Category: Voice/Tone/Trust Building

Counter Intuitive

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20 COMMENTS

With the possible exception of the day Taylor decided she’d had enough of country, the saddest day of my life was the day our dog Abbie died. I was rarely in the house when she wasn’t, and no matter what she was up to when I walked in the door, she never failed to come over and excitedly greet me. Contrast that with my three children who, while in their late teens, had trouble differentiating between me and the mailman. Of course, at some point, we knew Abbie’s days were numbered. […] Click to read more…

Risky Business 

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17 COMMENTS

We were down in Atlanta this past weekend, visiting our son Evan. For reasons we fail to understand, Evan prefers mild winters, friendly inhabitants, and modern airports over whatever the opposite of all that is that we offer here in Massachusetts. As it happens, Evan is in the market for a new living room couch. And so, in between eating a month’s worth of food in a single, three-day period, we visited a few stores to help him decide. When it comes to buying furniture – bed, chair, couch, whatever […] Click to read more…

Eyes Wide Shut

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19 COMMENTS

I was standing on the second-floor landing of a hotel lobby waiting for my wife. I knew she was coming soon, so I just stood there. I wasn’t looking at my phone … I wasn’t walking around … I was just standing there. Suddenly, I heard a door unlock and immediately realized I was directly in front of somebody’s room. Uh oh. I didn’t want to run away as if I had been deliberately lurking. But I couldn’t just stand there either without looking like someone who had been deliberately lurking. Fortunately, there […] Click to read more…

Presumed Competent

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4 COMMENTS

Long ago, I had a client, a financial planner. One day, while visiting his home office, I noticed a BMW sportscar sitting in his driveway. He had always driven a pickup truck, so I assumed it wasn’t his. But he said no, it was. Except pretty much the only time he drove it was when he was going to meet with a client. As he explained, “If your financial planner shows up in a pickup truck, you assume he’s not very good.” That seemed to make sense. And I guess it […] Click to read more…

Impersonal Personalization 

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16 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Back in the day – and I mean WAY back in the day – my dentist used to send me a birthday card every year. It was snail-mailed (that’s all there was at the time), hand-addressed, and hand-signed by both he and the three or four other people working in his office. Now the truth is, I don’t know for sure any of these people actually signed the cards. Maybe they hired someone to use different colored pens and fake different signatures to make it look like they did. […] Click to read more…