Let's talk about the response. All right. interpersonal interactions are like an asset. And I promise you this is leading up to the question of, well, what is the best response to someone who's cranky? All right. So we're going to go through the science right now, and talk about the different ways you can respond and then talk about how we use that to help someone who's cranky, not be cranky anymore, right customer who's cranky, right?

So our interpersonal interactions are like a dance, okay? One person is doing something the other person is responding. And then the first person responds to the second one, and so forth. It's a cycle. It's interaction. There's, there's one or more two or more people involved in these interactions.

And in the case of a cranky customer, they're being cranky, you're responding to the crankiness. And they're responding to how you respond to that. So understanding that your response is gonna have an impact on this person. You're dealing with. That's the key to personal interpersonal enlightenment, understanding your behavior impacts how the other person behaves is the key to everything. All right?

Despite all your triggers, you can choose how you respond. And that's great news. But again, the question is, what's the best response to help a cranky person be, you know, less cranky? The answer in general, with some caveats is a neutral polite response. Well, a neutral, a very calm, not not excited, not. not nervous, not energetic, just a very calm, neutral tone of voice is the best response and there's some caveats to that, which I'm not going to get into in this course.

Again, I've got books and other programs that kind of go into the neutral response element in in more detail. What I'm gonna give you right now is, is kind of the quick version of the science right? Now, a word on where this is coming from this is behavioral psychology, specifically operant conditioning, people have been looking at the impact that positive, negative, negative and neutral responses have on learning and unlearning of behaviors in animals and in humans for almost seven years now. And what you need to understand is like, I'm not gonna give you any links to the research, right? And the reason I'm not is because there's never been a single study in the seven years that showed any different response like these things. What we've known about the positive, negative neutral has been validated by every single study ever done in the last 70 years.

Alright, so if you want to learn more about this, like go to Google academics, Docs, and type in operant conditioning, and you're gonna find Hundreds of thousands of research papers going back decades on so just choose one that looks interesting. You know, they look at this on like drug control how kids learn animals and birds and fish and like literally decades of research and what we know about how positive negative and neutral responses impact and shape people's an animal's behavior is. It's not even questioned anymore. It's just what everybody knows. Alright, so let's go into this. A positive reinforcement is like something happens and you like it.

So say you really like pistachio ice cream and you get some pistachio ice cream and it tastes absolutely fabulous and you really, really love it. That's a positive reinforcement that's going to make you want more ice cream. Right? So if you have ice cream and it tastes really good, you're going to want more ice cream. Now, a negative reinforcement is say you have some ice cream and it makes you throw up. You might think Never want ice cream again, right?

It's a negative negative response, negative reinforcement. And the neutral response is where you eat some ice cream. And it's okay. It's not good. It's not bad math. All right.

Now, what the science shows us is that yes, positive reinforcement does tend to reinforce the behavior. All right? What's counterintuitive is you would think the negative reinforcement would make you not want to do the behavior, but it's just the opposite. Negative reinforcement is actually reinforcement. Negative reinforcement only pushes people away from the behavior the first time they experience so the first time you do something, you have a bad experience, you're probably never doing it again. But if you've had a lot of positive experiences, and then you get a negative experience, that negative experience in that context after positive experiences, just makes you want more.

All right, let me give Let me tell you a little story about this. I went to China when I was in college, and we became obsessed with ice cream. I mean, like seriously, we would go to pagodas and not go to the Dakota because we'd go into town and look for the ice cream. We were just completely obsessed with it. And what was happening was that every once in a while we'd get a really good ice cream. Most of the time we get math, okay, ice cream.

And every once in a while we got we get ice cream that didn't even have any sugar in it. Like it was really bad. And if the fact that we weren't getting good ice cream all the time, but every once in a while is what made us obsessed with it. If we were always getting good ice cream, we wouldn't have become obsessed it was the fact that sometimes we had bad experiences mixed in with our good experiences that made us want to do it all the time. Right. Do not underestimate what's called variable reinforcement.

Sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad. Yeah, that makes that strengthens behavior and the rule of thumb for trainers Is that negative reinforcement is still considered reinforcement. So what you need to have to eliminate behavior is actually a neutral response. And again, we have a research on all I have to do is type in operant conditioning extinguishing behavior to find that hundreds of thousands of articles, academic articles on this topic, and they all say the same thing. What works to stop unwanted behavior is a neutral response, a calm, neutral response. If every time you get a calm, neutral response, you're going to give up the behavior.

If you're getting negative responses, sometimes you're going to strengthen the behavior. That's just one of those counterintuitive things. All right. Now, this is kind of, well, let's bring this back to our customers. Right. When we deal with difficult people, we tend to respond negatively right, that's to be expected there being cranky earnings.

Our natural response is to go, Oh, we don't like that. That's negative and then we get negative back. All right, and we might be passive aggressive with them. We may have tried to pretend to be nice, all the while thinking that we hate them because they're jerks. They're being jerks to us. So we just want to get through it.

But we're thinking horrible thoughts about them. And I know you've done this, we've all done this. This is kind of a natural human response. It doesn't mean it's a good response. But we all do it. Negative reinforcement though, as long as you're you're responding negatively, you're going to generate more negativity.

That's just the way it works. And this should be obvious, but fighting stupid, cranky people with stupid crankiness is not as pretty stupid. All right, all that a cranky person learns from you being cranky with them right back is that their crankiness was totally justified. They went in expecting to have a fight and you fought them and boy was Right. That's not what you want your customers to learn. Right?

What's counterintuitive though, is that being nice doesn't really work either. And, and you would think, oh, if I just kill them with kindness, right, then they'll like me, that's not gonna work either. We've all had this experience where someone's nasty to us, and we respond by genuinely being nice to them, and then they lash out at us, right? Just makes it worse. Now, there's a reason this happens. And it has to do with the fact that positive reinforcement is a reinforcement and I can go into the science behind it.

Now, there's some caveats to this. And again, if you want to know what they are and understand the science better, you need to take a slightly different, a different course or get the book the bully vaccine for more information. Right? But what you need to understand is positive reinforcement is still reinforcement. So what the person's learning is, good things happen to me. People are nice to me when I'm in I get my way when I'm nasty and cranky, right?

And is that really what you want your customer to learn? Yeah, no, because then they're always gonna be like that with you. And it's gonna be very, very frustrating. Yeah, the ideal is to keep the customer and make them happy, but train them not to be cranky with you, right? And to do that, you're really gonna have to master the neutral response as an emotionally neutral response. All right.

In order to get people to stop behaving badly with you, you have to stop rewarding their bad behavior. And if you do nice things for them, you're rewarding it and if you're nasty with them, you're validating their bad behavior. So you really have to be just calm and neutral with them. And I'm not saying don't be nice to them, don't try to solve their problem. I'm saying be nice to them. Smile and all those things when they're being nice to you.

But don't be mean to them, either. Alright, they're not being nice, don't be mean. But just be calm and neutral. All right? What you want to do is not reward the crankiness while still engaging with this person and trying to get their problem solved. And you're going to try and redirect them into a positive interaction with you.

Now, this is not someone who's just called up. And, you know, they started out cranking you said, Okay, I'm gonna try and solve your problem, and then they calm down. This is for people who are just like really, really, really, really just not letting you help them solve their problems. Okay? So let's, let's do an example of this. I have a frazzled customer, right?

You're say you're a web designer, and you have a customer come to you and they need something turned around like right now. And that's not realistic, but it's their fault because they didn't come to you sooner with this problem. And they want you to fix it now. Nananana now and that's not realistic and they're mad at you because of something that They did not because of something you did, but something they did. They're yelling at you. What do you do?

Like how do you handle that sort of customer? Well, you could yell back and say, you know, well, don't play me, this is your fault, but that's negative. And that's not a good way to keep a customer. You could apologize and try to do your best and that would be the positive response. But all you taught them to do is that cranky works, I can bully people into doing the things I need them to do. And that's not ideal either, because they will do it again and again and again.

And you're gonna keep facing this with them over and over and over again. And you end up not doing your best work, you you maybe do it at a price point, you shouldn't be doing it out. There's all sorts of ways that cranky people bully us into doing things for them that we shouldn't be doing. That's why they're doing it. It kind of works. Like Remember what I said sometimes it's about fear.

