Hi there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now, today's question comes from a teary-eyed house cleaner who, if you look at her cross-eyed,
will bust up into tears.
If you, for whatever reason, decide you're going to give her some constructive feedback
on the job she just did, she'll just start bawling.
She lives right on the edge of her emotions, and everything is like ... She cries and she
gets all upset and bent out of shape, and whatever.
She wants to know, "How on earth am I supposed to run a business when I am so emotional?"
Well, that's an excellent question, and my answer for you is this — you do not.
If you are that emotional, you're not going to survive in business.
Now, when a customer is bold enough to give you some information, like,
"Your cleaning sucks," (laughing) take that to heart.
That is gold.
If you can fix this problem, and you can tweak a couple of things, and you can fix this to
all of your other house cleaning accounts, you'll never lack for work, okay?
It's the house cleaners that just cry, and they go home and they get upset.
Then, they go to the private Facebook group and they rant about their hateful customers
instead of saying, "Oh my goodness.
My customer gave me gold.
They gave me some feedback that can revolutionize my business if I make those changes."
First and foremost, I want you to change the way that you're thinking about your business.
If a customer gives you feedback, that is gold.
Use it and grow your business.
All right.
Now, as far as the emotions go, there's a lot of other stuff going on.
In our world as house cleaners, we are people pleasers.
We want to please people.
We want to make them happy and we want to provide them solutions.
So when a customer comes to us and they're like, "ugh ugh" (negative).
You didn't cut it," we take that personally, and we get offended and we get upset.
I get that.
I've been there.
I understand.
Okay, so I'm going to share with you the shark proof concept and I hope it helps you like I know,
for a fact, it helped me.
Here's how it works.
I was on a trip one day, and I had about a three-hour window between my air flight and
the last appointment that I had, with nowhere to go.
But there was an aquarium nearby, and I said, "Hey, why don't I go to the aquarium and burn
a couple of hours?"
So I went to the aquarium, because I hadn't been there for a while, and there were all
of these displays of exotic fish.
There was a great, big archway made of water, where fish and sharks and all different kinds
of sea life were swimming around this tunnel of water.
You walk right through it.
It was super awesome.
Well, in one of the displays, there was nothing but a clear glass box.
I was so enamored by the clear glass box because it obviously did not belong in this display.
There was one of those information specialists standing there, with the little uniform on,
like, "Hey, ask me a question.
I'm dying to give you an answer."
I said, "What's with the clear box?
There's no fish in it."
She said, "No.
That's not for fish; that's for people.
That is a shark proof cage.
We put photographers in the shark-proof cage and we lower them into the depths of the ocean.
They can stand there, in the shark-proof cage, and they can take photographs of the sharks.
The sharks can get close, but they can't harm the photographer, and the photographer can't
harm the sharks.
Then, when it's time, we reel the box back up to ground, and we've got all these amazing
underwater sea life photos."
I was like, "Whoa.
Okay, so there's a shark-proof box."
As I left that day, I started thinking, "I need a shark proof box.
I need to put myself in a shark proof box, where my customers, that are like, "Agh,"
can't harm me and I can't harm them."
As I left that afternoon ... I was flying back home ... I started thinking to myself,
"What happens if I have an invisible, shark proof box that I place over myself
every time I feel threatened?"
Well, there are a couple of negative people in my life at this time.
So I decided that every time before the phone rings ... How we have caller ID and we can
see who's calling ... I would say to myself, "Shark proof."
What that meant is, "Put that little, invisible box on you right now, because this person
is going to call with free drama, and you're not being paid for free drama, and you're
not going to get sucked in."
So you can listen with the ears and you can pay attention, and be kind, and not get caught
up in the drama because there's a shark-proof box here.
Nothing they say can harm you.
At the end of the conversation, they will reel you back up to ground and you're completely
harm-free.
Right?
Don't get involved.
I played this game for about a year.
I had a no-drama year.
The year was 1994.
I decided, for one year, I was going to shark proof myself from all of the negativity
that came into my life.
I wasn't going to get upset.
Nobody pushes those hot buttons because I got a shark proof cage around me.
And so, I found myself almost like a new mantra, saying, "Shark proof, shark proof, shark proof."
Every time a customer would like ... "Shark proof, shark proof.
This person is giving me gold.
What can I do with this information?
Because guess what?
It bounces off this shark proof cage.
It can't hurt me.
It's not about me, it's about the business."
I was able to isolate myself from those hateful comments that some of our customers have.
If you're one of these people, where you wear your customers' opinions on your sleeves like
a badge of honor, guess what?
I'm telling you this.
You can shark proof yourself and you can be like Teflon and it bounces off of you.
You can take that information and you can go home and make the necessary tweaks without
taking it personally.
Because if you shark-proof yourself, and you shark-proof your business, you'll go so far
and so fast, because you're not taking all of that stuff and internalizing it and letting
it bring you down.
Because there's nothing quicker that will bring you down than opinions of people that
you value or that are paying you for your time.
That will bring you down because you're a people pleaser
and you want to do your best work.
But the best work you're ever going to be able to do is where you are incorporating
the feedback they give you and you're shark-proofing yourself, so you don't internalize it, because
you don't want it to eat away your health, and you don't want it to keep you up at night.
You need to be at your best, so you can turn around and implement all of the feedback that
you've just been given.
All right, so take this shark proof concept and go out there and
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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