Sometimes I think I have adult A.D.D. I can’t sit still very long & boring people about drive me to suicide. Long trips. Rush hour. Emotionless sermons. I can’t stand anything that makes me sit still longer than a few seconds unless it entertains me.
About five years ago, I went to a sales conference that could be categorized as an Alcatraz for ADDers. A middle-aged, well-dressed lady was the prison warden offering the normal torture tactics: false modesty, a monotone voice, overused cliché’s & a bevy of painfully boring stories. I remember drinking massive amounts of water just so I had an excuse to go to the bathroom.
As I drooled on my bottom lip & doodled on a hotel notepad, the ice-pick-my-the-eye boring speaker rambled through a series of irrelevant & over used metaphors about life. I think her goal was to irritate us into being better sales people.With my eyes flickering & attention almost gone, a life-changing quote splashed across the poorly assembled power point presentation.
In a real sense all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny: Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, & you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.
When I first read Martin Luther King’s words, I thought I understood what he was saying about community. He was telling us to comprehend the connection of people around us. Those you see when you walk in a crowd, men of different opinions, races & religions. All the people of the world related together in a single garment of humanity.
I thought I understood, but my initial thought was superficial. It took me five more years to appreciate the expanded meaning of MLK’s discourse and properly apply it to my world. Why is this important to Customer Service? Stay tuned and find out.
To be continued...