the enneagram and you: part 4 - viral marketing & the focus group in your head
Okay, ND is right, I probably did try to cram too much into one post with that last one. Here’s the thumbnail summary, as I wrote in my reply to her comment. You start out with a flawed, distorted worldview where reality is hostile and you have to take what you want from it. From that, you develop both an offensive strategy (a repeated pattern of behavior to get what you want) and a defensive strategy (a false persona to cover your imperfect, authentic self). We call this combined strategy your enneagram strategy. A One tries to be morally perfect: moral perfection is both her claim on reality for love (”they have to love me because I’m right/good/perfect.”), and the false front to hide her authentic, flawed self. Twos serve others. Threes seek success and accomplishments. Fours seek uniqueness or specialness. Fives seek information and wealth. Sixes seek security and loyalty. Sevens seek new experiences. Eights seek power. Nines seek peace and consensus.
In Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People he lists imagination as one of the four unique human gifts which enable changes in longstanding patterns of behavior. Imagination enables a change in behavior because in order to do what we’ve never done before, we have to first be able to imagine doing it. We have to be able to imagine that it’s possible before we can attempt it. Covey calls imagination “the first creation”–the second creation is bringing that imagined behavior or object into reality.
Reasoning with people is an absolutely awful way to try to get them to change their behavior. If you don’t believe me, try it some time. Try listing off the perfectly valid and true reasons to quit smoking to a smoker. Or debating with a person who overeats about the merits of portion control. Behavior usually isn’t driven by logic, so logic is a poor way to alter behavior.
Eric Berne, a psychologist, proposed that we have three basic parts (or “ego states”) to our personality: Parent, Adult, and Child. Parent is the source of your unquestioned judgments and opinions, and is formed from what you saw and heard from your parents. Child is the source of your emotions, and reflects the self-centered, imaginative, childlike part of your ego. Adult is the part of your brain that deals with reason, logic, facts and calculations.
Guess which two are the source of the vast majority of your decisions, words, and actions? (Hint: not Adult.)
Appealing to Adult fails because most of the time, Adult is not driving the bus. To get to a behavioral change, you have to bypass Adult.
One effective way is to speak directly to Parent, and offer a set of judgments don’t hold up under close logical scrutiny, but fit with Parent’s overall worldview and agenda. The use of propaganda by the Nazis in WWII is an excellent example of this. The claims of the Nazis made no sense logically. But by using repetition, and the pressure of authority (the pressure of the State is very similar to the pressure of any authority figure, including overbearing parents) they pushed their opinions into the psyches of willing citizens. Once those citizens’ Parent states accepted the opinions as “truth,” they stopped questioning them and began living and behaving out of that “accepted truth.” “Brainwashing” is essentially capturing and controlling your target’s Parent state.
Another method is to cripple or immobilize Parent, and engage the imaginative, creative Child. That’s the method that parables use. Much like a computer virus, they pose a problem that Parent is not equipped to solve, thereby paralyzing Parent.
The minister at the local church we attended Sunday was very right to describe parables as “bombs that sit in your brain and then suddenly go off.” What they explode is your rigid enneagram worldview, which resides in your Parent state. Because they don’t make sense on a literal level, they bypass your conscious Adult state. They go into your unconscious, the home of Parent and Child states, to be puzzled on there. There, they offer a vision of the world that directly conflicts with the Parent’s worldview of scarcity, the “hostile reality” worldview.
Boom! This paralyzes Parent. Freed from Parent’s constant “you can’t do that” nagging, the Child is free to imagine the possibilities. Given enough time and encouragement, a person can start living out that new, imagined reality.
On one level, this is the “new life” that Jesus provides. He offers us a new reality and invites us to live out that reality. In one sense, “The Kingdom of God” or “The Kingdom of Heaven” is just… plain old ordinary reality. But it’s a reality in which we are accepted, loved, and provided for by God. It’s a reality that makes our strategies useless and unnecessary. And to the extent we can drop those old, ineffective strategies, we can apply that energy to a new life in our new reality. Because those strategies require a lot of energy to maintain, dropping them frees up a tremendous amount of personal energy.
