Using Psychology to Thrive in Customer Support with Melody Wilding

Customer support comes with a real mental and emotional load.

In this episode, Priscilla sits down with Melody Wilding, licensed therapist, executive coach, and host of the Psychology at Work podcast, to talk about how support professionals can use psychology to protect their energy, communicate with confidence, and build healthier habits without emotionally detaching from customers.

We dig into why setting boundaries often fails in the moment and why setting clear expectations works better, how to spot boundary erosion, and what the “happy to help” mindset can turn into when it becomes overfunctioning. 

Melody also shares practical tools for handling frustrated customers without taking it personally and using the "broken record" technique when you need to stand your ground.

Plus: how remote work has changed rumination and workplace paranoia, why sensitivity can be a competitive advantage in support, and simple reset rituals you can use between tickets so one difficult interaction doesn’t spill into the next.

This conversation is for support pros who want to stay empathetic and protected, and for leaders who want to build a culture where sustainable support is the standard.

Where to find Melody:

Melody’s website: melodywilding.com

Podcast: Psychology at Work

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!

To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

Intro: Using Psychology to Thrive in Customer Support

Priscilla 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people of Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're discussing psychology at work, specifically psychology and customer support. We'll talk about what it looks like to build healthy boundaries, how to navigate customer emotions, and explore strategies rooted in psychology that will make our lives as customer support professionals easier and more enjoyable. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So I'm really excited about today's episode. A couple of years ago, when we were planning this podcast, one of the episodes that I wanted to do was this idea of using psychology to protect us and the work we're doing in customer support because there's such a mental load that comes with working with customers every day. And now that we've been recording episodes, I've really been looking for the right person to come on the show and talk with us about that. And I knew I had to find someone who was truly an expert in that field because it's not something that I have a lot of experience in. And so joining us today is Melody Wilding. Melody is an award-winning executive coach, human behavior professor, and licensed therapist. She is the host of the Psychology at Work podcast and is the author of Managing Up, How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge and Trust Yourself, Stop Overthinking, and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Well. For more than a decade, Melody has helped smart, thoughtful, top performers at the world's most successful companies get the recognition, respect, and pay they deserve by harnessing the power of psychology. And today, she's going to show us how to use psychology to impact how we approach customer support by creating healthy habits. Thanks for taking the time to be here, Melody. I'm really excited. Couldn't be more thrilled to be with you. Thank you so much. Yes. When I came across your podcast a couple of weeks ago, I felt like there were so many episodes in there that were directly applicable to what I know I experience at work and in customer support and the people on my team experience. And so it just felt like a perfect fit to have you on the show. So I really can't wait to get into this conversation. But before we do, we always kick off our episodes with a highlight of someone in our lives who have made our day better. And so I wanted to know who has made your day recently. I'm going to cheat a little and pick two people because they both use the same strategy with me and I love it.

Melody 2:27

There's no rules. So you can deal for it. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So uh I have two friends, Lorraine Lee and Terry Trust PCO. And why they have made my day recently is they send me voice notes, whether it's text or I vox with Terry. And it just always makes my day to be able to hear their voice because all day we're just scrolling through our feeds and you feel like you're catching up with people and you're connected with people. But there's just something different about being able to just quickly chat in that way, that uh a voxer message or a voice note. I've even had colleagues send me uh voice DMs via LinkedIn. And I just love that. I just feel so instantly more connected to them. So that always makes my day.

Priscilla 3:13

I love that. That's such a good example. Yeah. And it is like the power of our voices and actually hearing each other. What you said is so right. We spend a lot of time on social media or just in this digital world, and we feel connected to our friends or the people we work with, but you don't realize how disconnected you are until you actually have a conversation or hear their voice. And then it just takes it to a whole nother level and you have the inflection that helps you understand where they're coming from. And there's just the communication is so much stronger when you're able to hear someone's voice. During COVID, there was an app called Marco Polo. I don't know if either of you are familiar with it.

Jordan 3:53

Yes, I forgot about it.

Melody’s Path Into Psychology

Priscilla 3:55

I lived on Marco Polo with like four or five of my friends, and we would talk all day, just continuous conversations. And I remember thinking it was such a cool way to stay connected with them when we could just text, but something about sending those videos back and forth and hearing their voices really helped a time where we were all very disconnected, feel much more connected. So that's a great answer. I love it. So, you know, like I said, I'm really excited about this episode. I think understanding psychology and how we communicate with each other is so fascinating. And like how we can use these tools and the science that comes along with, you know, psychology is a science. And so using that is just really incredible. I think it's something we can harness and that will just make our lives better, which is what we're always trying to do. So before we get into that, can you tell me a little bit, Melody, about your experience and what it is about psychology that has you so passionate about that?

