KEYPOINT: Lack of empathy destroys business. Treat your client and customers like people, not automatons with wallets.
And of course YOU have YOUR "Rio stories" too. Perhaps you have one every day where people treat you like a nonperson with a wallet. And just like you, I forgave The Rio and did stay there this past winter, which is how they know me and know to make the empathic invitation for this week.
So they lost my business.
The Rio temporarily lost my business because the salesperson didn't hear my dismay at his babbling on about nothing. He didn't know I tuned him out, because he didn't talk to me. He talked at me. My resistance went up high...and there was nothing done to change the scenario.
KEY: He needed Empathy...
The Persuasion Sequence
Empathy
Discrepancy
Resistance
Resolution
Empathy Begins With Being Curious, Asking and Feeling
Before any technique or strategy can be implemented, there MUST be empathy.
...and I remembered this classic scene which ultmiately coined a phrase for a generation, from television history...Tony Randall shouts at Jack Klugman in a scene from The Odd Couple: "When you assume you make an as_ of you and me."
It sounds very cliche and rather goofy and it is true.
This is one of those life-changing moments made possible through the miracle of the sitcom. I'll never forget it. Felix Unger at the chalk board writing the words out as Oscar Madison watches open-mouthed. I saw it 25 years ago on ABC right before Monday Night Football. It was a surprisingly powerful imprint.
Curiosity, the Key to Empathy
From that moment forward, I made it my habit to be curious. I never assume what someone else's experience was...what they were feeling...what they were thinking. To predict...to anticipate all possibilities: good, very good. To assume my "intuition" was "right", to believe I knew what they felt.. always a big mistake...
That one characteristic...the willingness to wonder and be curious...is a skill of personal mastery. I have watched literally thousands of people screw up deals, dates and enterprises of all kinds because they had the incapacity to shut up and listen. Instead, so many people suffer from blurtitis...the dreaded disease of thinking you know what they are thinking or feeling and being stupid enough to say it out loud. Blurtitis....
Your client resists blurtitis and other similar diseases of bad verbal and emotional hygiene. In fact...so do you...it's just much easier to recognize rampant stupidity in others instead of yourself.
Continue this article for a $10,000 KEY....!
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