If a One no longer has to be perfect and right about everything, how much energy does he gain back in not trying to maintain that perfect image anymore? If a Two doesn’t have to take care of everybody else anymore, will she have time to nurture herself? If a Three doesn’t have to constantly strive for accomplishment, he might have the free time to deepen his relationships. If a Four doesn’t have to be a drama queen anymore, can she learn to enjoy the blessing of ordinary days?
Luke 20:18 says “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” Jesus is speaking of himself as the stone. The stone is not just a cornerstone, but a touchstone with true reality. The person who falls on the stone (accepts Jesus’ reality) will find their previous worldview and false self-image shattered. Those who don’t accept it will continue to bear the crushing weight of “the stuff I have to do to get by.” Like most of the parables, there are layers of meaning in this one. Most prophecies and parables are interesting in that they have multiple, equally-applicable meanings. There is one true meaning that applies to you right now… and another, different, true meaning that will apply in ten years… and likely a third that will apply to someone else five hundred years from now.
Many prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel were fulfilled, in some respects, during their lifetimes, and then fulfilled again during the time of Christ.
Ideas that we find challenging and disturbing may be genuinely false. They may also be “viruses” sent to counterprogram our fixed and inaccurate mindsets. It’s important to pay conscious attention to the things that make no sense to us, because our unconscious attention is going to do something with them, one way or another.
why is denzel trying to freak me out?
I brought my copy of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks in to work and copied to iTunes to have something non-Christmas-y to listen to (because they’ve had holiday stuff out since roughly September around here). So as I’m listening to “Time is on my Side” it reminds me of that creepy movie with Denzel Washington from a few years back, Fallen.
Which makes me think about his new creepy movie, Deja Vu.
Which makes me think about his slightly older creepy remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
And suddenly it strikes me: Denzel Washington creeps me the heck out.
Now, Denzel used to be the leading man of the African American community. (Now, I suspect it’s Will Smith.)Â Why the heck is he creeping everybody out?
Even in movies like Remember the Titans, he’s always intense, and rarely plays likable characters.  So maybe that’s his niche. The slightly creepy, intense, not-likable, but magnetic and compelling guy.
the enneagram and you: part 3 - shame and faking it
I bet you thought I was going to start getting into the types, didn’t you? Nope, we’re not there yet, Papa Smurf.
We have a few more global concepts to go over first, before we work our way to the specifics of each type. Assuming we even do. I may leave that for you guys to research out yourselves.
Faith is a word that can mean more than one thing, depending on who is speaking. To some, “to have faith” means to agree with a particular creed or set of beliefs. It’s a thing that happens on the cognitive, conscious, intellectual level.
If that’s so, why is it that Paul says that we receive faith by grace (Eph 2:8)? Who needs grace (”an undeserved gift”) to make a cognitive judgment?
[Mildly interesting side note: At least two people who read this blog are going to think that the next little bit was prompted by Sunday’s sermon. Wrong. I actually started this post, and intended to use this specific scripture, middle of last week.]
Matthew 13:13 says “Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” Does this scripture make any more sense to you in light of what we’ve said previously about trances? Who “sees but doesn’t see, hears but doesn’t hear, and doesn’t understand” what’s really going on around them?
Okay, if you don’t like the term “trances” (and I understand that it’s an off-putting term for some people) then perhaps it would be better to go back a little bit and put it in different terms. Let’s briefly revisit our last enneagram post, where little Adam and/or Evie discovers the rude awakening that (A) they are not omnipotent and One with the universe (in other words, they’re not God; and (B) they have to come up with a strategy to get what they need from the world.
The realization that you are not God, that you have limits, is called “shame.” I know you’ve been told that shame is something else entirely, and you probably have all kinds of emotional associations with the word “shame” but for the moment, just go with me on this. John Bradshaw, a prominent psychologist and expert in “inner child work” writes extensively about shame in his books, most notably “Healing the Shame that Binds You.” He is, after a manner, an expert in shame, and he describes shame as I’ve described it. C.S. Lewis is another notable writer who refers to shame as basically, being embarrassed that you’re not a god. I’ve recently been re-reading “Till We Have Faces,” Lewis’ favorite of his own books, and at one point Psyche is talking about being in the presence of a god, and feeling shame for “being mortal.” Being, as it were, inadequate, compared to the divine.
