Drop the Pink Elephant

15 Ways to Say What You Mean...and Mean What You Say

Bill McFarlan

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781907312229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Salute mentale e benessere

"As GMTV anchor, I interview hundreds of people every year. However well they interview, every single person would find it easier to explain their case by following these simple principles." EAMONN HOLMES, GMTV Presenter
"[Drop the Pink Elephant]...tackle[s] every aspect of personal communication in a crisp, entertaining style." THE PLAIN ENGLISH SOCIETY
"There can be no whitewash at the White House." (Richard Nixon). These nine words turned the American nation against their President. Why? Because people hadn't linked the White House with a cover up until Nixon himself made the connection. His own denial created the story.
It is perhaps the most famous Pink Elephant in history. But what exactly is a 'Pink Elephant'? Pink Elephants are the unnecessary negatives that clutter your conversation and meaning, sending out the wrong signals to anyone you communicate with.
In Drop the Pink Elephant, Bill McFarlan reveals how to avoid the deadly trap of allowing poor communication skills to obscure your meaning and reduce your effectiveness. Drop the Pink Elephant is filled with helpful, simple and practical advice on how to make your words count for more. Put these straightforward lessons into practice and you will notice immediately how much more effectively you are able to communicate with others.
Sharpen your conversation by:
* FIRST SPOTTING, THEN DROPPING THE PINK ELEPHANT
* GETTING RID OF THE JARGON
* LEARNING TO SPEAK IN PICTURES
* RECOGNISING WHEN YOU SHOULD APOLOGISE OR THANK PEOPLE
* CAPTIVATING AN AUDIENCE
N.B. No animals were hurt in the making of this book. (Can you spot your first Pink Elephant?)

Section Two

Be Principled in What You Say

Chapter 3

Staying on the Louisiana Highway

‘The sooner you’re replaced by a machine,
the better for all of us.’

Bill McFarlan, November 1993

It was late evening on a wet and windy November day when I arrived back at Glasgow Airport. I had been up since 4.30 a.m. to present sports bulletins on the BBC’s Breakfast News programme and then run a media training course at the London headquarters of Guinness.

The journey to Heathrow Airport had been fraught and the flight was delayed. I was now exhausted, having used all my energy first to present sport and then cajole and encourage my course participants. In short, I was fresh out of what I call ‘professional politeness’. Anybody coming between a soothing bath and me was likely to pay the price. However, in 30 minutes I would be in the sanctuary of my home, able to relax. I had only to find my car, pay for the parking ticket and drive home.

The car was at the far end of the car park, so I was soaked as I reached it. Approaching the tollbooth, I placed the ticket between my teeth and fumbled in my pocket for a ten pound note. With rain lashing down, I reluctantly opened the window and placed the note on the narrow ledge of the booth… only for a gust of wind to blow it inside.

‘There’s no need to throw it at me,’ snapped the officious woman in the booth. (Pink Elephant!)

‘I didn’t throw it at you. (Pink Elephant!) It was the wind,’ I sighed.

‘And I don’t want your half-chewed ticket either,’ she snarled. (Pink Elephant!)

‘Well it’s not as if I have AIDS,’ I hissed. (Pink Elephant!)

‘You might for all I know,’ she spat back.

That was it. I lost all composure.

‘The sooner you’re replaced by a machine, the better for all of us,’ I barked. ‘Have a happy redundancy.’

I snatched my change and screeched off feeling pretty good about my parting shot. I had shown her. How dare she treat her customer that way! Had she any idea how hard I had worked that day and how tired I was?

On relating the story at home, I now found it rather funny. Although, judging by the open-jawed expressions around the kitchen table, my family seemed to be missing the humour.

A week later, returning from my next stint at Breakfast News, it was mid-afternoon and the sun was shining. I was positively happy until a sense of foreboding began to suffocate me. What if the same woman was on duty at the pay booth and remembered me?

The smugness of seven days earlier had turned to guilt, although I was attempting to bury it in self-justification. In reality, I was now regretting my outburst. Despite her sniping, the machine gun fire I had released was unjustifiable. An escalation of the spat would have been avoidable, had I only shown one ounce of humility.

The trouble was my tiredness, and my resulting lack of professional politeness. But, at that time of night, I bet she was tired as well. I had been presenting a television programme and teaching media handling skills while she had been stuck in a cold and draughty booth, taking grief from ticket-sucking, wet, tired and grumpy customers like me. For all I knew, she may even have been told that day that she was to be replaced by a machine.

If I had only met her ‘no need to throw it at me’ comment with ‘I’m sorry, the wind caught it’, I’m sure we could have left on good terms.

What would I have done with a client? Remained polite throughout, of course. Shame on you Bill - you hypocrite!

Some years later, at the same airport - and after another long day in London - I was queuing at the machine to stamp my parking ticket. (The pay booths had been replaced but, ironically, one of the few people to keep their jobs in a customer care centre was my friend, the former collector of soggy, disease-ridden tickets.)

