Finding the Soft Side of a Tough Customer

This article grew out of my disagreement with a point raised by Perry W. Buffington in Cheap Psychological Tricks. Obviously many writers and speakers have made huge amounts of money by teaching people to "be assertive" with those whom they find intimidating, demand that those people "be vulnerable," and thereby transform "intimidating" encounters into presumably warm, fuzzy, nurturing experiences. Obviously this industry would not exist if the techniques it teaches didn't work for some people, some of the time.

I am an individual who's had very rewarding long-term working relationships with several people others found difficult, or impossible, to work with...and most of them weren't even related to me. What made those relationships work was definitely not any of those "instant friendship" techniques taught by people like Dale Carnegie, Werner Erhard, Anthony Robbins, and so on. Suzette Haden Elgin's Success with the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense contains a detailed discussion of a Tough Customer whose main difference from other businessmen is his "touch-dominant" mental process; these ideas might work in some situations but have not been applicable to mine. What I have to share is what's worked for me.

When I think back about working with well-known Tough Customers, thoughts about bonding with wild and feral animals, and with fellow introverts, come to mind. I think these thoughts are relevant because my favorite Tough Customers were fellow introverts...although some of them, typically older men, put on "masks" of aggressive, borderline-hostile manners.

When I say that wild animals have much in common with introverts, I'm not suggesting that introversion is "on the borderline of the autistic spectrum." I'm not convinced that there is a real autistic spectrum, although I can believe that milder forms of brain damage may produce milder degrees of autistic-like behavior. What wild animals, as distinct from pets, have in common with introverts, as distinct from extroverts, is that our fellow mortals in both of these categories are primarily concerned about things that have little to do with us. They neither love us nor fear us very much; mostly they're not interested in us. Like a deer who neither flees nor attacks, but just looks at us across a meadow, they're focussed on their own business; we're just a minor distraction.

Understanding and respecting this disinterest is the key to being able to work with these people and animals. If you are detached, and ask for only as much of their attention as will be positively helpful to them as well as you, you are more likely to get what you need. If you are consistently detached, disinterested, and positively helpful, over time, a bond may form.

This is why I think it's important to avoid all the pop-psychological gush about "love and fear." In a situation where detachment is going to work, Ms. or Mr. Impossible is using common sense to protect self from everyday stress and inconvenience. You don't get much chance to use detachment when someone is really feeling fear, and your chance of being able to use detachment is greatly reduced if you feel for them what they feel for their close friends and relatives. If you must put a label on your feelings or "attitude," I recommend "respect" or "courtesy."

Like any wild animal, Impossible has probably cultivated a threat display used to discourage anyone who looks as if he or she intends to make himself or herself tiresome. Threat displays vary. Those of humans are usually more subtle than those of other animals.

Professional adult humans, who ought to feel completely secure and confident about their dealings with you, but may want to avoid emotional intimacy, often use deliberate displays of lack of sympathy for your emotions. You might have stammered, choking back tears, "Doctor, I have this horrible squishy lump and I'm afraid it might be c-c-cancer," and the doctor sneered, "Oh ha ha, there's been a lot of mononucleosis at your school."

Or you took one of the tools of your trade into the repair shop, which displays one of those posters that shows people rolling about in convulsions of laughter, "You want it when, and for how much?" And the repairman glanced at the poster before saying, "This is such an antique, it's not really cost-effective even to try..." (This is especially obnoxious in computer shops, where the repairman may be younger than you are but has still, obviously, been around a lot longer than your "antique.") The purpose of this threat display may be to sell you a new gadget (he may even get a commission from the dealer), or simply to protect the repairman from the inconvenience of having to look around for the part your gadget needs.

Or you're a home health aide, physical therapist, massage therapist, occupational therapist, visiting nurse, etc., and although you think you're the one who's intimidated by the power an obviously ill and confused person has to destroy your career, your superior health and strength are still intimidating to some patients...so when you introduce yourself as the health care worker the agency sent out, the patient snarls, "Get out of my house."

This kind of behavior is obnoxious in the same way, and for the same reason, that animals' threat displays are obnoxious. It is never a good idea to push forward toward someone who is making a threat display. If prolonged observation of the species has shown you that this is a lower-level threat display, and you still want to interact with the one making the display, it may be a good idea to stand your ground, neither pushing forward nor fleeing.

The first "no," or "Get out of my house," or "So where'd the agency find you, anyway? You know the last little fool they sent out here didn't last even half a day before she went home in tears," is likely to be a threat display. Don't push forward; don't flee. Reply without an emotional reaction.

"You don't want physical therapy? Is this the wrong address? Are you Mrs. Smith?"

"What do I need to know about what the last temp did wrong?"

"I'm used to this gadget, and I like it. How much would it cost to replace the widget?"

When Polly, a feral kitten who became a wonderful pet cat, first approached me she bit and scratched my hand. She was big enough to break the skin in several places. Since I knew she wasn't rabid I recognized this as a relatively low-level threat display, so I ignored the scratches and pushed back against her mouth when she bit. From that day forward, Polly knew I wasn't going to attack her, so she became friendly. I've seen human Tough Customers lower their defenses as quickly as Polly did.

One of my odd jobs actually had "Feminist Activist" as a title. The organization had "Against Sexual Assault" in its name. What we were trying to do was open a safe house for victims of rape and domestic abuse. The first time I knocked on a stranger's door and introduced myself as coming from this organization Against Sexual Assault, and the homeowner said, "Oh, we're all for that," I felt outraged and stomped away in a bad temper.

