Running a business is HARD.
I love being an empathy facilitator. But I’m also doing this work on top of being a mother, professor, mentor, friend, and daughter. In my business, I’m not just a trainer. I’m also the salesperson, accountant, head of HR, head of marketing, administrative assistant, and self-motivator.
I feel incredibly proud when people praise a system I’ve developed from scratch, but this feeling of pride isn’t enough to keep me fully committed to the day-to-day realities of actually building a business. As a professor, research and curriculum design are in my DNA. Business is not.
Several months into this entrepreneurial venture, I was exhausted from the endless hours of work and considered winding things down and taking it easy.
Then I got the text from Ernesto. “Wendy, I just have to say THANK YOU. Brent and I have been doing some of the work you talked about and the difference has just been incredible!”
Ernesto was not a student from any of my sessions. Neither was his husband, Brent. They were both in my friend group, and a few weeks prior, I’d gone on Ernesto and Shauna’s podcast Hometown Hairdressers (named for the hosts’ profession, not the show topics). “We want to talk to any guest who has a perspective we don’t often get to see,” he told me when booking me as a guest.
The individual episodes are only about 30 minutes long. I had to choose which areas of my training I could deliver in a compressed timeline. I decided on perspective seeking and conversation killers. My intent was to give the listeners enough information that they could walk away from our brief time together and see some kind of positive change within their own lives.
Brent and Ernesto are a handsome, dynamic couple. When they walk into a room, the effect they have on others is palpable; it’s like a charge of positive, happy energy just burst through the doors. People flock around them to absorb their great energy.
Brent and Ernesto have been together for 11 years (married for 9) and are deeply committed to one another. Ernesto is spontaneous and bubbly while Brent is more introverted, a quiet planner. For a long time, these differences helped their relationship, pushing them to grow together and experience the world in new ways.
One day that dynamic didn’t quite work anymore.
Like many couples, Brent and Ernesto became set in their own ways over time. Rather than embracing the work-together attitude they had before, each began to see conflicts as a contest with the prize being some arbitrary sense of correctness.
“It wasn’t unusual for us to have a small argument that turned into one of us staying at a hotel,” Ernesto told me later. “We knew we needed to be more caring and empathetic but knowing and doing are two entirely different things.” Ernesto and Brent found themselves in that endless cycle that can build between friends, lovers, coworkers, and siblings: any issue can result in a huge fight, so it becomes much easier to be quiet and agreeable than try to have an open conversation. Over time the essential issues that need to be discussed get buried and ignored, and the tension builds.
A few days after the podcast aired, Brent was listening to it while mowing the lawn. During the conversation about perspective seeking, something clicked. And the conversation began. “We knew what we had to do; that was never in doubt,” Ernesto later recalled. “The question was how to do it.”
The how was nothing more than being a better and more active listener and truly seeking the other’s perspective. It sounds simple, but in the heat of an argument, it’s difficult to remember unless we practice. Brent immediately began to practice. So did Ernesto. The results were almost instantaneous.
“Disagreements which used to last the entire weekend went down to like three minutes. We both began to reinforce the other, making better word choices and pausing before speaking. Most of all we each stopped trying to be right and instead realized there is no right or wrong. It’s two people and they each have a different perspective.”
When catching up with Ernesto later, he told me the listener feedback to my podcast episode had been incredibly positive. People had pulled tidbits throughout the talk on how to better deal with spouses, friends, coworkers, and customers. He told me a story about his own use of perspective seeking on an unhappy customer. He made a conscious effort to avoid defensiveness and to understand her perspective and was then better able to empathize and heal the relationship with his longstanding client.
Starting a business is much more difficult than I ever expected it to be. What I also didn’t expect was that individual stories like Brent and Ernesto’s would have such an impact on me. Going into this, I didn’t want to tie my thoughts about the business too closely with individual outcomes. But now I find these personal stories to be one of the most satisfying parts of my work.
Thank you, Brent, Ernesto, and everyone else who has shared how empathic tools have helped improve your relationships with those around you. Your stories mean more to me than you could ever know.