Pari wrote:
Last week, you mentioned that a client made some sort of accommodation in how she wrote to her VA that made her VA feel better about the contribution she was being asked to me. I have to say, I don’t want to have to work that hard to communicate with my VA. I want to write what I write and have her get it…get me.
I get you, Pari. This is honestly the reason that I never went into NLP; I didn’t want to learn how to shift my own communication style to meet the needs of people I talked with. Instead, I wanted relationships where the communication was easy.
And I’ve surrounded myself with those people. Every single person on my team communicates in a way that fits with mine. There’s quickness, lightness, and ease to what we do together that makes things extra-special nice, and it feels so freeing.
You can have that. It just means that you need to choose a VA where the communication between the two of you feels easy and effortless from the beginning. The more that’s true, the less there will be a need for either of you to accommodate the other.
In my other post, there was already an established relationship, and they’d just hit a snag. The accommodation the client made for the VA was very small. I didn’t write about it, and maybe I should have, so I’ll do it now.
You’ll remember that the VA was having trouble with the client forwarding things and simply saying, “What do you think?” The fix was for her to say instead, “I think X. What’s your perspective on it?” The real fix for the VA was the client’s sharing her own thoughts before asking the VA for hers.
Can you see that that wasn’t a big shift for the client to make? And actually, it created a much bigger connection between them and helped them get to some depth in the conversation faster?
That’s the level of accommodation I’d suggest. If you have to make yourself do it, it’s just another pain point you’ll ultimately avoid.
