this information may take me a few minutes, an hour, or it may take much longer. I have been known to understand what someone has said months after they’ve said it.

My learning style is such that I must dig into something, tear it apart, see it work, and then apply it. Without actually experiencing something, I won’t typically understand it. So, communicating with someone who isn’t in that same mind set is a serious challenge for them as much as it is for me.

When I speak, I’m usually thinking out loud because I need to hear myself say it in order to continue to think about it. If you don’t understand this about me, then you may assume a line of thinking in me that actually doesn’t exist yet. In other words, it’s possible that what I say may be taken as rote when in fact it is merely my way of confirming that what I’m thinking is actually successfully being translated into communicable words. By testing those words against another person, I am able to hear them and gauge their response. The problem is when that other person has no clue about the mechanism in my head that drives this process, they just won’t get it. Moreover, they may feel throughout the relationship that I’m the one not getting it.  Actually, it’s both of us that aren’t getting it.