Melody 4:52

Well, let's go way, way back to, as most good stories, that it starts in childhood where I was a very perceptive kid. You know, people would say, Oh, you take things so seriously and take things so personally. You're so deep, you're so wise for your age. And as I grew up, I realized that that perceptiveness, yes, it left unchecked, it can really get in your way and lead to a lot of overthinking, which I think we'll talk about more today. But it has really been such a gift and really led to my fascination with people and dynamics and how do we relate to each other and why do we change how we show up in one environment versus another? And how do you motivate or inspire people to do something? Or why is someone resistant versus not? And those were always the types of questions I was asking myself from a young age. I was a weird kid. So um, all of that, that level of sensitivity and observation really I knew from a very young age I wanted to study psychology. It was very obvious, you know, being the good listener in the friend group and all that. And so that's what I did. Yeah, I went on, I have a research background, I studied the interaction of emotions and how our emotions color our memory of experiences. But through all of that research, it felt very disembodied from actually working with people. And so that's what led me to uh get my degree in social work, go on to be a therapist. And as I got deeper into that, my own geekiness is around productivity and personal and professional development. And 15 years ago, when I started, there was no one talking about how our mental and emotional worlds show up in our careers.

Jordan 6:45

Yeah.

Melody 6:46

And so that really became my sweet spot that I entered. And, you know, flash forward 15 years, two books, working with thousands of clients later. It's uh it's really been a nice amalgamation of kind of my own personality and interests with what people have needed. Because at the end of the day, work is about people. And if you have people in systems, what underlies all of that is both individual and then our kind of collective psychology of how we're interacting with each other.

Boundary Mistakes in the Workplace

Priscilla 7:17

I entered the workforce about 15 years ago. And I remember those like first couple years in a corporate setting and just that adjustment period, right? You leave college and you move into a corporate world and it's like figuring out how to interact with these people around you that have all levels of experience. And then I am like also a very deeply feeling person and live in my head a lot. And I remember struggling a lot early on in my career because it was this feeling of, okay, well, I have to separate these emotions that I'm having from my work and really trying to figure out how to do that in a healthy way. And as I've grown, I feel like I've developed some, you know, tools to handle these things. But I've what I've realized is the emotion actually is a benefit and it can help me in a lot of ways. And so as I've gotten older, as I've gotten more comfortable in the, you know, in a corporate work environment, I feel like I've gotten a little healthier with that. But what are some of the mistakes that you see with people in the corporate world now when it comes to like workplace habits and psychology? Like, what are some of the biggest mistakes you're seeing?

Melody 8:26

Well, it was really fun when you reached out about this show because your name is happy to help. Yeah. And I think you would relate to being someone I would call a sensitive striver. A hundred percent. Which is someone, yeah, who is a deep feeler, deep thinker, processes everything. It's like you have thousands of bits of information coming in versus the average person. And you're also very driven. You want to keep pushing yourself to succeed. Not necessarily a lot of my clients don't want to get the corner office. That's not what they're after. They just have this natural drive to be better than they were yesterday. Yeah. So those two qualities, amazing combination. But again, like I said before, if we're unbalanced, can really get in our way. Yeah. So coming back to the title of the show, actually, one thing I see for us sensitive strivers is we have a high level of responsibility. And often that shows up as dedication to our work, loyalty to others. We want to go above and beyond, volunteer, say yes. We are happy to help to a fault. Yes. And that is one of the patterns I see the most, and that can be the most dangerous for people, is getting into this cycle of overfunctioning, where you are taking on more responsibility, literally and psychologically, more responsibility in terms of tasks on your plate, obligations that you have, but also the mental and emotional load of what you are carrying. And when you are overfunctioning, it can inadvertently create this dynamic where other people underfunction. Not necessarily because they're bad people, but because if we're always the ones swooping in to make sure something gets over the finish line, other people don't have to step up. Yes. So it's almost like we're enabling lower performance. And then we get resentful about that and the cycle goes round and round.

Priscilla 10:22

Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, what you're describing is like most people I know who work in customer support.

Jordan 10:28

Yeah.

Priscilla 10:29

Because naturally the people who are really good at this role are people who are happy to help. They tend to be people pleasers, they tend to really enjoy that act of coming in and supporting a customer. The people who are really good at that, that's like a natural part of who they are. And so what you just described is 100% true, where you'll see people taking on this extra weight that maybe they shouldn't, but they don't really know how to handle that. And so one of the things I wanted to talk about was this idea of creating healthy boundaries so that we as support professionals can protect ourselves while still offering that emotional help to our customers, because there's so much of this balance between, you know, our job is to help our customers and to represent our brand and to be there for them and to build relationships. But then at what cost you have to be aware of those boundaries. And so one of the things I think about a lot is how do we as support professionals build those boundaries without emotionally detaching from the customers that we're working with?

Melody 11:33

Yeah. It's a fine line. It's a fine line, right? Because it's it's baked into the nature of your role. And of course, you always want to walk this balance of being a team player and a servant leader without driving yourself into burnout. Yeah. Right. I have an episode of my show that I did a couple months ago that was called the top three boundary mistakes that people make. And one of the main points I make in that episode is that we want to be less focused on setting boundaries and more focused on setting expectations. That may sound like semantics, but the difference is very profound because expectations are proactive. It's here's our typical response time, or here's the channels by which you can reach us. Let me give you an example of this. So, with my team, we use a community platform where we host all our programs and things like that. And uh it has a DM feature where people could DM me or someone from my team.

