So if you follow me, you know, I do plenty of car videos, but this one is specifically for you guys for the people who are taking my Udemy class. Alright, this is kind of like an introduction to communication with people with dementia. And I want to get into the details of that in this section of the course. But I I really wanted to do like a quick video face to face with you to talk about this because I think it's probably the hardest thing I'm going to teach how to communicate with people living with dementia. And again, we're gonna break it down. But here's the overview.

So when we're talking to somebody with dementia, we need to make sure we have the right vibe. I think that's the first and most important thing. We want to approach this person. Like we want to approach this person. We don't want to approach this person like we have to like for noise like we're frustrated with them. That's a huge part of it.

If you know it, this is like your story. And yes, right our partners get on our nerves, okay, sometimes, and this person might have dementia. And it's even more frustrating. Sometimes when they've asked you, you know, 10 million times what time you're going to go visit your kids, right? But you have to take a deep breath, if that means you need to go into the other room for a minute and like, compose yourself, that's what you need to do. Because when you approach them, you want to have the right energy about you.

If you approach frustrated, you're only going to get more frustrated because they're going to feel that they're going to see that you're annoyed and it's only gonna get worse from there. So that is like step one. Okay. And step two, whatever they're telling you is the right thing, right? Even if it doesn't make any sense, and you're thinking, where the heck did they come up with this crazy thing? That's what we're doing.

It's all about this idea of Yes. And I've been doing improv comedy which is not stand up improv comedy. For about my ninth year, I think doing this, where I get up on stage for the team, my team, and we essentially make up a play. So essentially do a play based off of a suggestion from the audience. And the main thing that we do is this idea of Yes. And so we so this works this way, if somebody in my in my on my team says something to be on stage, they say, that couch is blue.

I'm not gonna say, No, it's not that's a red elephant. Right? Like, that doesn't make any that doesn't help the scene move forward. What I want to do is yes, and them. So if they say that's the blue couch, I'm going to say yes. And I bought it yesterday.

Now you don't actually have to say the phrase Yes. And to everything your loved one with dementia says, No, we don't do that and improv, either. But the, the premise is that you're going to agree with and add to whatever that individual says to you. Because whatever they say is right, even if in our reality, it's not and what I'm gonna delve into in the next section is how to embrace someone's reality. And and I think that could be a really challenging thing to learn. Because it's not, um, it's not like intuitive, right?

Like we've learned our whole lives to, you know, try to correct somebody if they say the wrong thing. But that's not what we want to do in dementia care. And I think that's why it's really hard sometimes to teach this concept because people have a really hard time going like, Well, wait a minute. Like, that's not, that's not what we're supposed to do. I'm also going to talk to you about becoming a dementia detective, how to use your detective skills and what you know about your loved one to enhance your caregiving and your communication. We're also going to talk about not trying to use logic not arguing, because I know that you know, if you've ever argued with somebody with dementia, it doesn't go super great, right?

Like it really doesn't go well at all right? So we need to figure out a way to Communicate with that person. Or we're not arguing, right? And we're not spinning our own wheels in circles getting ourselves really frustrated. So throughout this section, those are all things we're going to talk about and, and really, I want you to keep in mind this idea of, you know, approaching with an energy that is positive. And then also this concept of Yes, and being able to live in somebody else's world, even if it's not the world that you're particularly familiar with.

I think it's really going to help us with our communication skills.