Matt Ragland argues that apologizing often reinforces fault and increases tension. Instead, use DLP: describe the behavior, label it with a positive trait like "patient" or "observant," then praise them for it. This shifts conversations toward positive identity in customer service, parenting, and coaching.
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Come with me if you want to lift. Sorry, light. The main thing I wanted to talk about in this video is an idea of what if instead of saying sorry, you said thank you. All right, and this might sound a little counterintuitive, but it's something that we talked about at the ConvertKit retreat, because when we're dealing with customers every single day, A lot of times something will happen that, you know, we want to make a customer feel like— we don't want to make a customer feel like they've ever done anything wrong, for the most part. Of course, there are exceptions to everything. And so a lot of times you'll be like, "Oh, I'm so sorry about that." You know, if you've worked in any kind of customer service, retail, you know, food service, anything like that, any kind of service-oriented, customer-facing job, you've probably said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'll take care of that." So what I wanted to talk about with my killer slides here is what if you said this instead of this? Okay, so let me give you a few examples. Sometimes if you're working with a customer, no matter what type of business you're in, but you know, when you're working with software, you're going to come across errors. You know, software just has errors. So a lot of times we'll say, hey, sorry for the error. Thanks for pointing— yeah, so we'll say, "Sorry for the error." But what if instead you said, "Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, very observant of you." Okay, "Thanks for pointing that out. Very observant of you." Or here's another example: "Sorry for the delay. Thanks for being patient." Last one. Yeah, sometimes the little context to this one is that sometimes if someone goes over a certain subscriber level or some— there's something fishy about an email, their account might be locked temporarily. So this is what we could say instead of, hey, sorry your account was affected, thank you for understanding. All right, so in each one of these, to me, we're using a very specific type of language because what we're doing is— and I actually learned about this at summer camp when I was a camp counselor, one of the many, many gifts of camp counseling and again working with people— so what it is is saying It's a term called DLP, all right? And so that means describe, label, and praise. Do you like my slides? You should like my slides. Describe, label, praise. And what does that mean? What that means is that you're going to describe the action, you're going to give it a label, and then you're going to praise it. So notice for all of these, I'm giving them a specific label for a characteristic that I'm telling them that they exemplified. Okay, they were understanding. They were patient and they were observant. So when you're doing that, when you're describing what happened, you're giving it a label and then you're praising that. It totally changes the conversation. I'm serious. It very— you know, people write in very tense and sometimes frustrated, and doing this a lot of times will, you know, kind of pull back on some of that tension. It's great. I use this already. I'm practicing it with my son. You know, he's 20 months old. And any kids that I worked with in the past at summer camp, describe, label, and praise. When I was a coach, when I was a lacrosse coach, football coach, say like, hey, you showed a lot of great effort. You showed a lot of motivation. You showed a lot of patience. Giving people labels and praising them, because what that does is you're giving them an identity. Last slide. You're giving that person identity. You're giving them a characteristic that they can identify with and think, oh, I'm an understanding person. I'm a patient person. I'm an observant person. I'm a motivated person. Okay, so doing that, I encourage you to try that this week. Instead of saying sorry, maybe think of a way to say thank you instead. And this is another thing, just working with people, especially if you work with kids in any kind of way, that DLP is fantastic because instead of just saying like, hey, good job, way to go, Timmy, or whatever, little Matt, good job. Good job is not descriptive. It's not a bad thing to say, but instead think of something, a specific trait that that person showed, and praise that. Label it and praise it. So thanks for watching this today. I always really appreciate it. Go ahead and subscribe right underneath this if you're liking these videos. I'm doing a video every single day in February. I almost said April. Why do I— why did I want to say that? Every day in February there's going to be a new video coming out. So really appreciate you showing. I got a concert to go to tonight. Morgan and I have Date night, we're going to see Bear's Den. I'll put a link to them in the description box if you want to check out their music. I won't link any here or use it in the show because then everything would get banned by YouTube, but they are fantastic. Kaden and I headed out to get some Chipotle. Got date night, so getting our friends Ryan and Camilla set up. Kaden, can you say hi? Got some, got some Chex Mix going on. Checks. Exactly. Don't vlog and drive. Amazing.
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It's an honor.
It truly is an honor to be here. And you've been incredible. Thank you so much.