Jordan 12:31

Yeah.

Melody 12:31

And people would DM us questions, whether it was about billing or even a coaching question, for example. And every single time I would have this psychological rigmarole of, oh gosh, I have to get back to them, but I feel like I'm giving this person preferential treatment because other people aren't DMing me. And now I have to push back on them and say, you know, I really can't respond to messages. Like we can't go back and forth about this and here. So can you redirect this? I would go through this whole thing. And so at the beginning of the year, I said to my team, new policy going forward. We are not going to be able to respond to DMs. And we communicated that as an expectation to our clients. Hey, brief change. If you want to get the best and the fastest service from us, reach out at this email so nothing gets lost. And that's how we'll be able to serve you. And now we have an autoresponder up. And if a message comes in, I have removed the worry of having to set a boundary and all the emotional upheaval I would go through. It seems like a small example, but there are countless situations where we get into this over time.

Priscilla 13:40

I like the distinction between expectations and boundaries because boundaries to me feel like more in the moment, throwing them up and trying to figure out, okay, right in this situation, I need to set a boundary. And that can be hard to do because it can come across as rude. It can come across as bad customer support if you're trying to in the moment throw a boundary up, even though it's not bad customer support necessarily, it can feel that way. Yeah. But if you set an expectation, it's kind of like you're preparing before you go into battle. You're going, okay, this is how I'm going to handle this before I get there. And that way everyone's on the same page before you get into that moment where emotions are high and we're trying to keep ourselves protected. So I like that distinction. And I think a lot of customer support professionals feel that when it comes to like phone support versus email support. And a lot of times you'll hear, especially with, you know, SaaS products, where they don't want to offer phone support because that boundary is really hard to put up when you're on a phone call with a customer. So limiting it to email support allows you the freedom to say, okay, this is the expectation around this. And then occasionally I can make an exception and make a phone call when that's something I'm choosing so that I can protect myself. I think that's just a really cool way to look at it, defining it with those two different terms.

Melody 15:05

Yeah. To make sure you get the best and fastest support and nothing falls through the cracks, that's very intentional. Because if we can contextualize our boundary or our expectation, whatever it is, in how does this actually serve you, person I am setting this with, in terms of you getting the most accurate information or the fastest, highest quality response or support, then the person doesn't feel as on the defensive as, oh, you're taking something away from me. It's more of this is in service of doing what's best for you and your experience overall. So I think that's important too, because a lot of us, especially sensitive strivers, will approach boundaries with a lot of shame.

Jordan 15:50

Yeah.

Melody 15:51

To say, oh, I'm I'm so sorry. I hate to have to do this, or I really don't want to disappoint you, right? We teach people how to treat us. And so if you're arriving at that and messaging it with shame and excessive contrition, right, when it's not necessarily warranted, the other person responds to that. But if you say, here's why this is for your benefit, it totally changes the energy and the other person's reaction as a result.

Spotting Boundary Erosion

Priscilla 16:18

And it forces you to think through that when you're setting those expectations and the boundaries to think through that and go, okay, why are we doing it this way? Why are we gonna not provide this mode of communication or whatever it is? You can actually sit down and think through that, okay, because it's actually gonna be easier for someone to come back to the information we're giving them if it's written. Yes, versus if it's in a phone call or something like that. And that way you have that ready when you're talking with your customer about that. And we've done that before on our end, where we've gone, okay, why is it that we don't offer phone support? We don't want to say we just don't do it because we just don't do it. We want to have reasoning behind that. And some of that will be serving us to protect us, but some of that, like you mentioned, is to serve the customer. And so being able to communicate that and define that as a team is really important. And then you can go and clarify it with your customer in a way that makes them feel more served because you've thought about them in that way. So, what are some signs that your boundaries or those expectations are being crossed, even if someone's like not being rude or going through a, you know, the wrong channel? Like, how can we identify that if we're not used to having like firm boundaries and expectations?

Melody 17:27

Yeah. The biggest emotional red flag is resentment. And I referred to that earlier. Yeah. Resentment is a huge telltale sign that you have let something go on for far too long than it should have, right? Or, or you have been overextending yourself without a feeling of reciprocity or recognition there. And so sometimes I will have clients do a resentment audit. What are the areas where that feeling is even creeping up for you past, let's say uh four out of 10 or higher? Because those are areas where we may have to set or reset some boundaries around, you know, whether it's your level of commitment or it's the scope of how you're involved. But that's a really good place to start because resentment, it's simmering. Sometimes you do get this flash of just indignation when you see an email hit your inbox or someone's name come across your Slacker teams. But other times it's just this kind of anger that's weighing you down. So that's what I would say is the big one that most people overlook. There's a lot of good information in that emotional data.

