THIS is when you know you’re screwed ➜

“Hi! Happy to finally get to your beautiful boutique hotel. These twisting single-lane roads here in Scotland are a bit hard to navigate in the rain. We have a room reservation for one night.”

“Your name, please?”

“Reisman.”

“Hmmmm, I’m not seeing your room reservation on our records, and we are totally booked for tonight.”

My tired husband, shuffling through our travel documents, proudly produces the email hard copy of our reservation and replies, “Here it is – we have one room reserved.”

The guy behind the counter of this rustic, small and remote hotel looks at our documents and points to one line and says, “Your reservation is for July 10 and today is July 5.”

THIS is when the power shifts.

You know you are right…

Until … “pow” … you are proven WRONG.

Think of a see-saw slide at your local playground. You were going up and now you’re going down. Way down. The fulcrum of balance has shifted. You have now lost all of your power. You are not always correct!

Does this happen in your business?

Yes.

At this exact moment of revelation, as your see-saw whacks down, you will ask yourself these pivotal questions:

• “Have I been nice during this conversation exchange?”
• “How rude have I been?”
• “What does damage control look like here?”

Our hotel owners in their home hanging out in the kitchen with us!

What happened to the jet-lagged Reismans?

As we stood at this hotel counter, rain pelting down outside, and sleep deprived, the owner came over, took pity on us and said, “Look, every place around here that I do business with is booked and I don’t want to send you to places I don’t know. Why don’t you be our guests tonight at our home up the lane?” Phew, I’m grateful we had a pretty good “nice index”.