ABCO Payroll Services®

By Roger Reynolds

I have always tried to follow that old saying, "Learn from other people's mistakes, you don't have time to make all of them yourself". I learned a valuable lesson using this philosophy while completing army basic training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

While we were standing in formation after we had seemingly finished our training on how to react to poisonous gas, without warning, tear gas canisters were suddenly released. Having previously overheard trainees, a week ahead of us in their training, talk about what would happen, I wasn't surprised. I had rehearsed in my mind what I would do - Take my helmet liner off, put it on my rifle, take my gas mask out, put it on, cover the filter and exhale to remove any gas that may have been inside the mask. As soon as I heard the pop of the first canister I swung into action, I had that mask on before the tear gas got close.

One of the squad leaders (a squad leader was a trainee that had been given snap on corporal stripes, a big benefit of being a squad leader was no KP or other details) took off running instead of reacting properly.

After the gas cleared and the squad leader returned to the formation, the drill instructor asked him why he ran away and told him that was a bad example for the others in his squad. The squad leader responded, "I don't give a #$@#"!

When the drill instructor heard this he walked over to the squad leader and as he was ripping the stripes off his arm yelled, "If you don't care, then you're not a squad leader anymore"!

What did I learn from this? It wasn't the mistake that cost the trainee his stripes - it was his attitude of not caring. We must never give the prospect or client the feeling that we don't care. We must listen; have empathy for their problems and concerns not only with our words, but also our body language and our actions.

As the poster in our office says, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care".