Weight Weight Just Love Me – Responsive – Day 37
Everything thrives (including me) when I respond with loving kindness.
Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI- ACP, RYT
I am writing this blog post on my iPhone as I am in the car driving home from the incredible week of cooking school and yoga retreat. (I am not driving). Being on the iPhone I got to thinking about how much I enjoy mobile responsive websites. And I realized I pretty much enjoy any type of response that makes my life better.
About twenty years ago I created a course on customer service. This was the predecessor to how I teach best friend customer service to my staff at Cheetah. My team strives to treat every encounter with the same level of care and kindness they show to their best friends. The key here is responsiveness. What we have found over time is we attract kind and caring students as well. In that early customer service course, I had students explore the idea there are no discontinuities in life – you can have even better customer service when you show up as a great customer.
Looking through this lens – when I respond to myself with kindness and compassion, I’m more capable of responding to others the same way. I was raised Catholic and I recall one of the teachings was “love your neighbor as yourself.” So it just goes to reason the more I learn how to love myself, the more capabilities I develop to respond to others in kind. So this is not just a gift I’m giving myself. Loving myself more is enabling me to respond to others in more loving ways as well.
Kate’s comment: I took that picture of you and Top (that’s the kitten – his brother’s name is Tip)! As for getting better customer service when you’re a great customer – that is so true. In private practice, I’ve been working a lot with insurance companies to see what benefits my patients have. I try to be nice to them, and I find that they are nice right back! When I don’t get an answer that I’m satisfied with, I ask permission if I can ask a few more questions (which will hopefully lead me to the answer that I’m happy with). I also use their name – in nice ways, of course. Like saying, “Thank you, Thomas. I really appreciate you helping me with this”. Dale Carnegie said “a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. Boy, is that ever true!
Treating yourself with the same kindness you treat others is a great method to make you like yourself more – just don’t say your own name too much. That’s the makings of becoming a crazy cat lady.