Priscilla 18:42

I feel that a lot. And I think for a long time, I thought the solution to that was that I just needed to figure out a way to let it go. And I think to an extent, there is part of that. But what I'm learning as I grow and, you know, as an adult is that those boundaries really are gonna help to ease that and to remove some of that resentment. And so I think that's a very important thing to be on the lookout for because I think a lot of people don't notice that as it's simmering until it hits a point where it's just it's so much. And then it's hard to move forward from that.

Being Replaceable To Grow

Melody 19:15

Yeah. And a more uh tactical one that I see a lot, which it sounds backwards. A lot of the people who, when they first come to work with me and my team, they'll say they've received feedback around things like they're not strategic enough or they don't know how to prioritize. Some of them will even be being told you're too valuable where you are. And that is a big red flag that you need boundaries because you have made yourself indispensable to the point where you've made yourself unmovable or unpromotable. And it's a very tricky, right? This is that happy to help mentality. Let me step in. But then you can paint yourself into a corner of no one else can do your role, or there's not a lot of mobility for you to take on other projects because you have all the knowledge in your head, right? You haven't created SOPs or templates that other people can use. So it's too expensive or it's too risky to let you move somewhere else. And the other part of that about not being strategic or not knowing how to prioritize is when you are indiscriminately saying yes to everything, that doesn't signal you know how to evaluate the trade-offs or you know how to have tough conversations, some of those more mid or senior level skills that you might need. And so we have this equation growing up that, you know, effort plus time, if I just work hard and bide my time, therefore I will be successful. And it can be a real mind switch to realize that being able to push back tactfully is what will help you get ahead because it's the opposite of the way we've been conditioned to grow in our careers. Yeah.

Priscilla 21:05

Yeah. And I remember early on working when I started over here at Buzzprout, someone saying something along the lines of, everyone here is replaceable. And I remember thinking, like, oh, yikes, like I don't want to hear that. Like we're all replaceable. Like I could be fired at any moment. Is that what you mean? But what they meant was you actually get the freedom to leave and not think about work. We don't want you to be in a mindset where you are irreplaceable, so you can't move.

Jordan 21:31

Yeah.

Controlling Negative Self-Talk

Priscilla 21:31

So just like what you were saying, where you can't move up because you're irreplaceable where you are, or you can't take a vacation because no one can do your job the way you can do your job. And so having that mindset is something that I know I used to cling to, like I'm irreplaceable in this way. But then when I started working here, it was like, actually, no, you are replaceable. But where you're not replaceable is at home with your family. Where you're not replaceable are these other places. But at work, you should be able to be replaceable. You Want to be so that you can move on to the next thing or move up, or there's the phrase you can't steal second if you're standing on first. Yeah. I think that that's really important. So one of the things that you talk about a lot is negative self-talk. I am someone who's always been in my head. I said that early on, but I spend a lot of time in my head. And sometimes it's negative, sometimes it's positive. More often than not, it's negative. And what I think is interesting is working in support, you know, you deal with all different types of people all day. And some people are frustrated and they say things to you in support that actually reinforces the negative self-talk that you're trying to get out of. Yeah. And so, how does self-talk play into our corporate life? And then what advice would you have for people who are really struggling to get out of their head in that sense?

Melody 22:51

You hit the nail on the head that the feedback or the criticism that tends to sting the most is the one that confirms the worst things we believe about ourselves, right? Like you're not being helpful enough. Or I thought this was actually a good company, right? And you're like, oh, it just hits you like a dagger when people say that because those are hitting on your insecurities. And so part of being, we've been talking about being a sensitive striver, thoughtfulness is a huge part of this trait where it can be a gigantic advantage to be able to see different sides of a situation or have empathy for a customer, for example. But we can become so self-aware that we become self-conscious, right? It goes all the way around. Yes. One of the tricks I talk about in my book, Trust Yourself, is to give that inner critic a name. It sounds silly, and that's actually part of the point of it.

Priscilla 23:48

Yeah.

Melody 23:48

Is to give that inner critic an identity that is separate from you. So when you hear that talk track coming up, and let me just go back to that for a second, because if that talk track is coming up, our brain is going to filter for everything that confirms that, right? Our our brain just takes a mental shortcut and says, what information confirms the identity and the story I have about myself and the world? I'm just going to listen to that. And so if you think you're not good enough or you you think you're a difficult person, right? You're going to scan for all of that to confirm that story. Yeah. And so if you can put a label on that inner critic, you know, I called mine Bozo. I have That's a good one. Yeah. I have had clients who call that theirs uh Miranda Priestley, or I once had someone who had a little Darth Vader that he would keep on his desk, and that was like his inner critic totem that he would be able to talk to.

Jordan 24:44

Yeah.

