Recently, I had an experience which gave me a more profound understanding of the challenging behaviors I present in my Spirit in Service seminar. I realize all the behaviors are aspects of myself. Notice that I didn’t say personality, because behaviors are just that, something observable and an aspect of a person, not the whole person.
In the Spirit In Service seminar, I created characters to represent each challenging behavior. The challenging behavior I demonstrated recently was The Clueless!
As a concierge, the way I handled the Clueless customer was to look for what was funny in the situation and then jot it down in a humor journal and. I’d make a conscious choice to switch the stress to humor. For example, when guests asked me if they needed sweaters to go to Sausalito, I asked if they were driving. When they said yes, I then explained that if they didn’t need the sweaters they could leave them in the car. On another occasion a customer asked, “I can see your escalator is turned off. I know I can get down, but how would I get back up?” Rather than judging or becoming annoyed, I learned to laugh, exercise my humor muscle and maintain my journal.
Also, I want you to know that I consider myself a master problem solver. Any good concierge or service provider needs to think in a creative and simple solutions-oriented way. The fact that I pride myself on this skill makes this recent incident of complete cluelessness all the more poignant.
In a nutshell, my husband went to the ophthalmologist for a routine checkup on his eyes and found out he needed to have emergency surgery for a detached retina, a very serious condition where every moment counts. I needed to get him to the hospital, which was an hour from where I was, get him checked in, then drive two hours up the winding Highway One to our home on the coast, pick up what he needed then turn around and drive two hours back down, pick him up at the hospital after the surgery, organize a hotel for the night and take him to the follow-up appointment the next morning.
Here was my problem. I now had two cars, and one driver. I could get to where his car was on Wednesday and drive it to our home on the coast because a friend could take me. BUT the doctor wanted Bill’s car moved from her parking lot by Monday evening. The nearby hotel said I could park his car there until Wednesday, but now I needed to get his car from the doctor’s parking lot and move it to the hotel parking lot. Then, I needed to get back to where we were now staying in Marin for the next 2 nights.
I literally tried to figure this puzzle out for three hours and even asked two different friends to drive me from Marin to the doctor’s parking lot and back. Suddenly, I realized DUH!!! Since the hotel parking lot and the doctor’s parking lot were close to each other, I could drive myself from Marin to the doctor’s parking lot, park my car next to Bill’s, take Bill’s car to the hotel parking lot, THEN SIMPLY WALK back to my car and come back to Marin in my car.
This simple solution took a master problem solver three hours to realize and solve! After laughing at myself, I realized how exhausted I was from the fire drill of the day before. I recognized that sometimes people are clueless not because they need a clue or are dense, but because there could be any number of stressors. Traveling is a big stressor for people that undermines their ability to solve problems. I understood the true importance of having empathy or compassion for The Clueless because you never know what precipitated the clueless behavior.
Your compassion, empathy, and kindness either to yourself or others you are serving goes a long way to easing the path through the stress.