Elevate the way you treat people | Deeper | Post

A combination of my background in business, my South African heritage, and the environment in which I grew up in, somewhat made me grow up to believe that I deserved to be treated a certain way by people.

When I go to a store, my business-knowledge reasoning was as follows: I am a paying customer, and the enterprise, therefore, needs to do anything possible to keep me as a customer.

The South African in me, and the statements I had heard tossed around such as "the cashier didn't even give me a smile," and being exposed to an environment where I had seen, and gone to believe that in order for any product/service-related problems to be solved by the store, you need to 'elevate your attitude'.

'Elevating your attitude' will mean different things to different people so I will distinguish it by the intention behind the actions we take. It may go from asking sarcastic or derogatory questions such as "what are you paid to do?" all the way to raising your voice or portraying aggressive behaviour. Elevating your attitude is done with the intention of belittling, hurting, embarrassing or any other such intentions.

An example of this is a time I faced a problem with a telecommunication provider. They had made an appointment to come to install wifi, long story short, they never showed up to come to install the wifi on that day and no one could assist us with any helpful information about what had happened, or when they would come to do the installation.

I then went to the store and asked questions that the consultant on the other side obviously had no answers to, such as "why did your technicians say they would come if they knew they would not actually come?" The person to whom I was asking these questions would obviously not have accurate answers to this question, but the intention for asking the questions was never to get an accurate answer. That's the word: my intention. The only reason I asked those questions was to make the person on the other end feel bad and perhaps even gain a bonus 5 points of apologising in order to make everything okay.

But the most important question I asked myself after this encounter was: was any of the behaviour necessary? What do we ever gain from doing things out of skewed intentions?

Rarely any good.

Staying in a foreign country will very quickly make you realise how much of a bubble you've operated in. All my life, I had lived in the South African bubble that had said: "When I have a problem, you, as a representative of the company I have a problem with, need to make sure my problem is solved" [This is not to allude to this being a better or worse approach, but rather a realisation that each community is unique, and how small an individual is in relation to these multifaceted societies ].

Between the language barrier and the unique regard for customer service here, I have learnt that 'elevating your attitude' is never a necessary resort.

Firstly, because it doesn't work here. The customer agent will either just drop the call while you are speaking, or blankly stare at you because they genuinely don't understand what you are saying in your state of rage.

Secondly, because, no matter how you believe someone should have treated you (whether a parent, lover, friend or customer service agent) no one needs your elevated attitude.

Everyone is a breathing, feeling, human being before they are an enemy, friend or customer service agent.

And, each person operates from their individual reality. We can either choose to do life with the person, or we can choose to walk away from the person and avoid ever interacting with them again.

Otherwise, how significant of us to think that our drop in the ocean presence should make another community, store, or country change their ways for us.

Thirdly, because love is always such a better frequency to operate from. Do you ever notice how people will go out of their way to assist you because you were kind to them, complimented them or just acknowledged their presence?

In a world full of darkness, light always stands out.

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*** My word is never the full stop to life. I too am continuously learning.

Therefore feel free to share your opinion with me. I'm always eager to learn, unlearn and learn afresh when the need arises.