Surface Tension
When you let a pain point remain unspoken, it festers. Tension builds inside of you. The more you experience the trigger, the stronger that tension gets.
It’s like holding a ball underneath the surface of water. The deeper you try to push the ball, the harder it is to control until—WOOSH! It launches out of the water and soars into the sky.
When that ball is emotions, this outcome can be immensely detrimental.
I coach my employees on the importance of asking for feedback from our clients. In this coaching, I compare the relationship with our clients to a relationship with a significant other.
If I am doing something that is frustrating to my wife and she ignores it, the more times it happens, the harder it will be to ignore. She’ll get increasingly frustrated and resentment towards me will grow.
This happens with clients to businesses too.
If a client is dissatisfied with a product or feels that their concerns aren’t being properly addressed by a service, they may ignore it.
If this pain point continually surfaces, they will begin to resent the organization. This will happen regardless of whether they voice the concern or not.
If they choose to address the concern and it remains ignored, the resentment will typically come to a head and result in the client taking their business elsewhere.
But what happens if your spouse or your client never voices their expectations to you? They never give you the opportunity to meet the expectation that they hold in their mind.
A quote attributed to Neil Strauss summarizes this best, “unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”
In partnerships, if each spouse doesn’t articulate their expectations, they are setting each other up for failure and setting themselves up for resentment.
If clients don’t clearly express their expectations, they unintentionally sabotage the relationship.
Sometimes, upon entering a relationship or a business partnership we are unable to set expectations as we simply don’t know what to expect.
That is normal.
As the relationship runs its course, you will find pain points that need to be addressed. You will need to reflect on what has happened, how it made you feel, why it made you feel that way, and how it can be avoided in the future.
This allows you to ensure you properly understand where that pain point is coming from and it allows you to clearly articulate a solution so you and the other party can work together to solve the problem or prevent it from being an ongoing issue.
If you choose to ignore the pain point, it will likely resurface. Over and over and over again. Until the resentment shoots to the surface.
Instead of pushing the ball deeper, release the tension the moment you feel yourself starting to submerge it. Don’t let others get caught in the explosion of your premeditated resentment.
