Interpersonal Interactions

[dmaze]

Compare and contrast:

(1) Needed to call lawyer a couple of times last week and this week. Horrible source of stress! Don't know what to ask, don't know what answers to expect, unspecified fear of phone. All bad. Did actually succeed in doing it but with a lot of warmup.

(2) Went to IBM HR thing all day Tuesday, which involved a fair amount of talking to HR people and other employees that I've never met before. This was fine; I got a reasonable amount of advice, I got some useful consistent answers to the "what do I need to do to advance my career in the next couple of years" question, I exchanged "elevator speeches" and life stories with a couple of people in one of the afternoon sessions.

What makes these different? One factor might be that I can procrastinate at the telephone the way I can't in person. (I delay "important" email too, but I can eventually just sit down and crank it out without too much pain; it's also much less interactive.) A second is that my relationship with the lawyer, whom I'll have to deal with probably a couple more times in the next month or two, is longer than my relationships with the other IBM people, whom I'll probably never see again. And I'm much more familiar with the general mode of social interaction with meeting people in a professional environment, where I do kind of half expect the lawyer to tell me "you're on crack, this needs to completely get redone and it'll take weeks of your time and cost thousands of dollars".

How do people who live their lives on the phone deal? I'd think that, say, any kind of sales position I'd be really terrible at.

Comments

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Heh. Now you'll be all ready to call your assigned property from the last external meeting :)

During the course of SPUR, I figured out something about #1. Basically, no matter how much I procrastinate doing that stuff, or think that I need to first figure out what to say or need to prepare materials, it never actually gets any better. Therefore, there's no point in putting it off, and if I do it sooner, that's one less thing to be dreading. Also, for some reason, after making some phone calls essentially asking someone whether they could donate a large chunk of money and time to the cause, other sorts of phoning are comparatively less intimidating. So all you need to do is make a couple of phone calls asking for a major donation or asking someone to be fundraising chair.

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

Yeah, for some reason I was actually on the ball with those calls. I have no idea why. I guess part of it was that I knew I was going out of town, so I should just go ahead and deal. But having a script also helped a lot. :)

So I have some idea why, then, but not in a way that directly helps...

[narya.livejournal.com]

I think the IBM experience and the lawyer experience are different in another way - in the case of IBM, if you don't get anything out of the experience, your expectation is probably that it's IBM's fault. After all, lots of people are attending and IBM is making you go. In the case of the lawyer, you are probably thinking that if you don't get what you want out of it then you have screwed yourself.

I think the best sales people I've dealt with have been successful because they really do believe that whoever they are selling to needs their product and will be happier because of it. I don't think you can be successful if your mentality in calling up clients is that you're asking them to do you a favor. I do think you could do it if you had to, but I doubt you'd ever like it.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I'm procrastinating phone calls right now.

I had a work personna, and it was much easier to make phone calls about work than personal phone calls.

Phone calls are harder for me because:
- I like hanging out with humans, so even scary things are less scary when there's a person there.
- When you don't know what you need to say it's easy to make vague statements in person and then take in cues from the other person to figure out what to say.
- Most of the phone calls I have to make involve either my having screwed something up or someone else having screwed something up, and that means the call is going to be uncomfortable.

Personally phone calls do get better for me when I have a script. For really intimidating phone calls (like to contractors, who seem to hate phone calls as much as I do) I will actually write out the script ahead of time.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Contractors hate phone calls because there's a good chance that you're going to ask them to either:

1) do the work you paid them for or

2) do extra work for free that wasn't in the original spec

But I think 1 is the source of most of their discomfort.

[ilai]

When I was at my tech support job and on the phone all the time, I psyched myself up with the same reasoning nuclearpolymer gave--that no matter how much I procrastinate, it'll never go away, and so I might as well just do it and get it over with. It also helped that I had prepared notes, so whenever I called a customer, I would have my notes in front of me should anything come up. Of course, if a customer called me up cold, I wouldn't have any sort of preparation, but I could also remind myself that I know more about our product than they do (which applies to your lawyer situation as well--the lawyer knows all kinds of legal stuff that you wouldn't ever think of, but you are the expert on your situation, which the lawyer needs to understand somehow).

It also gets easier with practice, but that doesn't really make the first few times any less scary :-)

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Ironically, you can use general phone phobia to your advantage. If you tell most people that "if you don't do X by date Y, I'm going to call you on the phone and ask about it", they actually tend to do X. Of course, not so much contractors, since they can just keep ignoring the calls.