Try or Do?

I remember running some training for a team of receptionists in a busy walk in medical centre. There had been a lot of complaints from patients about the way they had been treated by the reception staff. The knock on effect was that the walk in was loosing patients and there was negative feedback being posted on a well known public health forum.

I was drafted in to do some troubleshooting and eventually ran a  session designed around staff having the choice as to how they reacted to customers (patients). They had the choice to smile, the choice to be polite, the choice to be attentive and the question is if they didn't how had they made the decision not to? Because they all agreed that they must have made the decision to behave the way that they did. We agreed on acceptable standards of behaviour and acceptable attitudes, and explored the NLP communication model so that each of the team understood exactly how individuals have their own perception of the world around them.

I then asked for agreement to change the status quo and to improve the patient experience, all of the team, bar one person, were fully on side and enthusiastic about their new beliefs on patient care. The one person remained quiet throughout this part of the session until eventually she uttered the words - "I'll try"

Here is an exercise for you - 'try' and pick up something near you. Perhaps a pen or if you have a mouse with your pc just 'try' and pick it up.....now when I say try I imagine that most of you will already have picked whatever it is up. That is picking something up, not trying...go on keep trying...try and find that you cannot. In therapy work I often encourage clients to 'try in vain' to reproduce old behaviours that we had just modified, so that they can discover that they cannot.

So here's the thing, you have the choice in life, you always do, never not never, so either do it or choose not to. If you do it and it turns out differently from what you expected, learn from it, you got a result after all, just do it differently next time to get the result you want and be positive and just 'Do It' and act as if you already can...because if you just try, there is always the chance that you may fail. Remember - trying presupposes failure.