It might be easier to understand if put in comparison with guilt. Guilt is feeling bad or inadequate for what you’ve done, or not done. Shame is feeling bad or inadequate for what you are, or are not. You are not perfect, and on some level that’s embarrassing and shameful. So you do what Adam and Eve did immediately upon realizing they’d screwed up: you seek to cover that shame so no one can see it. Adam and Eve used fig leaves. The rest of us use a personality. In the strictest sense, your personality isn’t who you are, it’s who you pretend to be to hide your imperfection. It’s a false self, a facade, that you do your best to believe is the real you.
Anybody else here old enough to remember those crappy vinyl plastic Halloween costumes from back before the government got all picky about the whole “suffication hazard” thing? Those hard plastic masks in the shape of Superman or Wonder Woman, or Barbie, with the little rectangular eyeholes, tiny little nostril holes, and those god-awful plastic smocks that were white in the back? Do you remember how hard it was to see out of those crappy masks? The best that could be said is that you sort of saw what was directly in front of you.
“Seeing, but not seeing.” When you wear a mask, it limits your vision. You have to make an effort to not see anything about yourself that doesn’t fit your constructed self-image. I heard a news report talking about the recent Michael Richards brewhaha, which parallels Mel Gibson’s similar episode of a few months back. Apparently, Richards talked on Jessie Jackson’s radio show about seeking healing for both the people he insulted, and himself. My initial reaction was “What does he need healing for?” and then it hit me. What if Mel and Michael really didn’t believe themselves to be racist or prejudiced? What if their constructed self-image was “I’m not that kind of person”?
And that’s when another part of “Till We Have Faces” suddenly “clicked” for me, and I understood it. It’s the main idea of the book, in the last chapter, after the Queen has recited, not her self-justifying written complaint against the gods, but her real, true, angry, bitter, ugly complaint. I don’t have the book on hand at the moment, but it’s something along the lines of “People talk foolishly about the joy of saying exactly what you mean, but in that moment when you find that you actually do say exactly what you mean, you’ll not talk of the joy of words. No wonder the gods don’t answer us, what would be the point, until that word gone unuttered can be got out of us? How can they speak face to face till we have faces?”
Both Richards and Gibson probably understand that statement all too well. They came face to face with their own ugliness, the “word unuttered” was got out of them by liquor, anger, and who knows what else. Now they can’t dodge that particular shame anymore, cover it up, or hide from it: the only option is healing it. There are things as ugly and uglier within me, words that haven’t been dug out of me yet.  I have no stone to throw. But back on topic.
Thomson describes parables as “a trance-breaking literary form.” On a literal level, a parable doesn’t make any sense. So your brain tosses it back to your unconscious like a child giving up on a rubik’s cube: “Here, you puzzle this thing out when you get the time.” To your unconscious, the seat of imagination and dreams, the imagery and symbolism are clear.  Parables are like a computer virus; they slowly, subtly start rewriting and revising the personal mythology that you are using as a blueprint for living your life, from within. Parables have the power to transform your worldview. They open up those tiny little rectangular eyeholes and let more of reality in.
The sermon I heard Sunday described parables as “subversive stories.”  The minister described them as a ticking bomb in your brain, that at some point would go off and explode your worldview when you suddenly “get” it.
In that sense, parables are pretty dangerous to the status quo. If you want to protect and preserve your self-image and current worldview, don’t read the parables. Either that, or come up with some nice, literal or useful interpretation of them that supports your current self-image and worldview.
Now we return back to this idea of faith as a gift of grace. If “the mother of all sin” is doubt in God’s goodness and provision, what does that mean? If “sin” is as much a worldview as it is the acts spawned by that worldview, how do you “forgive” sin? How do you “forgive” a worldview?
