Ever felt that gnawing dread of letting someone down? That fear of disappointing others that drives your every decision? … yeah, me too!
Do you strive relentlessly for the “perfect” customer experience, or look past the short-comings of the low-performers on your team, because the thought of disappointing either one strikes fear in you?
Does the idea of disappointing someone close to you, maybe even in your family, cause you to make decisions that don’t necessarily line-up with your core values?
In this week’s podcast, we tackle this fear head-on, discussing how it shapes our interactions with customers as well as our valuable employees. With the help of motivational speaker & author, Mel Robbins who has been wrestling with this fear since she was in fourth grade, shares valuable insights into how you can manage such fears and strike a healthy balance in your pursuit of customer and employee satisfaction, without sacrificing your values or compromising your business.
Ever felt that gnawing dread of letting someone down? That fear of disappointing others that drives your every decision? … yeah, me too!
Do you strive relentlessly for the “perfect” customer experience, or look past the short-comings of the low-performers on your team, because the thought of disappointing either one strikes fear in you?
Does the idea of disappointing someone close to you, maybe even in your family, cause you to make decisions that don’t necessarily line-up with your core values?
In this week’s podcast, we tackle this fear head-on, discussing how it shapes our interactions with customers as well as our valuable employees. With the help of motivational speaker & author, Mel Robbins who has been wrestling with this fear since she was in fourth grade, shares valuable insights into how you can manage such fears and strike a healthy balance in your pursuit of customer and employee satisfaction, without sacrificing your values or compromising your business.
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Rick:
The fear of disappointing a customer is real and necessary to a point right. I mean striving for CSI scores of a hundred percent in five-star reviews on Google is usually the underlying goal of most any business, especially the automotive repair industry. The fear of falling short of those goals drives our decisions and how we treat our customers and the hoops we jump through to ensure customer satisfaction or, in other words, no disappointments.
Rick:
Welcome to the MindWrench podcast with your host, rick Selover, where minor adjustments produce major improvements in mindset, personal growth and success. This is the place to be every Monday, where we make small improvements and take positive actions in our business and personal lives that will make a major impact in our success. Next level growth and quality of life.
Rick:
Hey, what's up everybody. Welcome to the MindWrench podcast. I'm your host, rick Selover. Thanks so much for stopping in. If you're a returning listener and haven't done so already, please take a minute and click the follow or subscribe button, and then rate and review the show. When you rate and review the show, the algorithms for Apple, spotify, google podcasts, iheartradio, amazon Music and all the other platforms will see that it's valuable and show it to more people that have never seen it before, and hopefully it can help them too. I would really, really really appreciate your help sharing this word with your friends and family as well. If you're a brand new listener, welcome. I hope you find something of value here that helps you in your personal or professional life as well. Please make sure to click the subscribe or follow button so you never miss another episode.
Rick:
I think more of us than not end up following this pattern, not only with those around us in our personal lives, but probably more often in our businesses. We do this almost daily with our customers because it's a byproduct of the nature of our business right fixing problems that they have, which is perfectly normal. But we also do this with our employees just as often, and that can lead to bigger problems. For us, the fear of disappointing a customer is real and necessary to a point right. I mean, striving for CSI scores of a hundred percent and five-star reviews on Google is usually the underlying goal of most any business, especially the automotive repair industry. The fear of falling short of those goals drives our decisions and how we treat our customers and the hoops we jump through to ensure customer satisfaction or, in other words, no disappointments. In fact, it's amazing how much we'll stress ourselves out trying to keep up with this goal, given how difficult some individuals are to please, right. But in this era of reduced workforce and technician shortages putting tremendous pressure on many shops, the fear of disappointing our employees seems to be equally as strong, wouldn't you agree? Now, I'm strong advocate of the concept of your employees being your greatest assets, for sure.
Rick:
But it seems most every shop has that one or two team members that either don't perform well you know they do low-quality work, or they got bad attendance or whatever or they're a negative influence, actually a poison to your otherwise positive work atmosphere. Yet we fail time and time again to make the bold move to cut them loose. In fact, we go out of our way sometimes to ensure we're not disappointing them, instead of the other way around. It's crazy, right. We tell ourselves and the others that may ask why that person is still employed at our shop things like, well, he's a pretty good tech or she's just a hard worker or shit. I don't have anyone to replace them, so I might as well keep them. Instead of having that hard conversation with him or her, we're just making the correct decision to let them go because they don't fit your future vision of your business.
Rick:
I'm working with several shops that are having this exact issue with some of their employees. They know they need to move on without them, but their intense fear of disappointing them is the real core of the stories. They tell themselves not to let them go. Listen, I can totally relate. I do this in my own life as well. I hate disappointing my wife or my kids, and my desire to not disappoint my customers is just as strong. While I ran across this clip from well-known motivational speaker, podcast host and author of the five second rule in the high five habit, mel Robbins, and as I was listening to this, I thought, holy shit, I do that all the time, and so do many of my collision shops I've dealt with. I absolutely need to share this with all of you, so here's Mel.
Mel:
So many of us have this perfectionism gene and the reason why we're perfectionists is we're trying to insulate ourselves from criticism, that if you get it perfect, no one will give you feedback. If you get it right, nobody's going to criticize you. If you do it perfect, then no one will be able to attack you. And the problem with that and that's just another side of the same coin, which is the fear of disappointing people we're managing not disappointing people, not by lying and not by being codependent, but by actually trying to be a perfectionist so that nobody criticizes you. So let me tell you a story about the fear of disappointing people in my own life, because this is the biggest trigger in my life. I mean, it goes back to being in fourth grade. Right, it's there. And this is another thing. I literally have to remind myself of this, everybody, every single day. You cannot remove the things that trigger you. You can't. If you're doing a pattern since fourth grade, there will be things for the rest of your life that will trigger that pattern to come up, but you can always choose not to repeat the pattern. So you'll be triggered and be afraid that you're going to disappoint somebody. That's real, that's normal, it's natural. It's part of being a human being. I think it's interwoven into every relationship where you love somebody. But you don't have to behave the way that you always behaved when you're nervous about disappointing somebody. So let me give you a dumb story. You ready?
