Customer service – Not just for customers anymore

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Customer service is one of the new frontiers for intimate relationships, as well as family and friends. Customer service isn’t just for customers and social media – it’s for your marriage, your business partners, your employees, your vendors, your co-workers, your family and friends. Customer service is YOU being nice to the cashier who’s having a bad day. It’s for ALL of your relationships.

I like what Tony Robbins has to say about relationships. It’s also the best type of customer service – giving, not taking.

“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.” – Anthony Robbins

Running a relationship is like running a marathon. Secret is training!

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Like a relationship that’s almost certainly doomed to fail, you can’t just show up to run a marathon and hope you’ll figure out the next 26.2 miles along the way. You’ll ruin yourself.

Whether it’s a relationship or a marathon, you gotta add training to your life’s already busy schedule – no excuses: run 5 miles before work, 12 miles on the weekends. Adding more miles, more stamina, over time. Learn better running techniques, mental “push-through” exercises and join running groups, if that helps.

And even though you can train for a marathon alone, you can’t train for a successful relationship alone. You “both” have to train. Your relationship has a much more difficult time crossing the finish line if only one of you makes the effort to train. Is your partner simply interested in “having a good time and seeing where it goes”? Or are they serious about winning the race? If they’re not interested in training, they’re not interested in winning.

Running a relationship is like running a marathon. It requires training!

TED – Robert Gupta: Music is medicine, music is sanity

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Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician — and what he learned. Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.

Robert Gupta joined the LA Philharmonic at the age of 19 — and maintains a passionate parallel interest in neurobiology and mental health issues. He’s a TED Senior Fellow.

Top 5 regrets people make on their deathbeds

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In particular:

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have sillyness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Read all 5 regrets: The top 5 regrets people make on their deathbeds – The Next Web

Chris Brogan’s speech at New England XPO – Excerpts

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Chris Brogan’s speech at New England XPO (excerpts):

  1. Mobile matters a great deal!
  2. 16pt plain-text “rules” in mobile, especially as consumers age.
  3. Web-enable your store’s location: Google.com/Places (add your physical store).
  4. >10% of complaints about a store experience – actually Tweeted from within the store
  5. Facebook: fastest-growing segment is 31-60 year olds, mostly women (to look at other people’s grandkids and kids)
  6. Email marketing: no more than 250 words in your newsletter – it’s the 140 character mentality.
  7. Just “First Name” and “email addy” – that’s ALL you ask for when asking people to sign up for a newsletter.
  8. Business cards are a placeholder for a relationship extension – not to add them to your free newsletter.
  9. The Referral Engine by John Jantsch
  10. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world – add keywords to your videos.
  11. Social media is about being there BEFORE the sale – build relationships.
  12. C.R.A.P. – Connections (connect about them, not you); Referrals (The Referral Engine by John Jantsch); Awareness/Attention (pay attention to them); Presence (being where the buyer is)