They’re people.
At the end of the day, it might be “the Johnson account” for your business, but they see themselves as Jim and Sandy Johnson, with an eight-year-old in the talent show and an eleven-year-old on the soccer team. Jim and Sandy, with their own lives, their own mortgage to pay, and their own problems in life. They don’t see themselves as your clients, but as their own family and within their own existence.
The only way to understand yourself and the way to best deal with people is to undertake the task of understanding other people. The following paragraph was quoted in Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and comes from Carl R. Rogers’s “On Becoming a Person.”
I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand the other person. The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you, Is it necessary to permit oneself to understand another? I think it is. Our first reaction to most of the statements (which we hear from other people) is an evaluation or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel "that's right," or "that's stupid," "that's abnormal," "that's unreasonable," "that's incorrect," "that's not nice."
Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.
