Seek to understand. This is a wonderful story of a young man who has compassion and freely gives it out. It is I! I do my very best in life to truly try to seek to understand the root of things. By nature I am curious and I love the inner workings of people. The mind and what we have gone through in life.
This story was inspired by one of our group members as he responded to a question. I can’t recall the question, but I certainly can recall the part of his answer that slapped me in the face, “seek to understand.” I naturally do this and always have, but that gentleman phrased it well. When there is some type of conflict I believe it is our job to try to fully comprehend where someone is coming from.
Let’s say someone yells at you for no reason and you have a knee-jerk reaction to blast back. Is that helpful? Many times not so much. Let’s be human about it, after all, that is what we are and let’s put our best foot forward to strive for that.
Ok, now back to the story. In the year 2010 I worked for Verizon Wireless. Yep, that cell phone company. My people always knew that I was naturally good at diffusing situations. Disgruntled and angry customs to be precise. Now during this period, I wasn’t a manager. I was just a regular employee, but the managers seem to take advantage of this unique gift.
On this particular day, there was a lady that came in and she was irate. She was yelling at an employee. I could hear her all the way in the stock room as I was organizing inventory. It was insane to hear. She said every bad word in the book. Even some I don’t recall hearing prior. Yeah, it was really bad.
One employee completely walked away from her. She then turned to the next employee. I obviously had to stop what I was doing to see what the disturbance was. As I was coming out my manager comes racing back to get me to intervene. The briefing I got was, “I have no idea why she’s so pissed, something about voicemail messages!” I’m like, “What the heck?”
So, I put my boxing gloves on and my empathy hat just in case things went sideways. Kidding of course! Next, I cautiously approach with a bit of a lump in my throat preparing for a verbal brawl. She was red-faced and looked completely and totally exhausted. I told the other employee to go take care of someone else and that I would try to help.
I discovered in just a matter of moments that the reason she was so angry about her voicemails was that there was a very important one that she lost. Her main argument was that all of her voicemails were gone and that it was our fault. The employee prior didn’t try to be human about things and come at it from another approach. The young lady didn’t divulge the tragedy, she only complained about the phone’s function. They just quickly got on the defensive because the lady was yelling at them.
This makes sense I guess because we feel we are being attacked. I wanted to get to the root of it and try to understand the whole issue. She told me that her phone went on the blink for no reason and she lost all of her voicemails. These were the type that you had to call to get from the servers not the visuals on the phone. She accidentally erased them.
They were so very important to her because several days before she lost her teenage son in a fatal car crash. Her son had left her a very sweet and loving voicemail message telling her that he loved her. That was the last type of communication she had. She broke out in tears telling the story. Of course, I started tearing up as well. I couldn’t imagine how she felt losing her son. It was awful.
I dug in and sought to understand the root of the problem. No judgment was placed prior. I just wanted to know what it was. I know it wasn’t the employee that she dealt with before and I certainly understood that it wasn’t me. There is always something deeper. We just need to find the love in our hearts. We need to take our egos out of it. Our egos are unnecessary when trying to problem solve. In fact, I can’t really think that our egos really serve much of a purpose these days anyway. But hey, what do I know!
In the end, I was able to uncover the real issue and I managed to get the voicemail back for the young lady. I also put the voicemail message on a DVD for her. She was so overwhelmed with joy she dropped to her knees and just cried. The happy type of tears. She was so grateful in fact that for probably about three months straight, every weekend she would bring me cakes, pies, and other meals she would make for me.
We of course don’t do things to receive things in return, but we need to seek to understand. All the goodness will follow I promise.
Conclusion
Let your guard down and stop the ego before it starts. Not every situation will work out as it did for me but at least do your very best to try to connect with one another. It does feel good. It makes my heart happy and I will go to bed each night knowing that I was hopefully being a part of the solution not a part of the problem.