Mel:
My husband and I got married. My father gave us this really incredible gift. He gave us an antique pool table. I grew up in Muskegon Michigan, where Brunswick was founded, and my dad has a hobby of going to garage sales and estate sales and buying old, dilapidated pool tables and then he restores them. So when Chris and I got married, he bought us an old dilapidated pool table from the same era as our house, which is the 1870s. He restored the whole thing and then recently he and I rented a U-Haul and we drove this sucker from Muskegon Michigan to Boston Massachusetts. My dad and I took a road trip. Get there and we assemble the pool table in what used to be our playroom. Fast forward three or four years. The speaking business takes off, my business starts to grow, we have people that work for us and my kids are older. We don't need a playroom, we need an office.
Rick:
Have you ever looked in the mirror and said to yourself how come I'm not further along than this? Or why can't I ever seem to get ahead? You're frustrated with life, unsure of your future, wanting to make a change in your current situation, but too scared to make that next move. Maybe you want to reach that next level in life or in your business, but not sure what the right move is. Or maybe you feel the best thing to do is nothing at all.
Rick:
Many of you may not know but, along with hosting my own weekly podcast, I'm a personal development mindset, business and life coach where I focus on helping people with self development, mindset and how to make positive changes in their lives. And, trust me, with all the negativity we've had to deal with these past two years, I think we all need some positivity, a positive change and a fresh approach to our life or our business. Sometimes talking to the right person can make all the difference. If you really want to start making those changes in your life, take action right now. Reach out and email, text, call or direct message me as soon as possible. Do it right now. I'll set you up with a free consultation call and pre-qualify you for either the one-on-one or business coaching that you really need to get your life or your business on the right track to success. Appointments are available right now.
Mel:
The pool table is in the middle of this thing. For the first two years of having the office, we kept the pool table there. Why? Because I didn't want my dad to be disappointed, because I love him. Now he visits our house twice a year for two or three days with my mom, and I kept this thing occupying a third of our office for two years, and then I realized I'm being ridiculous. I'm being absolutely ridiculous. Now here's the thing Will he be disappointed if I take the pool table down?
Mel:
Absolutely definitely. There are always going to be things that you do, decisions that you have to make in your life, in your business, for your family, that will disappoint other people. It's unavoidable, but the fact that he's going to be disappointed should never be the reason that I don't do something that is aligned with my values. Now let's take it a step further. When you make a decision that is likely going to disappoint people, or that does still make the decision because it's your life, there's nothing worse than when you start to rob your future and your life and your happiness because you're so focused on other people. However, if you love people, you can still take care of them when you make that decision.
Mel:
So let me go back to the example of the pool table. So I knew I was going to take it down. I knew my father was going to be disappointed. I was disappointed. I don't have a big house, so I don't have the room for a huge pool table. I don't have a finished basement, like a lot of people, I don't have, like a cool garage game room thing like that. I just don't have it.
Mel:
I called him first and said I need to talk to you about something you know the pool table. I love the pool table. Dad, my business is growing so much I actually need an office. And oh, great, it'll be great in the office. And I'm like well, yeah, it would, except I have three or four people showing up. We got to put some desks in there for now Even went down. Well, you could put a piece of plywood, they could work on the pool table and then they could do the thing and then the thing.
Mel:
And now my heart is racing because I don't want to disappoint my dad. And now he's fighting for the and I had to just say for me, dad, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to hire professional movers in the pool table business to disassemble this with love and care. We're going to store it beautifully. When I either get a full-time office offsite or I build a barn or I build a different house, this will have its own beautiful room, dedicated to you. So we had this beautiful conversation.
Mel:
Now was he disappointed Absolutely. When they come to the house and visit which they just did and they walk into the office, do I feel a pang? You better believe I do. It doesn't matter, that's all normal. I still need to make the decisions that I need to make, and the difference, what's changed, is how I relate to that fear. So, instead of what I would do in the past is I would make a decision that doesn't serve me. I'd leave the pool table, and then I'd be all about it. I'd leave the pool table as a way to make my dad happy, but it makes me miserable to leave it there because I need the space right, and then I'd be kind of annoyed. And then he'd come and I'd fake play pool because I kind of want to run.
Mel:
You know what I'm saying Like we do all this. That's not real, and what I've been able to do for myself in some instances, when I catch it, is to hit it head on and to be authentic and to still take care of people. And what I've also come to learn is that people can be disappointed in you and they still love you. You know you're never going to get around this. Everybody in your family is going to be disappointed with you probably once a day probably and you have the ability to retrain how you respond to that trigger that rises up in you where you start to fear that you're disappointing somebody, and the answer really is make the decision that's aligned with your values and the thing that supports you, and then take care of the person by being honest and straightforward about it, dealing with their disappointment head on, because that's really the adult thing to do and that's what you do when you love somebody. The way we've all been handling it, myself included, is manipulation, lying, resentment, withholding, and that doesn't serve anybody.
Rick:
That was Mel Robbins. This complete talk can be found on YouTube. Just search for the problem with being perfect, mel Robbins. I'll be sure to leave a link in the show notes. Well, that's all I had for you today. Thanks again for tuning in. I really appreciate your support and I hope you have a great week. I can always be reached at wwwricksellovercom, where you can find all my social media links podcast episodes, blog posts and much more.