By destroying it, and letting the person see reality as it actually is, you empower them to act from the God-reality of abundance and acceptance, and not their self-imposed reality of poverty, lack, covering-up and trying to earn some sort of salvation.
When Jesus preached freedom to the captives, on one level, he was telling them that he was going to free them through his death and resurrection. But on another level, he was actually creating a greater freedom for them by preaching to them. His words began the process of creating freedom from sin, tilling the ground and planting seeds that his death and resurrection would then bring to fruition.  The parables create a mental environment where someone can accept salvation and forgiveness. Jesus’ teachings, particularly the parables, create the ability to believe in grace. You can’t accept a gift you don’t really believe exists.
Is it now becoming any clearer how faith is a gift of grace? Probably more to come.
today’s post is brought to you by
I love writing. Mostly because I’m 99.9% selfish, and writing out one’s thoughts can be like finding the splinter in your brain that has been driving you nuts for a week, and digging it out. Ahhhhhhh… sweet relief!
In writing an email today, I dug out a mental or spiritual splinter that has been irritating me without my knowing exactly what it was for like, a couple of months at least. I’m a weirdo. (No, seriously folks. Pick yourselves up from where you’ve passed out from shock. It’s true.)
At heart, I am a pot-stirrer and a radical. I think differently than most, and I often feel compelled to share that oddball vision with others, despite the fact that it might, possibly, if they let it, severely screw up their perfectly comfortable worldview. That is an aspect of myself that I have kept a really tight lid on for most of my life. People tend to get torqued when you poke holes in their worldview.
But I’ve decided that since my goal in life is to be as like Jesus as I can be if He were me, (wrap your head around that one); and because Jesus was sort of a pot-stirring radical weirdo Himself, that continuing to completely throttle my pot-stirring tendencies in areas in which I have clear scriptural evidence that me and Jesus are on the same wavelength is spiritually constipating.
So, gentle readers, you may hear some shocking things out of me in upcoming posts. Or maybe not shocking. Maybe just stuff that challenges your comfort zone. Comfort is overrated anyway.
Let’s start off with a few slow-pitch softballs.
Jesus. Interesting guy. Liked poor people. Oddly enough, I never read that he said “Giving handouts just encourages people to be dependent. The poor need tough love. They need the character that comes from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. It’s good for them.” Apparently, He liked feeding them. You might consider doing the same.
Apparently, also not a big fan of consumerism. Thought “bling” was a bit tacky. Since Christmas is, in fact, the guy’s birthday, you could think about scaling back on the bauble-buying. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of the fact that I work for an advertising agency. Life’s full of contradictions, people.)
Also, seemed to really like kids. If you have some extra cash floating about your domicile, you might think about sending some in the general direction of a kid who thinks shoes are for rich people.
Well, that’s a good start, as softballs go. Have a happy, thankful holiday.
saddle up. lock and load.
Before we move on with the enneagram series, I’ve got some non-related “stuff” to journal out here.
My friend Daryn, who sometimes comments here, has a beautiful adopted son, Jake. Jake is also of a different ethnicity (Daryn, please correct me if that’s not the right word. I’m not wise in the ways of this stuff.) than his mom and dad. Their family is currently looking for a new church home, at least in part because they don’t want Jake to be the “lone brown boy,” in Daryn’s words, at their current place of worship.
Feeling different, feeling like the “lone _______ person” in a group that is supposed to be a fellowship, a community, is a painful thing. It’s a big part of why I am also looking for a new community of believers. For at least a year, I hadn’t felt like I truly “belonged” in our previous faith community. Because I don’t wear my “differentness” on the outside, it was simple enough to blend in. But “blending in” is not belonging.
To realize God is calling you elsewhere is not a fun or easy thing.
Asking a friend who has confided that they are looking for a new church home if they’ve “prayed and and considered it seriously” is kind of insensitive if you know this person well enough to know they don’t make big decisions without prayer and consideration. Are you expecting them to say “Oh, wow, duh! I knew I was forgetting something!” 