Melody 24:44

And there's psychology that shows when we can have that psychological distance from our thoughts where we're not fused with them. They're not so automatic. We're giving ourselves just that second of space and agency to have awareness to say, is this what I want to believe right now? Does this actually move me closer or further away to my values and my goals? That moment of awareness helps you be more calm. It helps you stay in your prefrontal cortex where you can uh have higher reasoning and more self-control. So when that person is coming at you with their own anger, you're able to say, this is a reflection of them possibly having a bad day. And I like to go through what are five possible reasons this person may be reacting this way, besides I suck and I'm terrible at my job. What are other explanations? Maybe their boss yelled at them, they got a flat tire this morning. Uh, their kid wouldn't get dressed for school, whatever it is. But it helps to get yourself off of that thought track of just confirming the insecurities you have about yourself.

Priscilla 25:51

Yeah, I think that's such a good piece of advice. We talk a lot about thinking about the fact that our customers have their own story and that they are bringing their own context into any interaction we have with them. And it helps us to relate with them better. And then when they're frustrated, it helps us to give them more grace in those moments without taking that personally when they get frustrated. So I think that taking a beat to really think through and list out five things is a really good tool that you can use to put yourself back in that mindset of like, this is not about me necessarily. And I don't need to let this be a reflection of me. The goal here is to help them get to their next step and move on to the next thing. On that same plane, you know, dealing with frustrated customers can be really draining. And in customer support, especially depending on your customers. I mean, we at Buzzbrout have fantastic customers, and very rarely do we have really frustrated, really mean people. But sometimes that happens. And for some companies, you have more people that are frustrated than others. And so you might be dealing with a repeat, like every email, there's some frustration, or if you're in the middle of a bug and everyone's frustrated and writing in about that. What is that repeated exposure to frustration or like urgency in support? How does that affect us, especially when we haven't established those boundaries or those expectations?

Melody 27:18

Yeah. Well, particularly if you're someone who's more on the sensitive side of the spectrum, there's research that shows that we have more active mirror neurons, which are essentially the empathy neurons. So our brain lights up more when we are experiencing the emotions of other people. And so we're we are literally taking in more of other people's emotional reactions, especially negativity. Negativity is very contagious, and that's for evolutionary purposes. It is helpful and protective if people are more scared or on alert or panicked because our, you know, prehistoric selves think that's going to keep us safe.

Priscilla 27:59

Yeah.

Melody 28:00

So that's why negativity spreads so much. And it can keep you on that high alert fight or flight. And the model uh we use in my book, Trust Yourself, and in some of my programs, we call that vigilance, where your vigilance becomes unbalanced to the point where you're always scanning for risks. Are people happy with me? Are they upset? And you may be reading into situations and small cues more than you would before. Yes. And all of that carries home, right? Because it's like you have these emotional tabs open or residue on you that you have to process at some time.

Priscilla 28:39

Right.

Melody 28:40

And so what we work with a lot of people on is trying to create that boundary, that distinction between work time and personal time. Because if we don't, if we don't create some of those internal mental boundaries, there's no healthy compartmentalization. You are always just going to be turning over, oh, could I said something differently in that email, or maybe I should have responded sooner, right? You're just constantly turning over those situations in your head and beating yourself up, or even being angry yourself at I can't believe that person was such a jerk to me. Like, what's wrong with everybody today? Right. It just becomes this dark cloud. Yeah. So having some sort of a transition ritual between your workday and then the rest of your life is extremely important. So you are creating that sense of closure.

Jordan 29:30

Yeah.

Melody 29:30

And this doesn't have to be elaborate. You know, we have some people that at the end of the day just write down here were three moments of strength. I kept my cool when this when this client was coming at me and sending 10 messages in a row. Or uh I was I was able to push through this project that I've been procrastinating on forever. So you could write down those three things. Maybe it's for me, it's always some form of changing my clothes, lighting a candle, turning the TV on, just something that signifies one section of the day is over and we're putting that aside and we're starting the next one.

Priscilla 30:08

Yeah. And you saying that makes me think about where we are as far as working remotely goes, because that was built into our days when we would leave the office and drive home and have a commute to make that transition. Yep. That's where I do it. I still go to the office because I like to have that separation, but I know a lot of people work from home and it is a lot harder to have that separation. So, how do you think that has affected the lack of a commute for a lot of people? How has that affected psychology and the bleeding over between work and home life?

Melody 30:41

Oh, huge. Huge. During during the pandemic, I found myself talking much more about what I called work from home paranoia, which was just again, just this constant heightened state of ruminating over everything because we often now lack more of the cues we had when we were in office. You could see your boss in the hallway and get a nod and just a little uh touch base that, okay, everything's okay. We're good, right? We're good. But now we're we're having to read into all of those cues. Like, why did they use a period instead of an exclamation point? Is that a bad sign? You know, yeah. And to your point, we don't have those natural uh transitions that we had before. So it's just one long period of time. And that's why you find yourself kind of going over things when you're at the dinner table, for example, because we haven't deliberately put those boundaries in place.

