Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

Do you ever notice people will go to their neighborhood travel agent and book a guilt trip and give it to you?  “If you loved me you would be here.”  “If you really cared about me you would give me some money.”  Do you have family members who do that to you, they guilt you into getting what they want?  Well, it’s counter-productive and it’s manipulative.  So, how do you counter-act that?  What you do is play back to the person what you thought they said.  So, if they say, “If you loved me, you would be here this weekend.”  Then you simply say, “Let me see if I understand you correctly, are you telling me that if I loved you, I would be here?”  At which point, they are very likely to say, “well, no, that’s not exactly what I mean, what I really want you to do is be here.”  If you play back exactly what they said you often will immobilize them and that will get results.  

Do you ever notice that you use the words always and never and you get all kinds of incendiary results?  People will do that to you.  Your kids will say “You are never home.” “You are always gone.”  Your first thought is, “Wait a second, I’m home often.  What are you talking about, always gone?”  The reality is that when you speak with always or never, those absolutes create all kinds of drag and resistance.  So to get people to be more interested in listening and less defensive, you want to change the word always to frequently, often, or much of the time.  Change the word never to once in a while, infrequently, or rarely.  When you change always and never to these other kinds of words you are going to get by far better results and as a result, people will listen with a lot less defensiveness.