Leaving a local church, for someone who was a “committed member,” is difficult no matter what their reasons. It’s a tremendous act of hope to believe that a situation painful enough to make what was once “home” feel like foreign ground doesn’t exist everywhere. It’s a leap of faith to believe that there really could be a place where you and your family can all feel that you belong. Not “live happily ever after and never have any conflicts or problems”–I don’t know too many people who aren’t aware that where there are people, there will be conflicts and problems.
A community of believers is not “the church.” The church has no building, no borders, no membership rosters, and no committees. The church is the living, organic body of Christ across all the man-made, artificial dividers we put up. It’s something you live, not something you join and forget about. (Or join and work your holy hiney off at, either, for that matter.) Earlier this year I struggled long and hard over whether or not I actually believed what my friend Bob calls “the institutional church” actually served any purpose or had any real relevance. Eventually, I did come to believe there can be value in belonging to a local community of believers. Note that I said “can be” not “is.” The TARC bus can take me from Indiana to my workplace. Can I jump on any TARC bus and be assured of reaching my intended destination? Um, no. It’s a little more complicated than that.
In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time unearthing my personal values and beliefs, in the context of the Gospel. Working on my personal rule of life and mission statements have really sort of shown me what direction I need to be heading. Ultimately, I realized that the spiritual TARC bus I was one was not really heading in the same direction God intends for me personally. My mission lies somewhere they aren’t going. If a community of faith is more or less the company of believers you are travelling through life with, it isn’t necessary that you all agree on everything all the time, but it is pretty much essential that you’re all heading in the same direction, towards the same landmarks. After nearly a year of prayer, honest observation and consideration, I realized that wasn’t the case for me there.
So now our family is on our little pilgrimage to find a company to travel with, a caravan of faith in this foreign land, that’s heading for the same destinations we are. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I’m not exactly sure where Chris is going. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure Chris knows where Chris is going. I’m walking in faith that God wouldn’t have us heading in totally uncompatible directions, and in fact that part of the reason we’re together is that our intended path covers mostly the same ground.
the enneagram and you: part 2 - the mother of all dysfunctions
Previously, I talked about trances. What trances are, and the fact that human beings are pretty much all under an assortment of cultural, religious, regional, familial and other trances. The enneagram is a trance at the level of personality.Trances are much like the psychological concepts of scripts, injunctions and drivers. If you don’t know what those things are, click the link. Or not. Up to you. Basically, trances, scripts, injunctions, and drivers are all ways we avoid having to pay attention to reality. We set the RV cruise control on autopilot, and go back to make a sandwich.
If the enneagram is a description of nine different trances based on nine different flawed worldviews, the truth is really, they all spring from one, central, humdinger of a flaw.
In Thomson’s parables book, he mentioned Jesus’ statement that you can’t serve both God and money. That’s a pretty strong statement. He didn’t say you had to choose between God and power, or God and sex, or God and self, even. Why money? Thomson’s theory is that it all comes down to economics.
The first law of economics is supply and demand, presupposing a world of scarcity. There isn’t enough of whatever it is you need. This is not the world that Jesus described repeatedly as “the Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom of God is a world of abundance.
So perhaps what Jesus is saying, is that you either go through life as a citizen of the World of Supply and Demand, or you go through it as a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. One person can’t have belief both that there isn’t enough to go around (a supply and demand worldview) and that there is enough for everybody (a Kingdom worldview).
When you boil it down to the elementals, it comes back to Mel Gibson’s speech in Signs. You either believe there is Someone up there looking out for you in a world where the divine intervenes on your behalf, or you figure you’re pretty much on your own in a hostile (or at best neutral) environment.
That’s it, folks. That is the source.
In Captivating, John and Stasi Eldredge talk about the Genesis story, and their description of the Fall goes completely along with this theory. Eve believed God was holding out on her. What if her failure wasn’t primarily about obedience? What if it was primarily a failure to trust in God’s goodwill towards her? If the “original sin” is the action she took, wasn’t it prompted by a belief that is completely the opposite of faith? So what’s really the original sin in this situation: disobeying a command, or losing faith in God’s love?