How Sensitivity Can Be a Superpower

Priscilla 31:37

Yeah. I think that's so insightful and so true. I think of the things like going to lunch with your coworkers from different departments and spending time with them. And I'm sure there are people that are in office that still do that. And that's fantastic. But I think it used to be so regular, at least I know for me before the pandemic, every day we were going having lunch and talking about things that weren't work related. And it builds these relationships. So then you don't ruminate as much on the why did they use a period? Why didn't they use an exclamation point? And that's, oh, are they frustrated with me? They called this meeting. I don't know what's going on. But when you don't have that relationship built, it is a lot easier to get in your head. And that's where things can get dangerous in my experience. Yeah. So one of the things you mentioned in this podcast, but also in your other writing, is that sensitivity can be a competitive advantage. Um, you refer to perceptiveness and emotional intelligence as superpowers when it comes to influencing those who you work with. So, how can support professionals with those superpowers, because a lot of them have those superpowers? Yeah, how can they use those when building customer relationships?

Melody 32:45

Yeah, I believe this now more than ever, especially with the rise of AI and so much automation. There's just so much distance in our interactions. And I really believe that if you're someone who has high empathy, high emotional intelligence, your ability to understand people's pain points, desires, needs, that is everything now. That is exactly what's needed to influence people, to get buy-in, to get them to take action. So, a very simple example, we teach this in one of my programs. It's called Speak Like a Senior Leader, where we're really working with mid-level corporate professionals to help them navigate the different stakeholders. But this certainly applies when you're building relationships with customers too, is to use that perceptiveness to flex your communication style to more so match and mirror the other person. So, for example, in my book Managing Up, I talk about how there's four primary communication styles. And they're based on the fact that people can be either highly dominant communicators or highly sociable communicators. So, do we prioritize speed, results, outcomes, assertiveness in the way we communicate? Do we prioritize people, relationships, connections, stories, things like that? And if you can recognize that someone is what in my vernacular, I would call a cheerleader who is someone who is both highly dominant and highly sociable. Those people are using words like vision, mission, enthusiasm, excitement. I would love to be able to do this for you, right? They're including anecdotes of maybe other happy customers or stakeholders who really enjoyed this product or this idea as well. You're going to get faster buy-in and agreement from that person than if you were prioritizing caution. And uh, we need to take this slowly, and maybe we should do a pilot first. The cheerleader is more of the let's go. This is exciting. We have so much opportunity here. Just those little tweaks in how you frame and present your message can make such a huge difference in how it's received by the other person. It's the difference between talking at them and getting through to them.

Strategies for Creating Boundaries at Work

Priscilla 35:10

Yes. And if you look at that in a support role or in a support experience, what that means is you are, you know, you're working with them, you're talking to them as a human being and not talking at them as like a customer. And so there's that connection there and it's like mirroring that and the energy that comes along with it. Because ultimately, with customer support, we are trying to educate and we're trying to solve their problems in that way. And I think that knowing how to flex that communication based on who you're talking with is really important. And I like that energy that comes into it because I think what separates a good customer support experience from a great customer support experience is that personal touch and that energy that we can bring as customer support professionals. I want to transition a little bit here to some strategies that we can use, you know, to create those boundaries to build these habits that will just make our lives easier and make us more successful in our roles in customer support and just in our work lives in general. Do you have any tips for professionals who are struggling to separate that the customer is frustrated versus the customer is frustrated with me?

Melody 36:26

Yeah. This also comes back to self-talk and putting psychological distance between their reaction and yours. Some people find it helpful. Some of my clients like to have a visualization of they're in a bubble, or uh, one of my colleagues would say she would like paint her body in gold armor before she would go into a tough conversation or a negotiation. And that was her reminder that the other person's reaction stays with them. It doesn't come on to me. Some people imagine like it's they're a duck and it's sort of water off their back that this belongs to the other person. So if a visualization helps you, that's great. Another little trick is to use phrases like this person is having the feeling of frustration versus this person is frustrated. Yeah. It is so small, but it's a reminder that this person is having an experience and an interpretation of this experience that is theirs to own.

Priscilla 37:25

Yeah.

Melody 37:25

And the same goes for you. You can say, I'm having the thought that I'm a complete failure in this role versus I'm a failure in this role. The saying, I'm having the thought that acknowledges that these are just words in my head or these are letters on the screen. They don't necessarily have to hurt me or have a deeper interpretation behind them.

Priscilla 37:48

And it gives you the ability to not define yourself by one emotion, or define your customer by one emotion or one experience. We are all very layered people. We will make mistakes, but viewing it like that allows you to say, like, I am not this one experience. This one experience is happening right now, but this is not who I am, and this is not who they are.

Jordan 38:12

Yeah.

