Someone else’s shoes

Sometimes it’s quite revealing to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and behave accordingly.

Ask yourself how hard it is to treat people with respect and politeness?

I just had an example. Someone rang me to try to sell me insurance that I don’t want or need.
I spoke to a colleague of hers last week and asked to be taken off ‘the list’, but I had another call today anyway.

The companies that run these sorts of operations have become increasingly clever over the last few years. They have learned that calls from withheld numbers or from random locations that you’ve never even been to (and may not even have heard of) are less likely to be answered.

Calls now often appear as local numbers, probbaly because they’re routed via a local exchange.

I don’t know about you, but I’m much more likely to answer a local call even if I don’t recognise the number.

Anyway, to get to the point, a few seconds into the call, I thought about the person on the other end of the line.
She’s just doing her job (and to be fair, in my opinion it’s a pretty thankless job).

She doesn’t need me to:

 – shout at her.

 – hang up on her

 – put the phone down beside me and let her talk until she gets bored and hangs up.

None of those things will make her day better.

And anyway,  I’M BETTER THAN THAT

Treat people with respect

People deserve to be treated as people, treated with respect.

So I explained politely that I had spoken to a colleague last week and asked to be taken off the list.
The response was very polite, and the call ended quickly and amicably.

My decision to treat the caller with respect paid immediate dividends in the way I was treated.

Now of course, that may have happened anyway, but I feel better, so for me it was a good decision.

I still have issues with the companies making these calls (which as far as I am concerned are SPAM calls), but it’s not the fault of the person on the other end of the phone.

They just want to earn an honest buck.

What does it mean to me?

The cynic would say that it doesn’t mean anything, but I feel better about myself, and I will try to do the same again in the future.

Today I don’t feel cynical.

I’m more positive and in part, that’s because I have treated someone with respect.

I believe that my day will be better because I have been better.

What goes around comes around!

If you want others to treat you with respect, then be proactive.

Do it to them first!

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