The next time, I used detachment: "Are you really?"

Smart Aleck said, "Yeah, I love it when my wife assaults me. I wish she'd do it more often." So I gave him the half-smile this joke deserved, and he said, "But of course that's not what you had in mind, is it?" and within five minutes he'd donated some money.

It's important to recognize higher-level threat displays, and back off without sacrificing your dignity, too...but if you've not used detachment before, it's remarkable how effectively detachment disarms threat displays.

At this point, only half the battle has been won. What you've gained is the chance to prove that your idea (whatever it is) has some merit. "Your" songbirds can safely take birdseed from your hand. Your mean-mouthed, possibly bigoted, probably dyspeptic and peevish customer can safely allow you to type on his precious computer. Your emotion-phobic doctor (or lawyer, who's probably even worse) can give you the information for which you're paying without your becoming hysterical and leaving wads of Kleenex all over the office.

For this purpose, some of Buffington's other Cheap Psychological Tricks can be helpful. When I've bonded with Tough Customers, however, it's been by being a fellow introvert who shared their interests and had a skill or talent that was useful to them.

The George Peters FacTapes come to mind...especially the one about abortion, which I didn't want to make. Now that he's dead, it's safe to admit what local readers remember: only one other man ever thought he wanted to work with Mr. Peters, and most people were scared of that man too. I didn't think I wanted anything to do with that old grouch either...but I happen to enjoy doing exhaustive research. If online publishers were paying me to go to law libraries, university libraries, the Library of Congress, and the obscure small-town library that's preserved the last copy of some old book, I'd be doing that now. Mr. Peters paid for that kind of research for the FacTapes; each 90-minute tape was really an abridged book.

I suspect that there were times, during the months of research that went into the abortion tape, when everyone involved yanked one of the draft tapes out of a machine and bounced it off a wall. Still, eventually all those who stayed with the project were glad we did. Those of us who are still alive, after all these years, are still friends. And after using detachment to negotiate points of agreement with the participants whose views infuriated me, I have to say: making the abortion tape was the job I've enjoyed most in my life.

Then there was the curmudgeon who actually did greet me with the line about having sent the last temp home in tears. His field was international trade law, which I find intimidating when it's not simply boring; his specific interest was Israel, and I think he was fractionally more patient with me because he thought I looked Jewish. He was elderly and dyspeptic but his unrealistic expectation was that all typists should be familiar with Hebrew words and names. I checked out library books and became familiar with those words and names. During the third week I worked there I revealed that all my known ancestors were Protestants, but it didn't seem to matter any more. During the week I was accepted by Berea College, he offered me a full-time job.

Threat displays made in the office are usually some variation on "I can make you look really stupid." Introverts are likely to feel threatened by demands for "teamwork" and "positive attitudes" and similar unnatural acts, and also likely to be able to make the people who make and respond to those demands look stupid. At 22, when hired for a long-term job, I was told, "We want the data entry clerk to start while the programmer who will be the clerk's boss is on vacation, because he's so difficult to work with."

Luckily, I used detachment to figure out the useful piece of information in that remark, which is "There are some simple routine parts of your job that you can do without supervision." Luckily, the routine tasks involved transferring pieces of paper from one stack to another, so when Mr. Difficult came back from vacation he could see a nice big stack of processed data and a small stack of data about which I was ready to ask him intelligent questions. He was about my age but a year behind me in school, and there was a mutual lack of attraction; I didn't want him as a friend. All I wanted was to be told how to do my job and earn my salary and pay off my college loan.

So a few weeks went by, and suddenly we were friends, car pool buddies who laughed at each other's computer jargon puns and agreed that just three of the other twenty-some workers at the office were competent, and I said, "Mike's competent too," and the programmer said, "He is not," and I still thought he had an ugly face and he still thought I had coffee breath, but we were still friends.

This kind of friendship and fun may or may not happen every time you disarm a Tough Customer enough to work with him or her. What I have observed is that detachment works better than "assertiveness." Nobody who squeaked angrily, "You don't have to talk that way to me-e-e," ever worked two days with any of those three grumpy, surly men I learned to love. They would take an "assertive" line as a personal challenge and start proving that they could send the "assertive" person away, preferably in tears. When people ignored the threat displays and did the kind of work they found useful, they were free to act kind and generous.

There is seldom much to lose by using detachment with a Tough Customer. I recommend trying it.

SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING

For an online introduction to the G.A.V.S.D. system, click here. (G.A.V.S.D. is a specialized way of using detachment.)

Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is the basic business communications book that facilitates communication with people who aren't Tough Customers. You can actually download it here.

Anthony Robbins' books, e.g. Awaken the Giant Within, are "inspirational" fun reads that can help relieve the stress of working among people who enjoy this style of communication.

The comparison between the perceptions of animals, wild or domestic, and humans with certain kinds of brain damage comes from Temple Grandin's work, published in books like Thinking in Pictures. Visit Dr. Grandin here.

Marti Olsen Laney's Introvert Advantage and its sequels are the definitive studies on working with "true" (long brain stem, LBS) introverts. Her web page is here.

As Elaine Aron's Highly Sensitive Person series explains, highly sensory-perceptive (HSP) introverts have a different trait from LBS introverts (although it's possible for one person to have both traits). Elaine Aron's web page for HSPs is here.