Giving voice and vision to our compassion and to our resulting feelings of the unconditional might seem a daunting task. Such a consideration on a daily basis could feel well outside our daily meaning perspectives. Our insecure identity would ask about how such a thing could be realistically accomplished. Our defensive ego might declare that it's a good idea, but no one has time for such a thing these days. That internal dialogue sounds like the one I went through when I examined my life in all its forms to see if I could find ways of discovering some way of speaking my "Yes" to the I/Thou.
A good part of the answer came when our friend Janet sent me a cassette: Introduction to Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. This form of communication is also called Compassionate Communication, a title I rather prefer. The first title reads as a "No" to violent communication, but it may speak more clearly to a time of such essentially violent daily communication than a "Yes" to the idea of compassion. In life generally, we may need to expose the disease before we can pursue a remedy.
I listened to the tape a number of times, and I felt and applied compassionate communication, rather uncomfortably for a while, to my job as an English teacher at a community college and beyond. Its use presented quite a challenge for quite a while, but it showed its value in my use of it. I kept moving further and further into the idea and practice of Compassionate Communication. Later, when I was teaching employment skills to students seeking a new start in their professional and personal lives, it became a natural part of what we learned together. The communication component of this training class served as a central part of the often dour discussion of customer service.
In our discussion of customer service, most of the students thought we would just go through some of the very instrumental, learn-it-and-do-it-have-a-nice-day forms of customer service. That's what they learned before in jobs they'd held, and that's what they felt accustomed to in being dealt with as a customer. In striving to question the usual and prevailing meaning perspective of customer service, we critically reflected on how we defined "customer" and how we defined "service."
Our beginning discussion about customer service went very much the same most of the time. Someone would say that a customer was a "walking wallet" or "the one who pays your salary." Most everyone would focus in the customer as someone to whom you sold things. That stems from the dominator model of business where you only serve others because they really serve the business, the dominator. Eventually after asking whether any of us wanted to be treated like a wallet or a paycheck, to which they all said "NO," we looked for something more satisfying than the usual and prevailing ideas about who customers really are. We decided all customers had a need. We also decided that we all had needs all day long. It was an essential part of all of our lives, of ourselves. When we could let go of the meaning perspective about customers that came from experts and others, we would find ourselves experts at human needs. Being human ourselves, we all felt those needs. We all wanted them fulfilled.
We wondered what would fulfill these needs. Many students answered that customers, and we are all customers, wanted respect.[127] Granted that we want respect, it would serve our purpose to define respect. Definition comes hard for most of us. We don't do it often. Many times our definitions came out in a circular fashion: respect = polite and polite = respect.