Do you speak “customer” fluently?

I’ve missed a few weeks with the birth of our fifth child, but that experience gave me some great new ideas to post. I hope you enjoy!

Recently we welcome kid number five to the Tripp clan. By number five, we assumed the birth would be a piece of cake since, of course, we know everything by now, right? I guess not. My poor wife endured the most painful of all the births. To add to the physical pain, they kept asking questions like, “have you ever had an OP birth?” There were other acronyms thrown around as if somehow baby number five also came with a medical degree. A moment of enormous pain was compounded to an extent by a language barrier among people who speak English. Not only did it make a bad situation seem worse, the lack of plain and simple communication delayed getting to the root of the trouble and prolonged the pain.

We all get caught up in our own worlds and words as if our customers or new employees have been with us the whole time. We can make an already stressful experience of making a big purchase, or starting a new job even more stressful.

We don’t need to talk to everyone like they are a three year old, but we do need to make sure that we know more about the person we are communicating with, so, as Stephen Covey might say, we need to know that we are understanding before we seek to be understood. We need to speak the language of our audience.

PS We know now that OP means “occiput posterior”… not sure that that means either? It means face up and, more importantly, means A LOT more pain.