Navigating the world with hearing loss can feel like charting unknown territory without a guide—until now. We’re thrilled to introduce Shari Eberts, one of our Empower Retreat ambassadors and a passionate advocate for hearing health. Though she doesn’t want her hearing loss to define her, Shari finds that being open about it relieves the pressure of always having to hear perfectly. Her blog, Living With Hearing Loss, has become an online community for people navigating similar challenges.
Her advocacy goes even further with her book, Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, co-authored with Gael Hannan. This essential guide offers practical strategies for living well with hearing loss and has become a valuable resource for many.
In this interview, Shari shares her story, her mission to normalize conversations around hearing loss, and how she’s helping others find confidence and resilience along the way. Join us for an insightful conversation with Shari Eberts!
Watch the YouTube clip below for highlights from Shari’s interview, followed by an in-depth Q&A that dives even deeper into her journey and insights.
A: Our journey with the book started during the pandemic. Everything had shut down, and we were trying to find ways to support the hearing loss community. The pandemic was especially hard for people with hearing loss since we lost the superpower of lip reading.
Gael reached out to me—we didn’t know each other that well; we had mutual friends. She asked, “Hey, Shari, do you want to write a book about hearing loss?” It was something I had always wanted to do, and we had talked about it in the past. I responded, “OK, sure. What would it be about?” She responded, saying, “Well, duh, hearing loss.” From there, we brainstormed on how to create something truly useful for the community.
There are many memoirs about hearing loss. Sharing stories is so powerful in building empathy and community. But we wanted to do more than that. We wanted to create a practical guide—almost like an operating manual for people with hearing loss to learn how to live with it. This became our goal, and we wrote the entire book over Zoom, never meeting in person until a month before the book was published.
It took two years of writing and revising together on Zoom, with some meetings lasting four or five hours. We had such a wonderful time writing the book. I mean, we learned so much from each other, as we each have different hearing losses and life experiences, yet we both found our way to these same skill sets. When we realized that these commonalities existed, it made us feel like anyone could develop these skills for living well with hearing loss. That’s really the goal of the book.
A: That was actually one of the hardest things about the book—to come up with the title, which sounds like a crazy thing. We had a bunch of ideas that we went through, but we loved this one because it really has that message of going beyond hearing, right?
One of the main messages of the book is that it's not just about hearing; it's about communicating. And when we shifted our mindset to focus on becoming better communicators, rather than just hearing better, that really changed our life for the better.
The second part of the title, Living Skillfully with Hearing Loss, was also really important. "Skillfully" was a key word because a skill is something you can learn, right? It’s something you can practice, get better at, and even be taught.
We wanted people to understand right from the title that there would be major takeaways—skills they could walk away with and use in their own lives. Family members and friends could use them as well, and even audiologists, right? These are skills they can help their clients develop.
So that was a really important part of the title for us too.
A: I think it was a little bit of everything. You know, I think it’s a little bit of both—a lot of it just came from our life experiences.
When I first had my hearing loss, all I wanted was to hear better, just like I used to. This is one of the MindShifts in the book: changing how we think about our hearing loss can greatly impact how we behave and how well we live with it.
I knew as someone with hearing loss, I’d probably never hear perfectly. Even with my devices. Would I hear better? Yes, I’d definitely do better. But if I only focused on how well I would hear, I’d continue to feel like I was failing. The goal can’t be to hear perfectly, because I’ll never achieve that.
But it doesn’t matter, because if I focus on communicating, that’s what’s most important. That connection with people—that’s the real goal, right? So, by changing the goal to communicating, you find more success, and it’s also something within your control.
How well I hear is partly in my control, but some of it isn’t. How well I communicate, though, is more in my control. I have more skills and tools that I can use to focus on that.
It was a gradual realization, and when I started approaching challenging hearing or listening situations with that different attitude, I felt less bogged down. I felt less angry, less frustrated, and I felt more in control of what I could do to build those relationships and take charge of my life and my hearing loss.
