Honey Or Vinegar?

There is an old expression that says – “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”  This slogan usually applies to customers when it comes to resolving issues or complaints with businesses or companies.  When a customer has some sort of negative experience with a business or company – for whatever reason, in his or her effort to get it resolved, they usually have 2 approaches they can take. 

The can kick, moan, swear, groan, scream, and threaten to try to get their desired resolution – or they can “kill the company with kindness” to try to get what they want.

So why is this slogan a focus of this blog post?  Although it pertains to business resolution, it can also apply to the principals of everyday life.  So are you the type of person that naturally emits Honey instead of Vinegar? 

For example, do you view negative setbacks or obstacles as opportunities (honey), or do you react as if you as if you've just been punched in the eye (vinegar)?  Does constructive criticism from other people make you take a second look at how you can improve (honey), or does it fuel a fire within to go on the offensive and fight back (vinegar)?  Is the very point of winning the outcome of an argument or disagreement (vinegar), more important that sorting out the facts, and drawing a best met conclusion (honey?) 

As you can see, the honey and vinegar slogan can apply to almost any areas of your life such as relationships, work, dealing with family members, interacting with your children and yes – even dealing that pizza delivery person - who deserves to be beheaded or at least a public hanging - simply because it took him or her 31 minutes instead of 30 minutes to deliver your food.

Take our business of hypnosis.  Although we have client policies and guidelines that we follow and adhere to, we are always more receptive to the honey approach.  For example, we recently had a client who came in for her hypnosis session.  After a good hour or so, she disclosed that she simply wasn’t able to go through with the session because she just didn’t feel ready.  Now, although we have a no refund and/or late cancellation policy, we gave back every penny why?  Because she was so nice and pleasant, that I could in good conscience change for her visit.  In fact, she ever persisted on paying us something for the time I did spend with her, but I refused.  Now, I could have stuck to my guns, but I am glad I made this decision, because although she had personal reservations, she was so grateful that she ended up referring 5 clients to us, simply because we waived her fee.

So as you can see, not being ready to go through with a scheduled session may not sound like a truly valid reason for waiving at least our late cancellation fee, as we did spend a great deal of time with her.  However, the fact is, she was kind, honest, and didn’t try to disguise her change of heart into some sore of service complaint just to get a refund.  Therefore, she won over our compassion to break our office policies to make an exception to make her happy.  And she in turn sent us some interested clients.  This is a honey highway!  

From our example above, you can see that both honey and vinegar can also be contagious to some degree.  When you treat someone or a situation with a degree of respect, dignity, and compassion, it tends to come back around full circle.  However, if you are quick start off on the offensive and put down, criticize, or complain with hurtful vengeance, you are bond to be exposed to equal retaliation or at least, resistance.

So in closing, the moral of this blog post is that you get out of life, what you put into it.  That’s why it important to self-evaluate your reaction status when it comes to the a speed bump in the road of life.  There will always be challenging and trying times, and in most cases, they way we handle it, is what will actually determine the outcome.  This is not to say that there aren’t times in life when you require a little bit of vinegar to get your point across.  However, any good cook knows that you can always add more – but you can’t take it away.  Adding too much vinegar in the beginning could spoil the meal.


Visit Positive Change Hypnosis

Even in dark times, there is light!

I am a huge advocate of staying positive and trying to see the bright side of life especially through the hardest of times. On the flip side I am a realist and I understand that this is a difficult task that requires consistent reminding to ourselves. Nevertheless a smile upon our face and taking things with a grain of salt can somehow make even the bumpy roads feel a little bit smoother.

Here is a good personal example of this. I begin every day in pretty much the same way. I get up at 4 AM and proceed to brew my morning coffee as I feed my dog and cat. Afterwards I head down to my home office, log onto my computer and I begin each day by checking my email accounts. As a business owner I have about 8 separate accounts that are used for all different purposes ranging from customer feedback to business and PR.

So while I am in the process of signing into one of the accounts I realize that it is prompting me to change my password. As strange as this seemed at the time, I confirmed that this was not a phishing page and decided to go along with the request. Everything seemed legitimate as I receive a conformation at my secondary email address confirming the change.

So I then attempt to sign in but was unsuccessful in doing so. It kept looping me back to a "verify password" screen. At this time I began to worry that this email address had been comprise and hacked into. However I wasn’t very worried as I do not use it for personal information and it is used for very limited client contact.

And so, I attempted to try and get email support for the error and while doing so, I was informed that this email address was indeed compromised and that there was scheduled maintenance being performed on the email client server. I would need to wait until later in the day to log into it. During this time, I am assuming the worst. What did this hacker do to my account and how many spam emails we sent out to people on my behalf? I would have to wait to find out.

Later in the afternoon I again attempted to sign in and presto, success at last! Not much seemed out if place except that I had four emails form past clients. These clients all took the time to inform me that they had receive spam from my email address and that they were aware that it had to be some type of problem with a hijacked account. I quickly responded to each of them explaining that my information had indeed been compromised and that the emails did not originate from me sending them out.

What happened next was amazing. Most of the clients responded back to me saying that it was no big deal. However, two of the four clients added that ironically, they had been waiting to book another hypnosis session with me to work on other areas that they want to improve and that they just have not gotten around to doing so.

So in the end, what seemed like a bad start to a bad day turned out to actually be beneficial in the long run. The spam email that they received from my email address acted as sort of a reminder to them and they went ahead and booked a hypnosis session with us. I guess in strange way, I sort of owe this hacker a little bit of gratitude because thanks to him or her, I have two additional clients for hypnosis next week. So you see, even in what might seem like the darkest of times, things have a funny way of working themselves out and are not as bad as they seem.

http://www.positivechangehypnois.net/