Are you being served?

I'm fortunate in that, even in my mid forties, I still have hair. So periodically, I head off to a hairdresser in town to get it cut. I’m not a big fan of getting a haircut – it’s a strictly utilitarian thing for me – and I’ve been fairly free with my choice of hairdressers over the years, never really sticking to one in particular. However, I've been going to the same hairdresser on a roughly monthly basis for nearly three years now; he’s local, seems like a nice guy and he was having a few problems with his business in the early years, so I stuck with him out of a sense of solidarity – small businesses sticking together.

So, here’s the routine. Every month, the same guy cuts my hair. Every month, I get the same haircut. Every month, he asks me how I want it cut and every month I give the same reply. Every month, in response to my reply, he queries whether I really have my hair that short. Then he cuts it, I pay him and the whole thing starts up again in about four weeks’ time. During the haircut, he'll often ask me what I do for a living - I've lost count of the number of times he's asked me. I usually give a different reply every time, just to see whether he notices - he hasn't so far or, at least, if he has he hasn't mentioned the many discrepancies in my stories.

When I first noticed it, I found it amusing but recently it’s started to bug me; the last time I went, there were two of us waiting and he asked “which one of you is Steve?” Is it really too much to expect that, after let’s say at least thirty visits – he might remember who I am? Is it really so difficult to make a little note of who your customers are, what they do for a living, how they like to have their hair cut?

It’s not bad customer service – it’s not like he’s insulting me or being rude or overcharging me or anything like that. It’s just an example of poor customer service. He’s a good enough hairdresser; don’t get me wrong – the core service he provides is perfectly adequate. But I could easily be persuaded to go to another hairdresser, one who offered a similar core service but a better customer service. All for the want of a few, easily taken, steps.

It’s worth thinking about the service you offer – not just the core service but the customer service. Are you building loyal customers? A very good friend of mine runs a company called Spice Learning and they’re doing a series on the “A to Z of Customer Service” at the moment – if you suspect your customers might be feeling a little open to persuasion by other suppliers, I’d recommend you take a look.

On a personal note, the blog is taking a short break. The next “official” post will be on 15^th October, although there may be some shorter updates before then, depending on my access to the internet. Have a great couple of weeks.

Telling your story

Before I get to the subject of this week’s blog, I’d like to ask you to do me a favour. To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen and you’ll also need to pay very close attention to your mind. I’m going to give you a word and I’d like you to write down the first word you think of when you see the word I’m going to give you. It can be any word you like, whatever pops into your head but, as I said, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your mind.

Are you ready? The word is: choice. Write down the word you associate with choice and we’ll come back to it in a while.

I was working with a group this week, helping them work out what they wanted to do with their lives and careers. This obviously involves some goal setting and that goal can be very general or it can be very specific. To use a journey as an analogy, your destination could be as general as London or as specific as a particular address. Neither is better than the other but, in order to set off in any meaningful way, you’ll probably need at least a general idea of where you’re going.

One of the delegates was completely unable to do this. She had, she claimed, absolutely no idea of where she was going. Not only that, she was sceptical about the whole process. There were too many other things that could happen in the future – including the old cliché of falling under a bus tomorrow (I checked: she didn’t) – and for her that made planning or goal setting pointless and impossible.

We spent some time thinking about the journey she had already made in her life and it occurred to me that we can tell our life stories in one of three ways. It can be a story of chance – luck, coincidences and random happenings. It can be a story of destiny – you were fated to marry that person, born to do that job. Or it can be a story of choice – where you are today is a result of the choices you made yesterday and the day before and the day before that. All of those three options, it seems to me, are equally valid; it’s your autobiography and you can tell it any way you choose. However, only one of those options allows you to have any part in building your future, and that’s choice.

Go back to the word you wrote. Some people write negative words – burden, difficulty, overwhelming; some write positive words – freedom, autonomy, excitement. I wonder what you wrote. And I wonder how much the word you associate with choice will determine the way you tell your autobiography – and the extent to which you write your own future.

