Peter LohmannAll Things Residential Property Management | CEO of RL Property Management | Co-Founder of Crane

Don’t let silence fill with toxic stories (the real cost of not updating your clients)

19 Aug 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:04

In this talk, the speaker warns that when clients receive no information or updates, they fill the communication vacuum with imagined, often negative narratives. This emotional speculation quickly escalates, moving clients from rational assessment to an amygdala‑driven, hostile stance. The resulting "toxic gas" forces the service provider to expend far more effort—often five to ten times the original work—to correct misunderstandings, resolve issues, and repair reputational damage. The speaker emphasizes that frequent, small updates act as a vent, preventing the buildup of harmful stories, reducing emotional escalation, and saving time, resources, and future negative reviews.

Chapters

So when someone is left in this vacuum of no information, no updates, or when we are left to our own devices and something's not going right, we immediately start making up stories about what's really going on. And so this is like a balloon filling with toxic gas. So the speed at which we can let a little air out of that for the other person and the frequency with which we let some of that toxic gas out keeps things tolerable so people aren't shifting to their amygdala so fast and going to war with us. People do not think and behave rationally. People behave out of an emotional response, and the stories they make up are whipping them into unnecessary frenzies that completely tank our time and resources later. When you're trying to wrestle an issue down to earth after it's already gone, you know, off the rails for 2 or 3 weeks, good luck. There's like a 5x, a 10x effort there. And then we might say, well, screw them. You know, they're dead to me and they're not rational. And I don't care if they write me a bad review, 'cause I'm gonna game the system and get all my friends to write good reviews. We're just, we're in a downward spiral at that point.