People will
forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget
how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
The store where I most recently purchased a suit is going out of
business.
I did not find this surprising, given my experience purchasing a suit
there.
The purchase went well. The alterations were ok. It was ready to be
picked up when they said it would be ready.
Then I arrived to pick it up.
They took my altered suit from the rack. Took it off the hanger and
proceeded to stuff it into a small shopping bag that can hold no more than a
single box of Corn Flakes.
No garment bag. No large (and wide) shopping bags that the dry
cleaners use.
They didn’t even offer me the hanger.
My brand new suit was being treated no differently than a bag of
Doritos.
It occurred to me at that moment how sometimes the small things can
have a huge impact.
It shouldn’t. We are taught not to let the small stuff bother us.
Teaching is one thing, then comes the real life situation. And in this
real life situation this small detail disturbed me.
Then a deeper thought entered my mind.
There was no issue with the suit, just their choice of packaging. The
packaging was giving me a negative view towards the store, and even towards my
purchase as a whole.
Then I connected the dots.
The suit is the message we give our kids.
The bag is how we package that message. How we deliver the message. It
is the words we choose to use (or not use). It is the method we deliver the
message (e.g. blunt vs. evasive, written word vs. spoken word, directly from us
vs. from a third party).
Step one is making sure the correct message is given over.
Step two is just as important, making sure that the message is
delivered properly.
An improperly delivered message will get disregarded by children, no
matter how good the message is.
Each child has their own “delivery filter”. There are certain types of
messages that their filter will allow, and they have others that their filter
will reject.
The key is to find what can get through the filter, and even who can
get through the filter.
The same message can have very different results depending on who is
delivering it, how it is being delivered and when it is being delivered.
Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who
lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with
people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes,
enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills
and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child
safety.
You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com
Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here
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