Presence or Absence?

You’re talking to someone and their mind is elsewhere; they’re only partly here in the moment with you. You understand their distraction because they have a lot on their plate. But eventually, you have to adjust to this degree of absence and accept less satisfaction interacting with them. This is hardly a recipe to build rapport in business relationships.

When you’re with a client, are you also thinking about something that’s happening someplace else? If so, that’s an absence of Here. Are you thinking about something that happened earlier or will happen later? That’s an absence of Now. It’s the exact combination of Here and Now that creates PRESENCE and a lack of which that creates ABSENCE.

We live in a world of endless distraction and controlling our attention for long periods is rare. If attention were currency, we could track how we spend it and I daresay it would resemble impulse buying, spending it reactively instead of purposefully. We let distraction loot our attention instead of deliberately allocating it to what we find important?

While people generally have good excuses for distraction, what if YOU WEREN’T distracted, weren’t thinking about something else, and weren’t absent? What if you were giving your clients your full here and now? How would it make them feel?

VALUED I think—that you put everything aside to be present with them, interacting live. Your presence is a gift. They’d feel it and, by not making those justifiable excuses, you’d stand out from the crowd. Next time you are genuinely present with a client, you may notice they find you more of a pleasure to interact with. They may prefer to do business with you because you give them your presence.