Transformed Beliefs Change Behavior
Do you remember learning about the benefits of a compelling customer care strategy? A well-done strategy:
- gives direction (how to behave in customer caring ways)
- is the framework for decision-making
- energizes, motivates and inspires and
- touches the human spirit.
Wouldn't you agree that those qualities - along with most everything else that you've learned with The Coach to date - revolve around or culminate in corporate attitudes, which are based on corporate beliefs? And if you're one of our steadfast subscribers who's really doing the work here, wouldn't you agree that you're doing it because you truly believe in some combination of the importance of customer loyalty, the quality of what your organization offers and your talents as a leader? Wouldn't you agree that you believe in the potential that you have to improve all aspects of the Relationship Tripod® - yourself as a professional, the customer experience, and the organization's bottom line? We're sure you do.
If you're seeing improvements and other positive changes in yourself, your team, the experience your customers are having, your bottom line - in short, in any area of your life at all - it's because you believe in what you're doing. You've changed your beliefs from whatever they were before you worked with The Coach to new beliefs that are anchoring your thoughts, words and actions in a customer care focus. Lasting changes can happen only if the right beliefs are in place.
You can see this concept in action if you think about people you know who have successfully lost weight and kept it off, and people who either 'can't' lose weight or can't keep it off after they've reached their goals. In fact, people in the latter group tend to fall into the 'yo-yo' syndrome, constantly gaining and losing weight, with the gains ever increasing. Have you ever wondered why? In our opinion, the people who are most successful when it comes to any such endeavor are those who go beyond changing their behaviors to changing their beliefs. In other words, if you want to change a behavior, you have to look at the beliefs that are anchoring it.
If you're on a diet and are focused only on your behaviors, you might substitute celery for chips, salads for fast food and walking for watching TV after dinner - and all of that is great. But if you don't address your base beliefs such as, "I take after Mom's side of the family, and everyone in that family is fat," or "In our family serving and eating food is an expression of love, so if I don't eat a lot I'm not loved," or even, "I'm afraid I'll get too much attention if I look great, and I don't know how to handle that or the new choices that I'll have to make," then chances are that it will be difficult for you to maintain those behaviors.
On the other hand, people who change their old anchors to genuine new beliefs have more consistent, longer lasting success. So someone who starts thinking, "I believe that vibrant good health, which I can achieve through excellent nutrition and exercise, will give me the energy I need to better enjoy all the things I love," will tend to make healthy lifestyle choices more often over a longer period of time.
You can also apply this concept to an organization by looking at its cultural beliefs and how they are helping or hindering the organization in reaching its goals. We'll give you an example: While working with several financial institutions that wanted to launch customer care initiatives, we realized that their deep-seated belief that they should be suspicious of customers was creating a wall of resistance. That makes sense when you think about it, because back in the old days people robbed banks more than any other places of business - it was the only place that robbers were guaranteed to find significant sums of money.
Today thieves comprise only a small part of the population, yet banks are built both structurally and organizationally to guard their customers' assets and prevent theft. People in the financial sector are schooled in managing risk, not in managing relationships. So it's tough to get a whole corporate culture to provide better care and value for its customers when it's possible that at the base of their belief system, they consider every customer to be a potential crook.
It took an in-depth inquiry process on our part and an educational process on theirs to uncover the beliefs that were running the show. We patiently peeled away one layer at a time to get down to the beliefs, asking questions like, "Why do you do this like that? Why do you think that way? Does this match with the reality out there? Does it make sense to be this way now?" Thought, action, attitude, assumption, we peeled it all away until we got to their beliefs, to the place where real change begins.
To change beliefs (about yourself or about your business) you have to first uncover the belief. Since beliefs are layered under years of assumptions and attitudes and behaviors sometimes they can be challenging to identify since they have disappeared below the level of conscious awareness. Surfacing the beliefs takes conscious intention and a good deal of patience. In organizations we ask a series of "why" questions. "Why is that?" is a good one to start with. And then keep going asking at least 5 times "Why?" about the same issue. This begins to peel the layers; eventually you'll find the belief behind the behavior. Once you are there you can challenge it to see if it has any basis in reality and then choose to replace it with a new one.
As always it all comes down to choices, to choosing a pathway that both frames your beliefs and directs them toward Exquisite Customer Care. That's where choosing to be optimistic comes in!
