Communicating with your parrot starts with listening to your parrot.
Listening is an art form. The listening that receives understanding and gives real understanding back. We call some people good listeners. It’s a compliment. When you are in the company of a listener, you actually feel better when you finish speaking. You feel, heard. The relationship between the listener and the speaker becomes stronger. They grow trust in that quiet exercise of sincere listening. It’s a gift allowing another to speak while paying sincere attention. To truly listen to another is stating a fact; they are more important than you at that moment. It’s not an easy gift to give. You have to set yourself, and what you want at that moment, aside.
Allow your parrot to speak their truth through choices.
We build the best of companion parrot relationship with time investment, empathy, patience, and listening. Communication through unselfish motivations. It’s the human in the room that needs the behavior modifications. Because a human’s motivations are complex. We want. We bring expectations, some so unreasonable inside a context there is no way to explain it.
Parrots do not rationalize. Parrots do not bring unreasonable expectations. They are living in the now; they bring results from experiences and use those past results as measuring sticks to the now, but vitriol, hate, and judgment are not in their DNA. And so, we have an unconditional cognitive creature meeting a rationalizing, expectation driven human.
The art of listening requires handing over controls to the speaker. Sharing your life with a companion parrot is not controlling that companion parrot. It’s listening to your parrot’s needs before you bring your expectation to the moment. It is a respectful and unconditional exercise between two minds. It requires time.
The size of your parrot makes no difference. Our companion parrot lifestyle success does not sit at the feet of our parrot. It sits in the very center of our own actions. Success is not their responsibility, it is ours.
Listening requires time. To listen to a parrot is taking in the whole of their body language, voice, actions, and attitude. A healthy parrot that suddenly changes demeanor or habits is a parrot reacting to the human in the room’s sudden change of demeanor or habits. Some parrots are almost clairvoyant (cockatoo), so sensitive they notice your issues before you do. Some parrots are so emotionally connected to their human they feel the change as it is building, before the human notices their own emotional snowballing.
Fractured communication comes from the human in the room wanting, rather than listening. And yes, there will be days you will not receive the wants you bring to your parrot.
Parrots have the right to say no safely. Otherwise, this isn’t a relationship. It’s ownership. They didn’t sign up for that.
