Making it easy

It's amazing the things you see and the lessons you learn about people and about behaviour if you have the eyes to see it, and the ears to observe it.

Polite Canadians seem to spend vast amounts of energy telling one another that we value privacy, and perhaps this is the reason why at least some of us tend to keep to ourselves when we find ourselves in a crowd of strangers. Not so for one of my travel companions; he has an amazing ability to cross the cultural boundaries and to put even the most harried and stressed service provider at ease. The result, he tends to get places with an agility that is not afforded any but the most daring.

Whether it is the hostess who greets us in the lounge and takes away the dishes left behind after our snack, or the agent who is trying her best to get a full plane load of people onboard before the pilot fires up the engines, they all have their jobs to do, and my friend recognizes (as we all do) that these people are doing their very best to make us, the travellers, as comfortable as we can be.

When most of us would be content to wordlessly provide documents or ignore the presence of such service providers, my companion takes special care to address them all with a particular phrase (which is becoming ever more familiar to me as I spend more time in his presence). 'You are working so hard', he says, 'and you are doing a wonderful job'. This puts the hearer immediately at ease, a smile on her face, and permits an openness that results in magic being worked. With such simple words, doors are opened, and we are all the beneficiaries.