The tempter came up to her, and said “You don’t have all that you could have. All that you should have. If you want a better life, you have to take it for yourself. God is holding out on you.” And Adam, standing elbow to elbow with her at the time, fell for it, too. (The word that’s translated as “with her” implies close physical proximity, up to and including “being with her in the Biblical sense.”)
So once you’ve decided that God is not looking out for you, the world becomes a very unfriendly place. If you believe that the Creator is basically out to get you, what does that do to your perspective on the Creation?
Assuming that God is good and means the best for us, breaking with that belief is a break with the nature of reality itself. Once we break with reality, we have to decide how to make our way in the harsh new world. The world that doesn’t support us and provide for us. The world where we have to take what we want and need for ourselves.
Welcome back to the enneagram. Because the types flow from nine different decisions we make about the best way to navigate this new, hostile terrain.
Imagine an infant. An infant has a purely self-centered worldview. The world exists simply for him to enjoy. The mother exists to hug and coddle and feed him. The moon and stars hang in the sky just for him. And he doesn’t really perceive any boundaries or separation between “me” and “the world” or “mommy” or reality. It’s all just one big “me.” An infant’s worldview is startlingly similar to the mystic, noetic concept of being One with all reality, variously referred to in different religious traditions as holy communion, nirvana, or enlightenment.
And then a new concept enters the picture: the world doesn’t actually bend to his will. He doesn’t get the food instantly when he wants it. He doesn’t get picked up magically when he wants it. Suddenly it becomes clear: there’s me, and there’s everything else. And I have to figure out how to get what I want and need from that big, scary, “everything else.” Oh, the humanity!
So our little Adam (or Evie) makes a decision, at a startlingly early age, about the best way to get what he or she wants from this big, scary, hostile thing called reality. “If I am/do (fill in the enneagram compulsion here), then I will be okay.” That decision gets set in stone in their little psyche, and the trance begins. No need to take in any more of reality than that.
But what if that’s a fundamentally flawed worldview? What if I’m okay no matter what I do or am? What if my negotiations with reality, the currency of exchange I develop to get what I need, is not only unnecessary, but instead creates much of the lack I perceive? What if I’m bartering so intently for bread and water that I don’t even see God is standing next to me, offering a feast for free?
Told you this was going to get deep.
the enneagram and you: part 1 - trances
Here’s how I process information, and I think it’s a pretty good way:
- Step 1: I take in new information, either by reading, hearing or by experiencing something that challenges the way I think
- Step 2: I digest what I read or experienced
- Step 3: I spit it back out in my own words
- Step 4: I try out my new paradigm in the real world
After a while of doing step four, I usually revisit what I read and wrote, to see if the “beta testing” in reality has revealed any bugs.
So consider this series of posts Step 2 for some of my recent experiences and readings. 
Okay, onward and upward.
The first idea I’m going to throw at you is the idea that you are in a trance. Actually, you are probably in lots of trances all at once.
A trance is a way that we limit or filter or sort our perceptions of reality to keep the input down to a manageable size so your head does not explode. There are all kinds of trances: cultural trances, religious trances, family trances, and so on. We use these trances to “weed out” parts of reality we don’t want to deal with.
You see this effect in sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. During their trauma, they focus so tightly on something other than the trauma that they are able to basically unplug themselves from that reality. In hypnosis, the subject focuses their attention to an extremely narrow set of sensory inputs: a flickering light, and the voice of the hypnotist, usually. Once the trance has effectively cut off or blocked out all other input, your mind accepts the remaining input as “reality.”
Which is how you end up with grown men clucking like chickens on a stage. It’s also, taken further, how you end up with grown men who believe that we never landed on the moon. Their personal trance tells them that the world is a certain way, and if their entranced worldview says that men can’t walk on the moon, no amount of evidence from reality will convince them otherwise.
Which brings us rather neatly round to the enneagram. In this context, the enneagram describes nine different trances based on different but equally flawed assumptions about how the world works. Each enneagram trance says “This is the way the world is, so you can delete any input that indicates otherwise.” And because this happens at an unconscious level, most of the time, you’re not really aware that what you’re seeing isn’t an accurate representation of reality.