Priscilla 38:13

I know for myself that that can be really hard to separate. But once you figure out how to separate it and to remind yourself that like the negative self-talk is not necessarily the reality, once you can separate that, it makes life way easier and it just makes things way more enjoyable. One of the things that I see a lot of customer support professionals run into is this feeling of a customer pushing back on the facts and then you having to step into this role, be a little more assertive than maybe you would normally be, stand in your confidence a little bit more than maybe you would need to be because you have this pushback from a customer who's saying, well, actually, that's not true when the reality is it is true. So, what are one or two practical tools that support professionals can use to feel confident in those difficult customer-facing situations where they have to be a little more assertive and that might feel uncomfortable?

Melody 39:11

Two things. Number one, where possible, try to stay forward-looking and solution focused. So you can say, I understand. And my goal for this conversation now is to figure out how we resolve this for you. So I think a lot of us go back there and try to relitigate what has happened, but instead just recognize it and try to move forward and redirect or refocus the conversation to what you can do now. Yeah. So that's one thing. Number two is there are certain situations where you may want to stand your ground. And in those uh circumstances, using what's called the broken record technique can be very helpful. That's where you repeat a phrase just in a level tone again and again. And you may want to rephrase it. So you're not just saying the same thing, but you can say, you know, as I mentioned, this was our policy that was stated at checkout, for example. You may say, I understand. However, this was what you agreed to when you checked out, right? And you just keep coming back to one statement, not escalating your voice, especially if this is over the phone or voice, but just coming back to that, reiterating it. Sometimes that can take the air out of a person's reaction because you're not caving to their pressure tactics.

Priscilla 40:32

Which can be really hard, especially when you're in a either face-to-face or uh voice-to-voice situation. It can be really hard, especially when you're the kind of person that is happy to help and wants this. And then you're in a moment where now you have to be assertive and you have to stand with like your back and like, you know, stay firm on something because there's no way around it. We find that sometimes passing the voice to another person can help too. If you're getting stuck in that loop and there also, you know, being a broken record on the other side, you go, okay, I'm gonna have to get someone else in here and see if that can help us get out of this. Like sometimes that's a strategy that we use. But honestly, one of the things that is so hard about customer support is that you finish one of those conversations and you start another one. And it might be that the next one is completely different tonally, but it might be that it's another frustrated person. You just never know. And carrying that feeling from person to person can be really dangerous because then you might treat one customer a certain way because the person you just worked with was rude and now you're feeling that still. And we talked about finding ways to reset at the end of a workday so that you can go and be in your home life in a healthy environment. But what about kind of switching email to email? Like, do you have any tips or strategies for resetting within each email in a way that is really meaningful and allows you to focus on the next email or into the next person?

Melody 41:59

Two things come to mind. First is if you can give yourself a break or if you can break up so you're not just going directly into that next email. You get up from your desk, you go make a cup of coffee or whatever, take a lap around your house, just so you have some shift out of that emotion. Because I always like to say, you can't get over an emotion, you have to go through it. And that stress, it's gonna stay in your body. You have to metabolize it somehow. And I understand you can't stop your day and meditate for 20 minutes. Most of us can't do that. Yeah, but you can stand up and maybe just like shake your shoulders and just get it out, or again, go refill your glass of water and come back and let that be your physical reset for it. So you can do that. And I find the principle of assuming best intent saves me more times than not. If I just open every email, even after I've had a tough interaction, if I just go into the next one, assuming best intent, that people are doing the best they can, but the resources they have that helps save me from carrying over that projection from one interaction into the next.

Jordan 43:10

That is becoming our catchphrase on this podcast, assuming you've been.

Leadership Modeling And Team Values

Priscilla 43:14

I feel like it's my catchphrase for my life. Yes. Is assume positive intent. I remember probably 10 years ago, a friend of mine saying it to me, and it was the first time I'd ever heard it. And this was not a work situation, but she said, like, we just have to assume positive intent. And it just kind of like hit me, and I was like, wait, I should be living my whole life assuming positive intent. Yes, yeah, until someone proves to me that the intent is not positive. But until then, I'm gonna assume it. And I really think it it makes your life more enjoyable. It sure is. Like it's a it's a benefit for you if you're assuming positive intent from the people around you. It makes your life better. So it's kind of selfish, but it really is something I think about all the time. Yeah. So one of the things that is talked about a lot in this is the idea. That leadership is modeling a lot of these healthy habits, right? With customer support professionals, a lot of times it gets hard and your leader is who you are. I mean, honestly, customer support, but any workplace, your leaders who you're looking for to model those kind of behaviors. So I want to talk about some of these habits from the top down and how we as leaders can help equip the people on our team with these strategies and then how we can model it. So, what do you think, you know, leaders can do to help normalize boundaries and emotional protection for the people that are working maybe in these support roles?

