Everything Begins with a Conversation

No matter how difficult that conversation may be.

Over the last 20 years I have successfully built a career in the entertainment industry as an actress and a singer, and I’ve found ways to balance it with my personal life. My career recently became inclusive of activism and I realized that in all these facets of my life both personal and professional, communication has been at the center of all of it all. I’ve learned a lot about myself and how we interact with one another, and because of this my motto for the last six years has been that everything begins with a conversation. No matter what it is.

My oldest daughter is 4 1/2 years old and she was a very early talker. But before she learned how to use her words we often had to guess what it was she was trying to communicate. We got onboard with the baby sign language and with the fake words she had for things like strawberry and blueberry.  We tuned in to her body language, her actions and of course, her cries. Because from a young age we learn how to communicate our wants and our needs with very little words and as we grow older, and our language skills advance, we find more ways to communicate and have conversations with the people around us.

We also quickly learn that if we have to make decisions in any way, whether it be with a work partner, at home with a loved one, at school with a classmate, what to with a group of friends or what to do next with a team, those decisions all have to start with a conversation.

But sometimes, conversations are difficult to have. No matter what age you are, we’ve all at some point had to figure out how to have a difficult conversation.  Sometimes we don’t know the right words to say and don’t know how to navigate conversations in certain spaces. And we leave ourselves asking how do we do this? Because it’s not just about knowing what to say… We also don’t know when to say it and most importantly we don’t know how to say it.

With the rise of social media platforms, advances in technology, and the deepening political division, effective conversations and interactions with our peers and loved ones have become even more challenging on a daily basis. It seems as though the more options we are given to interact, and the more vocabulary we have at our disposal,  the harder it is to figure out how to communicate through those different platforms. Your voice and language on Facebook cannot be the same as your voice and language on Instagram, and your voice on Instagram simply does not translate in the same way on Tiktok. Knowing this leaves us frustrated and wanting to shut down communication all together.

What is it about us as humans that as we’ve advanced in ways to communicate and in our ways to have conversations, our ability to do so effectively has broken down. We dodge phone calls, eye contact makes us uncomfortable, the thought of having to engage in person causes an unnecessary level of stress, and we resort to arguing through our phones.

Since the pandemic we’ve been pushed even more to hide behind screens and shield ourselves from actual human interaction and conversation. It made us more antisocial and a lot of us became introverted when we may have naturally been more extroverted. And I get it. Communicating is hard. Even if it’s over the simplest things.  But also, the English language is difficult.

Certain words have more than one definition, or they are spelled the same but pronounced differently and then to top it off we all process information differently. Some of us do better with lists, some do better with visuals, and some people need to hear something repeated more than once to fully understand it.

So with all of these variables in the way, how on earth can we as humans learn to effectively communicate with one another?

How can we possibly learn to communicate and have a conversation about things like diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, racism, and women’s rights? These are the very things that have been at the forefront of our conversations in recent years. Those conversations—those groundbreaking conversations that lead to real change—are difficult. And uncomfortable. But they’re nothing if not necessary, especially now. No matter how we choose to communicate with one another, everything, no matter how small, must begin with a real conversation.

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Malynda Hale is a multi-hyphenate creative based in Los Angeles. Most recently she starred in the feature film “Bull Street” alongside Loretta Devine and Amy Madigan and made her directorial debut with the short film “Curtain Call” that has been accepted into film festivals across the globe. She has been a featured commentator on CNN, ABC News, and NBC as well as a guest writer for The Daily Beast, Blavity and The Female Lead. She was named by Wired Magazine, and What’s up Trending as one of the top influencers affecting the 2024 election, and has been featured in LA Times, Marketplace Tech and NPR. She’s the owner of JMV Entertainment and creator of The Black Voices Heard project and #WeNeedToTalk.