I agreed to proofread a sixty-page document for my husband at 2 p.m. in the afternoon on a Monday. He needed it proofed by the end of the day. I figured it would take me about an hour. What was I thinking? After an hour of reading, I was only a quarter of the way through. My chest tightened. “Breathe, Marilyn,” I coached myself. (There were so many other things on my to-do list that I’d rather be doing.) Have you ever been in a similar situation with a customer?
I felt agitated and with every paragraph, I found myself thinking, “This is taking too long. I want this to be over.” My mind just wouldn’t shut up about it.
All of a sudden, an unexpected memory from my college days flashed through my mind:
I had a part time job as a computer counselor helping students discover and fix errors in their computer programming code. Somehow, I was able to find even the most hidden programming bugs. But whenever I had a tough bug in my own computer code, I couldn’t find it for the life of me. I always had to find someone else to help me.
I realized my mental programming needed updating.
I got stuck one night, around midnight, in the computer lab, and couldn’t find a soul to help. Not knowing what else to do, I sat down at my counseling desk and looked at it as if it was somebody else’s code. All of a sudden, the error popped out at me. I solved the problem. “That was weird,” I thought. But, from then on, anytime I’d get stuck, I would use that method to solve my programming problems. Viewing it from a different perspective was the key.
It’s said that the human brain can be compared to a complex computer system. Could it be that our thoughts are like computer programs that run in the background? If so, my code for coping well with this 60-page document was defective.
The more I noticed my thoughts and the way those thoughts made me feel, the more I realized my mental programming needed updating. Is it possible to reprogram the way I think?
My first thought was, “No, leave me alone. I want to be miserable about this.” It’s kind of shocking to notice our own defiant thoughts. There were two parts of me – the part that was thinking and the part noticing what I was thinking. My thoughts didn’t like being noticed, but I persisted because I wanted to be more effective. I gave myself a moment to decide if I was really willing to complete the job for my husband or if I would be better off to break my commitment to do the other things on my to-do list.
I chose to complete the proofreading and stop resisting the time it was going to take to finish it. I looked at the clock and said to myself, “I am going to accept that for the next hour I will be doing this task.” Again, I felt resistance. If I accepted it for an hour, I’d have to stop complaining about it for an hour. I’d have to let go of accomplishing some of the other things that were more enjoyable to do. I decided that I’d test it out and only accept it for the next ten minutes of proofreading. Oh, what a beautiful feeling of relief. I even started to enjoy the words I was reading.
I read the rest of the document (almost) completely free of stress. Tension would still creep in every now and then, but when I noticed what I was thinking, I was able to redirect my thoughts and relax again. How does this relate to customer service?
Take a moment to choose. People spend unnecessary time feeling angry and resentful while completing tasks. My guess is you’ve been there and done that at some point in your life. When you take a little time out to assess the long-term value of your actions, and see it as a choice instead of a burden, it’s easier to do what’s best in a customer service situation.
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