Just as it was my turn at the machine, I dropped a couple of pound coins on the floor. Scrambling to pick them up, I noticed people behind me in the queue edging forward towards the machine.

‘I think you’ll find there’s a queue,’ I announced, in best Basil Fawlty style.

‘Oh Bill, it’s yourself,’ came the reply, to my horror. ‘Remember you ran a training course for us in London last month?’

Suddenly, I was all charm. All professional politeness. All embarrassment.

So at what point do you learn to engage the brain before putting the mouth in gear? Normally when your logic kicks in before an emotional response to your ego coming under attack.

These two incidents taught me a valuable lesson. I now have a technique in place that helps me stay cool. It involves ‘remaining on the Louisiana Highway, rather than straying into the swamp’. Put simply, it’s about keeping to the moral high ground in any argument.

Keeping to the highway may well start off by offering the other person a get-out clause, avoiding a tricky situation. One such situation arose when I found a woman sitting on my seat on a plane.

I looked at my boarding pass. It was 10C. I checked the seat she occupied. It was 10C. Now I’ve misread both the boarding pass and the seat number in the past, so I checked again.

Then I began. ‘Excuse me, I wonder if I have the right boarding pass.’

‘10C,’ she said, looking at my pass, before repeating the number and looking above her head. She then rifled through her bag to find her own pass, numbered 9C. ‘Oh I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s quite all right,’ I replied. ‘I find the numbering slightly confusing. ’

Painless! I got my seat. She got hers. We avoided a needless confrontation.

However, I once witnessed a similar situation involving two women go horribly wrong. One strode up the passageway, clearly harassed, and announced to the other ‘I think you’ll find you’re in my seat. 15A.’

The seated woman remained cool, checked her own boarding pass, then asked to see the other passenger’s card. ‘Well, I would be,’ she then replied, ‘if I were going to Amsterdam. But I’m going to Heathrow … along with everyone else.’

Nonchalantly, she resumed reading her newspaper as the aggressor marched back down the passageway, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. She was accompanied off the plane by much pointing and sniggering from other passengers.

To claim the moral high ground - and stay on the Louisiana Highway - all you have to do is remain polite and reasonable. Even if you get off on the wrong foot, you can always retrieve the situation and still come up smelling of roses.

I was enjoying a weekend in the south-west of England with my wife and another couple. Ready to go out for dinner, Caroline and I arrived in the bar before the others came down. I went to the counter to order. Fifteen minutes later, our friends were still absent, so I went up for another round.

When I returned with the drinks, I looked at my change and realized I had been overcharged. The barman was busy when I arrived back, so my argument was well-prepared. Firmly, but politely, I told him he had made a mistake and charged me £1.25 more for exactly the same drinks as before.

Triumphantly, I sat down, my money returned. At which point, Caroline pointed out that my arithmetic was wrong. The difference in price was only 25 pence. After several more checks, I reluctantly agreed.

‘But I’ve still been overcharged by 25p,’ I insisted to her.

‘Yes, it was 25 pence more,’ she pointed out. ‘But I had a gin and bitter lemon this time. It was a gin and tonic last time. That would account for it.’

Yes, yes, yes … and yes again. The barman was right. I was wrong, wrong, wrong! So what now? Time to deal with the unpalatable truth. I lifted the £1.25 and went back to the bar to apologize to a now-baffled barman.

‘I’m very sorry,’ I began, ‘the mistake was all mine.’

Now totally bemused, he took my money and got on with his increasingly confusing duties. I returned to my seat feeling foolish, but now guilt-free.

The 30-second apology turned out to be a wise investment of my time. The barman, it turned out, also served at breakfast, where I bade him ‘good morning’. He helped us downstairs with our luggage, then he checked us out of the hotel. It seemed that some greater force was telling him to shadow me, to ensure I remained humble. If so, the trick worked. I crept out the hotel with my case under one arm and my humility under the other.

Summary

1. Retain the moral high ground by remaining patient and polite.

2. Be sure of your facts and use only polite explanation.

3. That’s how to stay on the Louisiana Highway, rather than getting stuck in the swamp.

Chapter 4

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

‘Any fool can defend his mistake - and most fools do.’

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Elton John was spot-on when he sang ‘Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word’.

To be wrong hurts us deeply. It shakes our self-confidence. It makes us doubt our ability. But the truth may well be that we simply got it wrong.

Is it possible to go through your whole life being right all the time? Some people would certainly give you the impression that they, or their organization, are infallible.

Most of us hate having to say ‘I’m sorry, I got it wrong’. I reckon that’s because our self-confide...

Table of contents

• What the papers say …
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• World’s Top Ten Pink Elephants
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section One - Dump the Baggage and Create Clarity
• Section Two - Be Principled in What You Say
• Section Three - Positively Assert Yourself
• Section Four - Think of the Audience
• Section Five - Create Deeper Understanding
• Appendix - What Do Your Words Say About You?
• Index
• End User License Agreement