That was a really big and important shift for us.
A: Well, it’s an ongoing journey. That’s the thing about hearing loss—there’s no ultimate solution. It’s not like a puzzle where you say, “I solved it, here’s the key, and I’m done.” It’s always a changing journey, and that’s OK.
Getting comfortable with that is so important, and I feel it would be helpful if we knew this going into it. If our audiologists or hearing care professionals could talk a bit about that Big Picture, it would make it so much easier. There will be ups and downs, twists and turns, but knowing to expect them makes it easier to handle.
So, we outline these five stages of the journey. The first stage is Debating with Yourself, where many people get stuck. For me, it took a long time to acknowledge and accept my hearing loss because of the stigma I felt. That stage is all about debating with yourself, “Do I really have hearing loss? Is this my new reality?”
The second stage is Validating, which is where you get your hearing tested. Then comes Taking Charge—this is the most exciting part because you realize you can do something about it. You are the person most in charge of your hearing loss success.
Stage 3 is really where our book comes in; it can be very helpful for Stage 3, where you take charge and get that one-stop manual for the skills you need.
Stage 4 is Living Skillfully, and that’s the goal. But it doesn’t mean life is perfect, as life with hearing loss is probably never going to be perfect. However, in difficult situations, you know you have the tools to get through it. If there’s a hiccup or a bump, you try something else and keep going. Living skillfully means having the ability to navigate ups and downs.
The last part of the journey, and what makes it a journey, is Refreshing and Restarting. Sometimes things are out of our control. Maybe our hearing loss worsens, we get new hearing aids, or something unexpected like a pandemic happens. This might set us back to an earlier stage, but it’s an opportunity to keep moving forward, continue learning, and return to skillful living.
I feel like I am in the living skillfully stage. I try to be as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have bad days. We all have bad days where we slip back, and maybe we’re still in a bit of denial.
We’re always learning, always trying to take more charge of our hearing loss. So I try to live skillfully every day, but it’s definitely not perfect.
A: Oh yeah, absolutely. Hearing aids, for sure. I’m very grateful for my hearing aids, but an important thing to understand is that hearing aids work well in quiet situations [like this]. But sometimes, in difficult listening situations, you need other technologies.
One of my most important technologies is captioning. I have probably three or four different apps on my phone that I use for speech-to-text. One of the positives of the pandemic, if there were any, was the fast development of speech-to-text capability through auto-captioning.
Anytime I’m on a video call—whether it’s Zoom, FaceTime, or anything like that—I can always turn on captions. And if I’m at a conference, I do my best to use speech-to-text on my phone. Speech-to-text is huge.
I know a lot of other people use remote microphones. So, if you’re at a lecture or in a different setting, you can ask the speaker to attach a microphone, which brings the sound directly to your ears.
I love all these external accommodations available for people with hearing loss. You can get captions at the movies and on Broadway through different apps. Technology is always changing, and it can be hard to keep up. On calls, there’s InnoCaption, where you can get captioned phone calls. And there are other apps that do that as well. But for me, captioning is such an important way to augment what I get from my hearing aids. It helps me fill in the blanks I’m missing.
InnoCaption provides real-time captioning technology making phone calls easy and accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing community. Offered at no cost to individuals with hearing loss because we are certified by the FCC. InnoCaption is the only mobile app that offers real-time captioning of phone calls through live stenographers and automated speech recognition software. The choice is yours.
InnoCaption proporciona tecnología de subtitulado en tiempo real que hace que las llamadas telefónicas sean fáciles y accesibles para la comunidad de personas sordas y con problemas de audición. Se ofrece sin coste alguno para las personas con pérdida auditiva porque estamos certificados por la FCC. InnoCaption es la única aplicación móvil que ofrece subtitulación en tiempo real de llamadas telefónicas mediante taquígrafos en directo y software de reconocimiento automático del habla. Usted elige.
