Distance

Evelyn Rodriguez reports that she’s been getting more traffic to her site since she decided to write more from the heart:

After my credible voice post I realized that I holding back too much in an effort to (tediously) maintain professionality. I was skimming the surface of where I wanted to take communication in an effort to maintain “professional distance.”

But people don’t necessarily want more distance in their lives. More importantly, I don’t want distance. So I responded to my own needs. It may appear as if this takes courage (well, coeur means heart in French) to do this. But a singer-songwriter I met recently said that brave and healthy are the exact same word in sign language.

I know that I gravitate more to blogs where I feel I am getting to know the author as well as learning “stuff”. Where there’s some sense of “this is who I am” as well as “this is how the world is” (although we can often infer the first from the second).

I think managing our distance is a continuing challenge for people and organisations. (I’m not sure managing is the right word, but it’ll do for now). It’s a continuing dance…

I’ve been reflecting on a recent sales call where the client seemed to want distance from the get-go, almost as if I and my partner were a threat. I struggle with those sorts of encounter, and sometimes I sit there longing for the ordeal to end. In this case, I became provocative and challenging, not as a calculated move but out of genuine frustration. He seemed to like that even though he didn’t agree with me – in the moment, it felt like the distancing had been overcome. Perhaps I had become less distant from myself, more connected to my own frustration. By expressing it, albeit clumsily, I showed up to the meeting and so did he. We didn’t sell anything, but at least we had an interesting conversation. Like Evelyn, I think basically we humans do want to get along together and will tend to move towards rather than away, in the right circumstances.