As I recently was putting in my son’s contact lenses, I realized that the experience could be beneficial as a communications lesson.

So just as I embarrassed my daughter years ago by telling a true story about whacking her with a golf ball, I’ll now embarrass my 15-year-old son by talking about how wearing contact lenses is like communicating in difficult times.

First, when I say that I was “putting in my son’s contact lenses,” I mean that I was putting them into my son’s eyes, not mine. He was just learning how to insert and remove contacts, and called for help after several frustrating minutes of trying to insert them himself.

Lesson #1: You should ask for help when you can’t see what you’re doing wrong. No matter how hard he tried, my son couldn’t see why his contact lenses kept bouncing off his eyes. It took the help of an experienced person to take a look from a different angle. In Kevin’s case, he was closing his eyes defensively just before the lens would settle onto his eye. In the communicator’s case, when a program, publication or campaign falls into your hands because it isn’t falling into place, you may need an outside opinion about how to redirect your efforts–and to find out if you’re blinking defensively.

Lesson #2: Which side is up? If you’ve never worn contact lenses, you may have trouble understanding how difficult it can be to discern whether a lens is “inside out.” Only a keen, practiced eye can spot the subtle angles that indicate whether a contact lens is flipped inside out or not. That spells the difference between completing the task in comfort or losing all pretense of sophistication as you shout in agony, “Get it out, get it out”–while you hop around the room, hunched over, frantically trying to remove the wrongly inserted lens from your now extremely irritated eye. Same lesson for communicators: If you don’t have the knowledge or experience to accurately gauge the angles of your project and the people involved with it, you may wind up hopping around a conference room, shouting in agony, “Get me out, get me out.”

Lesson #3: Keep it clean. This may be debated by some communicators, but I believe that just as a clean contact lens prevents irritants from building up, keeping a professional demeanor with coworkers, vendors and anyone who crosses your path can prevent a buildup of irritants in the workplace. Now some people might say that their workplace is full of irritating people, and that’s the way they like it. Okay…and I’ve spit on my contact lens before reinserting it at times when I didn’t have solution. But I didn’t feel good about it, and my eye knew the difference.

Lesson #4: The focus can change over time. Does your strategic communication planning involve using the same basic concepts year after year? Just as eyesight changes over time, communications needs and opportunities change constantly. Give yourself at least an annual checkup to see whether your vision has become a little fuzzy.

Lesson #5: When all else fails, radical surgery is an option. After wearing contact lenses for about three decades, I faced a tough choice. My eyesight and eye shape had finally made it difficult to find affordable contact lenses that balanced comfort with clear vision. So I decided to undergo laser eye surgery. A radical (for me) choice, that has given me great mid- to far-distance vision. Goodbye, contact lenses. If your communication programs just don’t seem fixable, maybe it’s time for a radical change. Just don’t do it without the guidance of an expert!

Lesson #6: Be realistic about the radical choices too. I had a choice with the laser surgery. It would be simple to correct my vision for the mid and far distance vision. But my eyes also have trouble focusing close-up. I had to decide whether I wanted one eye corrected for distance vision and one eye corrected for close vision, or whether to have both corrected for distance, and use reading glasses. I chose the reading glasses. If you need to consider a radical change to your communication programs, you may have to be ready to compromise on the probable results.

How do these lessons look to you?

thought last night about the struggle that my son had with wearing contact lenses for the first time,