July - All Star

July Customer Service All Star

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I was reminded of this recently while learning a new job in the Electrical department of Home Depot.

After almost 30 years of working in the jewelry industry, I found myself overwhelmed this summer with: new training materials, employee names, technical terms, acronyms, advice, procedures, passwords, and of all things - locker combinations.

Developing a readiness to learn is the art that all good teachers practice. I’m afraid people tend to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. I know I do at times. Let’s face it, you tend to take for granted the things you do by habit. In hindsight, it’s easy to explain experiences based on your level of knowledge and understanding, rather than a student’s level of mental preparedness. There’s the key - mental preparedness.

Learning a new job is not just having the right attitude towards the job; it’s being able to process the information and DO what’s expected on demand. People selectively remember what they’re ready to when their experience, confidence, and skill levels balance. I call this selective absorption. In the book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell refers to this phenomena as "stickiness."

According to Gladwell, stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can't get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory. When Winston filter-tip cigarettes were introduced in the spring of 1954, for example, the company came up with the slogan, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." At the time, the ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of "like" instead of "as" created a minor sensation. It was the kind of phrase that people talked about, like the famous Wendy's tag line from 1984, "Where's the beef?”

How do you make a memorable impact on a new employee? It’s not just remembering More Saving. More Doing. Or is it? Company facts, projection figures, and department details, can set up mental roadblocks for employees who think they must memorize these things to understand the corporate culture. Memorization does not lead to understanding, in my experience, it’s - doing - that solidifies understanding and builds confidence. Doing means being willing to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, without a loss of self-esteem, and move on.

So, the teacher is the student in you. Students learn best when a mentor challenges them to teach themselves. Like sunlight is to plants, the teacher is a catalyst for the student to discover their goals and then set out a path to achieve them. This requires drawing out what an employee knows in relation to what they need to understand to perform the job.

Being a rookie is a humble reminder that you must create a blueprint to learn new tasks. It’s simply a matter of establishing a plan, trusting the procedure, and building the confidence to be yourself.

By practicing the art of being a student, you can rest assured the teacher in you will appear.

Comments

When Fear Becomes the Default

In this special episode, When Fear Becomes the Default. Early Sunday morning, I was cycling past a small veterans’ pocket park in San Marcos. The air was still, the streets nearly empty. On one corner stood a young woman, alone, holding a hand-painted sign that read: “Be ANGRY. ICE agents are murdering people.” I pedaled past, but the words stayed with me. I knew the context—the footage and headlines from Minneapolis the day before, already ricocheting through the country and hardening opinions. Even in the quiet of the ride, the noise followed. Two miles later, I stopped at a red light. A black car with dark windows pulled up inches from my bike. My heart jumped. My first instinct wasn’t neighbor —it was threat . I found myself bracing, scanning, and wondering if the person inside was angry, armed, or looking for trouble. Then the door opened. A well-dressed young woman stepped out, walked to the trunk, and pulled out a sign that read “Open House.” She turned, smiled brightly, and sa...

Boy on a Beam

In this special bonus episode, Boy on a Beam. In a world long ago, when the days moved quite slow, Before buzzes and beeps and the fast things we know, A boy sat quite still on a very fine day, Just staring at nothing . . . and thinking away. No tablets! No gadgets! No screens shining bright! No earbuds stuck in from morning till night. No lists, no charts, and no chores to be done. He just sat there thinking—that's quiet-time fun! His name was Young Albert. He sat in his chair, Thinking of things that weren’t really there. “Suppose,” said Young Albert, with eyes open wide, “I ran super fast with my arms by my side! Suppose I ran faster than anyone knew, And caught up to sunshine that zoomed past me—too! If I hopped on its back for a light-speedy ride, What secrets would I find tucked away deep inside?” “Would stars look like sprinkles, all shiny and small? Would UP feel like sideways? Would BIG feel like Tall?” He giggled and wondered and thought, and he dreamed, Till his head fel...

Sweden Called . . . They Said No.

Have you ever wondered about the Nobel Prize? Let's look at Where Genius Meets “Wait—Where’s My Medal?” Every October, the Nobel Prizes are announced, and humanity pauses to celebrate the "greatest benefit to mankind." And every year, like clockwork, a specific type of person appears online to complain—at length—that they were robbed. (Well, maybe this year more than most.) The Origin: A Legacy of Guilt The prize exists because Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor, had a crisis of conscience. Nobel held 355 patents, but he was most famous for inventing dynamite. When a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary, calling him the " Merchant of Death, " he decided to buy a better legacy. In his 1895 will, he left the bulk of his massive fortune to establish five prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace). Because he was Swedish, he entrusted the selection to Swedish institutions, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The only outlier...

The Thought Experiment–Revisited

In this episode. The Thought Experiment–Revisited The Boy on a Light Beam In 1895, a sixteen-year-old boy did something we rarely allow ourselves to do anymore. He stared into space and let his mind wander. No phone. No notes. No “Optimization Hacks” for his morning routine. Just a question: What would happen if I chased a beam of light—and actually caught it? That boy was Albert Einstein . And that single act of curiosity—a Gedankenexperiment , a thought experiment—eventually cracked open Newton’s tidy universe and rearranged our understanding of time itself. Not bad for an afternoon of daydreaming. Imagine if Einstein had been “productive” instead. He would have logged the light-beam idea into a Notion database, tagged it #CareerGrowth, and then promptly ignored it to attend a forty-five-minute “Sync” about the color of the departmental logo. He’d have a high Efficiency Score—and we’d still be stuck in a Newtonian universe , wondering why the Wi-Fi is slow. In a post I wrote back in...

On The Fly

Search This Blog