Okay, I feel like we’ve effectively covered trances. Next up, we’ll discuss what I like to call the primal flaw, the one that leads to all the other distortions. All the other distortions, the other trances, are based on this original distortion. And if you think “original flaw” sounds an awful lot like “original sin” you’re on the right trail…
value. judgment.
I don’t do angry well.
However, God and/or the universe thinks it’s time I learned, as evidenced by the ample practice opportunities they’ve been throwing my way in the last couple of weeks.
First came a loved-one’s recent Festival of Stupidity. Then the whole Ted Haggard / Mark Driscoll thing that hit all my anger buttons despite having nothing to do with me personally. Lastly, I found a little emotional land-mine in the form of an email from my first-ever dissatisfied customer.
Now, reality says that if you’re in business, eventually, no matter how hard you try to please everyone, you will have dissatisfied, complaining customers. And judging by what my friends and acquaintences who are business owners have told me (and what I’ve seen at the various companies I’ve worked for) oddly enough, it’s usually the customers you tried the hardest to accomodate. In fact, the only thing that surprised my business-owning friends about this situation is that it took me two full years in business to have a “problem customer” appear.
In this particular case, I met with the customer twice before starting the project. They had printed out my company site, and obviously looked at my previous work. My prices were listed on my site, and I reiterated my pricing and gave them a quote on their project, all of which they said they were fine with. They didn’t have a logo, which most designers would have charged them extra for, but I went ahead and threw in a logo design for free, just ‘cuz I’m that kind of gal.
Went through the project, and it ended up being more work than I quoted, mainly because the logo took three revisions till they were satisfied with it, and they had no digital photography and almost no copy. I had to spend a few extra hours researching, editing, and Photoshopping to get them enough content to fill the sitemap they agreed upon.
At the end of the project, I billed them, and picked up the check in person. The customer didn’t seem at all dissatisfied with the project.
So then, a month later, I get an email telling me I overcharged them, and that “people in my industry” told them their site was worth less than half what they’d paid for it.
Now, a few days later, I can guess pretty accurately what happened. A combination of buyers remorse hitting and some idiot who owns a copy of FrontPage (and who probably thinks XML is the latest satellite radio station) popping off to my customer, and now they think they were “overcharged.”
I sent the customer an email, with a handy list of undisputable facts showing they weren’t overcharged, including the price lists for two of my competitors showing their exact same site would have cost nearly double from my closest-priced competitors.
However, I realize now that no amount of reason, facts, or logic will convince this client of anything, because for the most part, their belief that they were overcharged isn’t based in reason, facts or logic. It’s based, mostly, on the fact that they wished they hadn’t spent the money and the emotions spending that money brought up for them. Do I think some idiot told them what they both wanted and were afraid to hear? Yup. There’s always someone willing to do that.
As for myself, the whole thing was a positive, if painful, lesson from reality in the following:
- If I want to ever be a small business person again (and I might, who knows), I need to realize that no matter how hard I try to please everybody, it can’t be done.
- My emotional response to this person had to do with the concept of value, in the sense that I perceived it as an attack on my personal value and worth. What I heard, through my screwed-upness is “You’re not worth even half what you think and say you are. You’re either deluded or a liar if you say otherwise.”
- The value of my work is not determined by one person. The vast majority of the evidence from reality backs up that my work is worth what I charge for it.
- My value as a person is not determined or altered by any person. It is intrinsic, unchangeable, and incalculable. To the extent that I really believe that, the criticism of others (which comes from their own inner fears and worries almost as often as it comes from my mistakes) can’t hurt me.
- I’m really starting to get the hang of the purpose of anger. Anger lets you know someone has violated a boundary with you. I got angry at the Festival of Stupidity because my loved one violated a boundary in our relationship. I got angry at Mark Driscoll because his words violated a boundary of mine regarding placing responsibility for infidelity 100% on the person who cheated. And I got angry with my client because they violated the boundaries of our business agreement. What that person did was exactly the same as if I’d gotten a quote from my mechanic, agreed to it, told him to perform the service, paid him, and then a month later, not knowing anything at all about car repairs and mostly because I was feeling anxious about spending the money, told him his work wasn’t worth what he charged. In business, you make an agreement, and you stick to it, and if you have an issue with the other party, you take it up at the time of service, not a month later when you’re experiencing buyer’s remorse.
