Poverty, a speech impediment, and coming from a family that had very little formal education have all been part of my own personal Serengeti. When I started school, my family lived in a three-room clapboard house with no electricity or running water. I have often heard people claim to have come from humble beginnings, and I usually just nod my head while they describe their own childhoods. Not many people know what it's like to "draw" water from a spring or to be able to see the ground and the world outside through the cracks between the slats of a house. We did not even have a well, and the boards were unpainted, both inside and outside. The folks in John Grisham's "A Painted House" had it pretty good.
Neither of my parents attended high school and one of my grandparents was illiterate. For that reason, education was of paramount importance in my family. Dad, especially, ranked education right up there with religion. Early on, though, I was labeled by my speech impediment. I simply HAVE to make time to go see "The King's Speech." I was lucky to have a great speech therapist for two and a half years in elementary school, and you'd be very hard-pressed now to hear even a glimmer of that old impediment.
My personal Serengeti so far has included high school, college, and graduate school, as well as marriage and raising two very fine, now-adult children.
I was not so happy when I took the "Surviving Your Serengeti" quiz and viewed the results that pegged me as an elephant! Maybe that's because I'm a Democrat. Come to think of it, the donkey is not such an attractive logo, either. OK, I rationalized, there aren't any donkeys in the Serengeti. The choices, according to the book, are wildebeest, lion, crocodile, cheetah, giraffe, mongoose, elephant.
The Communicating Elephant is able to listen and actually HEAR what the other person is saying. As a journalism/English major in college and then as a journalism teacher for 20 years and now as a REALTOR®, I certainly hope that is true of me.
Communication has been my specialty, so maybe I am an elephant in the Serengeti sense. Interested in more than a series of monologues, the Communicating Elephant wants to foster a true dialogue. That certainly is true of teachers and salespeople, if they are ever to become effective.
I was also comforted to learn that my animal persona was among those that Aly called the big five-lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and buffalo. Interesting that the book's author only included two of those as categories for the book. I'm one of the dominant animals, I guess. Communication is one of my core skills, though, so the quiz did get that part right.
The elephant is the book's next to last chapter, and what I know now about my animal is the summary sheet that resulted from taking the quiz. I have to admit that I am intrigued after reading the book's first two chapters. I'm off to see if Amazon offers it for the Kindle.
Oh, and those peope who claim to have been poor and then follow it up by saying, "We were poor, but we didn't know it," must not have been truly poor or very smart (one or both of the afore-mentioned). "We were poor, but we had love, " they say. Well, we knew we were poor, eventhough we were loved!
Read about the Active Rain Challenge and take the QUIZ to discover what animal you are.
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