Melody 44:39

Oh, so many things come to mind. First of all, I have loved seeing more leaders add descriptive text to their sign-offs on email around these are my response times, these are my working hours. I think that is wonderful. As you were saying, just giving people um permission, you have to go first, right? For other people to see this is acceptable. That's one thing. The other thing that comes to mind that I end up doing with a lot of my clients is setting team values, which sounds very lame, but stay with me. Setting team values, but using those as ways for how we behave and we show up as a team. So it's one thing to say we value balance or we value transparency or creativity or compassion, whatever it is. But what does that look like in action? Right. I just had a leader go through this who inherited a team of communication experts and they've received some feedback that a number of deliverables have been off base and their highest stakeholders have not been satisfied. And so she has said, okay, well, I have to get on top of this somehow. She had a team retreat, they went through a values exercise, and one of the values she put forth was attention to detail. And it's not just, okay, we're going to have attention to detail. That means different things to different people.

Jordan 46:04

Yeah.

Melody 46:04

And so she said, what that means is in terms of how we operate, we do X, we do Y, we do Z. Does that sound doable to everyone? Is everyone in agreement that we're all we're all behind this? Yes. Now that gives her something to come back to in one-on-ones in team all hands, for example, to say, here's how we're living up to this, here's how we're not as close to it. And everyone has a shared understanding, buy-in language around that. So that's what I would say. If you have a team norm of balance, for example, well, what does that mean? Maybe that means that if you have to head out because your kid is a soccer game or you have a family emergency, you uh check in with the rest of the team and you let people know when you're going to get back to them about the things you owed them. Yeah. Right. It's that uh specific and that behavioral. That's really important.

Priscilla 46:58

Yeah. One thing I love is when you have those values set and then you go to shout out someone on your team, linking that directly back to a value. Yes. And saying this thing that they did really well, you could just say, hey, great job today. You did a great job. But if you go, hey, great job in this moment, because this showed this value that we all are working toward. Yeah. It connects it back. That positive reinforcement shows everyone on the team what it looks like to be detail oriented or to have compassion or to whatever, to balance things well, whatever it is that the value is you're reinforcing. So that's something that I don't do as often as I probably should, but I really love that like connection and making that really obvious and talking about your values a lot with the people on your team.

Jordan 47:46

I think that's really important too, especially if you are a remote worker, because there's so much asynchronous communication that you really don't get a lot of the, I don't know what the word for it is, like subcontext of what things are implied because it's just through this like written communication or, you know, maybe like a meeting every two weeks or something like that. And so, yeah, getting those kind of context clues for what our values actually truly mean and how they are put into action is a huge benefit to remote workers. Yeah.

Final Tips For Support Professionals And Leaders

Priscilla 48:16

So as we kind of wrap this up, what advice would you have for our listeners who are resonating with this, but they really don't know where to start when it comes to having this play out in their day-to-day life?

Melody 48:30

Well, I go back to that idea of the resentment audit, looking for those areas where that emotion is really flaring up to you. But I'll add one more tip, which is if you are someone who struggles to set boundaries, start with something I call the trade-off approach, which is setting a boundary and saying we can do X or we can do Y, which would you prefer we deprioritize or we slow down on? It's a great way instead of just saying, no, we can't do that. I can't believe you're adding yet another thing to our plate. Or if a customer comes to you and is asking for a refund and a discount on their next product, you can say we can do X or we can do Y. Which would you prefer? Right. So giving people those binary options can be a nice way to ease into, ease into uh setting those limits. I love that.

Priscilla 49:19

Yeah, that's a really good tip. What is one thing you wish more leaders understood about their role in the health of their team? We'll end on that.

Melody 49:29

Yeah, that the signal comes from the top, right? And everything trickles down from what you do. People are looking at you as the example. They are watching the nonverbal and the verbal steps that you take. And what is most telling for people is when you say one thing and you do another, right? That that is the most telling. And so uh, if you want a team that is sustainable and people not burning out, you have to be the one going first. Yeah.

Priscilla 49:59

That's the root of it, right there is that you have to model the behavior you want.

Jordan 50:03

Yeah.

How To Connect With Melody

Priscilla 50:04

And we're all trying to find ways to avoid burnout. And I think what you bring to the table with this angle of how psychology plays into it is so important to know. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this with us. I feel like I have this tool belt now of different things I can do to be better in my job. Yeah. And I think that that's really cool. For anyone who's listening who is not familiar with you, how can they reach out to you, learn more about you, get your books?

Melody 50:34

Yes, melodywilding.com is the best place to connect with me. And as you were mentioning, I also have a podcast that is hosted on Buzzsprout. So that is called Psychology at Work. I would love for you to subscribe. We're publishing episodes and interviews every single week. So that is also a great area to binge. Yes.

Priscilla 50:52

Yeah, and I highly recommend it. I have been listening to a lot of episodes over the last couple of weeks, and they are really, really incredible. They're very similar to this, right? Where you're getting a lot of really good practical advice with how to handle difficult situations at work. And for people that are in our emotional world, it can be really, really, really beneficial to have these tools in your tool belt. So I highly recommend the podcast. And thank you again so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. If you have a question or a topic that you would like us to cover in a future episode, you can shoot us a text using the send us a text link in the episode description. As always, if you like this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you again to Melody Wilding for joining us on today's episode. Thank you for listening. Now go and make someone's day.