Banking Crisis

If you deposit more money in your bank account than you with draw, your balance will increase. The more your balance increases, the more interest the bank pays you – increasing your balance further – and the kindly your bank looks upon you. Get a big enough balance and other banks may court you for your business. On the other hand, if you withdraw more than you deposit, the balance will decrease. It won’t stop at zero, however: your account will go overdrawn, taking you into the mysterious realm of negative numbers. The more overdrawn you go, the more your bank will charge you – decreasing your balance even further. If you continually go overdrawn, your bank will probably ask you to take your business elsewhere. Decrease your balance to such a level that you cannot possibly pay it back and you’re likely to be declared bankrupt – which makes further banking (and other things) problematic to say the least.

In his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey talks about the Emotional Bank Account. It’s a metaphor for the state of relationships and works in the same way as a normal bank account except that, instead of money, the balance is the level of trust in the relationship.

Some actions you can take – we’ll call them deposits – will improve the relationship, increasing balance of trust in the emotional bank account you hold with the person concerned. The higher the emotional bank account balance, the better the relationship and the more benefits you with both reap from it. Some actions you can take – withdrawals – will harm the relationship, reducing the level of trust. Keep making withdrawals and your emotional bank account with the person concerned becomes so overdrawn that the relationship breaks down. Do it often enough with enough people and you’ll become bankrupt and, no matter what you do or say, no one trusts you anymore; even things you sincerely intend as deposits will be seen as withdrawals.

I was reminded of this as I read a lot of the coverage about the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs. I’m not making a political comment but it was interesting to see how, no matter what he said or explanations he tried to give, no matter what deposits he tried to make, they were interpreted as withdrawals by some. Even giving a potential £4m to the British Legion was seen by some as self-serving; they just wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said.

We all make withdrawals occasionally – it’s just part of being human. An apology is usually all it takes to restore the relationship. But make sure you notice the withdrawals; we may not all run countries, head political parties or start wars but it’s still possible for us to end up bankrupt.

How do you treat your waiter?

One of the great things about this job is that I get to meet and work with lots of people – I must have met and trained thousands – and a couple of workshops over the last couple of weeks have reminded me of the best and the worst aspects of working with people.

The measure of someone’s character is how they treat people they don’t “have” to be polite to. Watching the way someone speaks to a waiter or a cleaner can give you quite an insight into the way they think. Those who speak pleasantly to them tend to be good people; those who are rude and dismissive tend to have a fixed hierarchy in their minds and the way they behave will depend on where others fit into that hierarchy – nice to the people above, nasty to the people below. This isn’t a class thing and I don’t mean to be condescending by mentioning waiters and cleaners because I include trainers/facilitators in that group, too.

Most delegates understand I have a job to do and they cheerfully co-operate. A significant minority really throw themselves into the workshop and everyone in the group benefits from their attitude. They’re the people who make my job an absolute pleasure – they ask questions, they contribute examples, they engage with the material. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of groups from one particular organisation who have all been like that – I was genuinely sorry to leave because we’d had so much fun together. They were brilliant and I wish I could name the organisation because they’re clearly doing a wonderful job.

A minority of delegates, however, take a different approach and I had one of those groups recently, too, from a different organisation. They thought it was okay to be rude, arrogant and obnoxious. They didn’t want to be in the room and weren’t shy about showing it; for some reason, they thought I was responsible for forcing them to be on the workshop and so took it out on me, in the same way that some diners take out their frustration with their food on waiters.

I’m not complaining about delegates; that would be like a sailor complaining about the sea. Someone told me, early in my training career, that my two duties were to love my delegates and to serve the course objectives and I’ve tried to stick to that. I love meeting people in this way and, as I said, the vast majority are lovely.

When I was a teenager, I went on a school trip to the local theatre to see a production of King Lear. Being teenagers, we were undisciplined and noisy and at one point, the actors onstage stopped the performance and addressed us directly, basically asking us to shut up or leave. That was thirty years ago and I’ve never forgotten the shock of realising that the theatre wasn’t like TV – the actors were real people who could see and hear me and who had feelings about what I did. It’s the same with some delegates; I’m sure they think that we can’t see them reading newspapers, checking emails or sending texts, yawning, looking out the window or picking their nose at the back of the room (yes, honestly).

So the next time you’re on a course or a workshop, spare a thought for the man or woman at the front. If you don’t want to be there, take some responsibility and do something about it but remember: we’re not the ones forcing you to be there and we have feelings too. You don’t have to be pleasant to us and it says something quite fundamental about you if you’re not.

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?

What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.