Agnes: “But I DON’T like anything about him!”
Me: “I understand. Take a look. See if you can find something.”
Agnes: Doesn’t take a look. “No, I just know there isn’t anything. He is really difficult to deal with.”
Me: Laughing. “I do understand, Agnes. Take a look. Find something.”
Agnes: Thinking, thinking, thinking. “Well, there is one thing …”
Agnes was in the Causative Communication training workshop with me. She is a highly skilled technical support engineer assigned to help the really large customers when they have problems. The difficult situations in her life happened when she was being hammered.
Hammered by customers whose entire computer systems had gone down and had brought their business to a complete halt. Hammered by the Account Managers who had sold them the system and were now hearing about how frustrated they were with it. Hammered internally by people telling her to stop asking for resources.
It was hard enough to do her job without being hammered. The stress was destroying her and Agnes was even having trouble sleeping.
I had just talked about Affinity (how much you like the other person) as an essential component in successful communication. I had covered how to raise Affinity, especially when it’s not happening on its own, by finding something you do like about the person.
I had also talked about the magic that happens with high Affinity. At that point, Agnes didn’t believe in magic.
She came back to the second day of training with this incredible story:
After class, I had a call with an extremely aggressive and demanding Account Manager (Sales) who was demanding that his customer's problem be solved and refusing to understand that it was a complex issue and would take time.
Normally I would get mad and think of how terrible he was for being so aggressive – and I would have simply written him off as an “aggressive sales guy.” But I stopped and decided to think about what I liked about him.
I realized that he was being extremely proactive, and I liked that. He was also really advocating on the customer’s behalf and I realized that if I were a customer, he was perfect! I would absolutely want him to be my Account Manager and to represent me internally to the rest of the organization. I would love how he fought for me. And I realized how valuable that was to customers and why he was doing it.
It made me feel real affinity for him for the first time.
I told him, “I really admire how proactive you are. I really understand how you’re fighting for the customer and I think it’s wonderful that you fight so hard for customers. If I were a customer, I would want you to be my Account Manager.”
Instantly he transformed. It was AMAZING. It was like a barrier wall between us dropped. He changed and starting talking to me like we were friends.
We were suddenly able to talk to each other. We were understanding each other for the FIRST time, and very quickly we came to an outcome we were both extremely happy about. It was so smooth, so easy, and we were both so happy with the outcome.
As this all happened, we felt so GOOD about each other. I have to tell you, I actually felt like, in this one meeting, we created an exceptional relationship. It was wonderful!
That’s magic.
If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.
It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.
Just how much magic would you like in your life?
Be the cause!