Sometimes they're just overwhelmed, but sometimes It's learned, yeah. If you give into the bullying by being overly nice and apologetic, like it's your fault, you're teaching them that they can bully you. And that's not what you want them to learn. Your third option is the initial response. Right? You can sympathize with their plight understand that when they yell at you, they're doing so because they can't really yell at themselves.

But don't get baited into the drama, right? This is their drama, not your drama, you just want to help them. Alright, but they have to be calm so that you can help them. Otherwise you can't have a rational discussion about how to fix the problem. As long as they're yelling and demanding irrational things, you're not getting the problem solved. So you need them to calm down.

And the way to do that is to become yourself. Alright? Notice the focus, you are willing to help them if they will let you help them. Right. That's their choices. As long as they're not they're being cranky, and they're not Being rational and they're not letting you help them rationally.

You can't help them, right? You want to help them, but it's up to them to let you help them. It's up to them to make that shift before you can shift into helping them. To pull this off, you need to not get frazzled. And you need to stand your ground politely and calmly. And with as little emotion as possible, right, very calm, say something along the lines of I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

But not as snarky as I just did more like I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. I understand you're under deadline, but because of whatever. But what you're asking for is not realistic. So let's talk about alternative ways to get this project done. Right. Calm, neutral tone of voice I contacted possible.

It's calm, it's sympathetic. It's helpful but you haven't just rolled and solve their problem either. Right? You're waiting for them to acknowledge that you're going to try and help them so that you can help them. And this seems like an unnecessary step. Like why not just help them?

Well, if you say, Well, let me help you. And they say, Okay, great. And they work together with you, then you're done. All right. Um, but if they're not, then you just have to repeat I'm sorry. I understand.

But I can't. So let's talk about what we can do instead and keep waiting for them and keep repeating that until they're willing to let you help them. What you're doing is you're asking them calmly. If they want you to help them solve their current problem, whatever that is. Right? You're letting them be frantic.

You're letting them be cranky and but you're also trying to redirect them to the solution, whatever that solution might be, right. If they don't want to solve their problem, because all they really want to do is rant, that's fine. Don't waste your time trying to solve their problem, if all they want to do is rant because you're not going to help them by solving their problem if they don't actually want their problem solved, because what they want to do is rant and some people just want to rant. So let them but keep refocusing. And on the question of Okay, I understand. Let's talk about how to solve this until they're calm enough to have that conversation about how to solve this.

Just repeating the call, I understand. Let's figure out how to solve this. You can only really solve their problem if they ask you to. And if they do, you can suggest alternatives that will work compromises things like that. But as long as they're emotionally agitated and freaked out and telling you and berating you and doing whatever cranky people do, just slow down deliberatively and calmly, counter their frankness, their practice franticness With calmness, right and deliberateness, you are modeling the emotional state you want them to get to. So that together, you can solve the problem.

All right? If they calm down great sympathize with their anxiety, let them know you're going to help them however you can within the constraints that exist and then set about trying to solve it with realistic alternatives. The point is that you need to remain calm, it's the calm response that's going to help them now they might respond with more franticness for a while, and that's to be expected. And again, it has to do with extinction of a behavior tends to escalate things and again, that's kind of wonky sciency I go into that dynamic, the the escalation dynamic more in other places, just understand that this might not work the first time you express it, right, you might have to continue to express your calm willingness to help them a few times before their their call. Okay. Now if they calm down right away, great, but if they're not coming down right away, just remain calm and keep reiterating.

I'm sorry. Let me try and help you. Okay? What I found is that once someone lets me help them, I can turn them into one of my greatest customers, right? And we all get cranky, we all have our moments, we all freak out. But if someone helps me solve my problem, I'm loyal to them.

Right? If they helped me get calm, and they helped me fix my problem in a way that really does work. They've got the customer for life, basically. So mastering the common response, the sympathetic response, well, making sure the person actually wants you to solve their problem and offering alternatives so that you can solve their problem is the way to go. That's what works. That's the neutral response.