- The tougher part of this anger business is figuring out the appropriate, logical response to the boundary violation. Not the irrational, emotional response, which often amounts to shouting “Kiss my shiny white @$$!” at the violator.
Well, good luck to all my gentle readers in dealing with those sticky boundary violations in your own life. If you have any sparkling insights into the whole “appropriate response” thing, send them my way.
rant: mark driscoll on the haggard scandal
I wasn’t going to post about this. Really. But it’s nearly a week later, and I’m still ticked off. So apparently I need the outlet.
If you follow “religious news” at all, and probably if you don’t, you’ve heard about the Ted Haggard scandal. Apparently, a leader in the evangelical church who was pretty outspoken about condemning homosexuality had more than a skeleton in his own closet. He resigned from his position as pastor of a midwestern mega church after evidence that he had been frequenting a male prostitute for sex and crystal meth.
That’s not what has me ticked off. This guy is clearly mentally ill. Whether you believe homosexuality is a mental illness, or you believe homophobia is a mental illness, or drug addiction is a mental illness, I think we can all agree Ted Haggard has all your lack-of-mental-health bases covered.
Mental illness doesn’t tick me off. Stupid ticks me off.
Because in the wake of what is clearly a painful week for Ted and his family, Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, took it upon himself to expound his own personal theory as to why his brother fell into disgrace.
It’s his wife’s fault. Of course.
Now, Driscoll isn’t quite stupid enough to actually come out and say “Haggard’s wife drove him into the arms of a drug-dealing male escort.” Instead, he outlines all the reasons she’s at fault (as are, apparently, all the wives of pastors who can’t quite master that whole “forsaking all others” thing); and finishes up with a weak “I’m not saying she’s responsible” to cover his already exposed … you get the picture.
I’m not sure what I found creepier: the misogynistic assertions that all those poor wandering clergymen out there are helpless victims of lazy, dumpy-looking wives and morally-challenged women, or his gleeful recounting of all the female parishioners who are trying to get into his own pants. Apparently, marrying a preacher is the equivalent of marrying a Chippendale’s dancer.
Who knew? Well, I better get myself off to the beauty salon and those kickboxing classes, lest I force poor Chris to call up the local escort service…
the incredible exploding dinner
You know, I have had dinners metaphorically blow up in my face before. But yesterday was a first.
I stayed home with the Queen, because she was running a high fever and coughing her poor little toddler heart out (rest easy, dear readers. Her fever broke early afternoon and she was hamming it up by end of day.) So since I had time for “dinner prep” for a change, I decided to make yeast rolls.
I had them in my nice 13 x 9 pyrex baking pan, and I actually remembered to pull them out of the oven at exactly the right moment of doneness: when they were all golden and flaky and yeasty.
And then I set the dish down on the stovetop. Apparently, on a burner I had forgotten to turn off.
In about three minutes, I started to smell something that was suspiciously like burned yeast rolls. I quickly figured out what I’d done, and with the potholders (safety first!) I moved the pan to the cold side of the stove. Apparently, it was much, much colder than the burner.
I stepped back about four steps, to holler down the hall at Chris what I’d done, when the 13 x 9 pyrex baking dish blew up rather spectacularly. It even made the “boom!” noise. Shards of superheated pyrex shrapnel flew everywhere, burning holes in the vinyl tile floor. It was … impressive, to say the least.
I just stood there for a moment, rather shell-shocked, having a lovely moment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I am pretty sure Chris came running up behind me, asked if I was okay, and then escorted me forceably to the living room. I am fairly certain I said I was okay.
All in all, it could have been much worse. I escaped with just a few small cuts, and nobody else was even in the room. I had it all cleaned up within an hour. The damage to the floor was not appreciably worse than the condition it’s already in.
But doggone it, those yeast rolls were perfect.
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