Hi Reader,

You'd think that after starting umpteen newsletters with some version of "not sure where I'm going with this this week, BUT..." I'd get a handle on things. Or at least learn to pretend like I know where I'm going. Or at the VERY least just edit my first paragraph after finishing the email. BUT...

...nah.

Here's what I DO think I know that I think I know: I need to work this tech support thing back up to a set of specific recommendations at some point. As in, actionable steps tech support individuals and companies can/should make that would bring more humanity to tech support.

Since that will be the end of the project, I'm tempted to shove it along in that direction. But some intuition tells me I need to go at least one step deeper before I have the building blocks. (I am, however, somewhat skeptical this level of philosophical inquiry will make it into the final whitepaper. We'll see.)

Last week I wrote about healing. I don't know if I'll ever be able to express it as clearly as I'd like, but I really do think that's what this is all about.

Let's go super abstract and suggest/imagine that there are two forces at work in the universe: dissolution, and resolution. You know, things fall apart and things come together. Maybe there are "forces" behind that and maybe not, but for the purposes of thinking about this let's just imagine there are.

When things knit together—whether it's a cut in your skin or a break in your bone or a new relationship forming or an old relationship reconciling or a new star forming out of a cloud of space dust—I sometimes have this experience of looking at the situation and imagining this sort of end point off in the future where things are "supposed to" be that way. We express it in story as "happily ever after," but it's not JUST a thing that shows up in stories. It seems to be some kind of fundamental "direction" reality is going in.

To say it in another way: there seems to be a level beneath the "good/bad" dichotomy, that reflects something similar but more profound. Maybe I could call it "things are 'supposed to' vs. 'not supposed to' be this way." Of course this idea is quickly derailed by the fact that things can and will only ever be the way the are, but when I look at it closely I think I can see that this is simply a symptom of the fact that I can't see the way things will be. I can't see the future.

Ok, fine. But here's the trippy part: if reality is headed in a "direction," then it only looks like that because of our perspective. We, too, are caught up in whatever current is headed in that "direction," flowing "downhill," toward some "end point." But if you think of it in terms of relativity, it's equally as valid to say that "end point" is coming toward us. In fact, someone has already imagined a being sitting at the end of the universe. Teilhard de Chardin called it the Omega Point.

Whatever looks to me like resolution looks like dissolution from Professor Doctor Omega Point's perspective. There is no universal good or bad, no supposed to or not supposed to. There is only movement this way or that way, toward the end of the universe or back from it. At the smallest level of reality we see only oscillating energy. Even matter appears to be nothing more than rapidly oscillating energy. In our little imagined abstract here, we are picturing that the universe itself, on the whole of its time scale, is also an oscillation, moving back and forth, no "one way" at any given point, but the "way" given only by a perspective within it.

(I seem to recall saying something about how I wouldn't be able to express this very clearly. I hope that if you "feel" your way through it you have some sense for what I'm trying to point at.)

Believe it or not, there is a reason I went into all this. It's because it seems like my "job" after getting squirted out into this part of a universe moving this "way" is to "flow with" what's happening. Healing might be pointless in an eternally oscillating universe, but it's not pointless to me. I get bashed around a lot, and it seems like a lot of people had it a lot worse when they were children, but now that I have my legs under me and have a sense for where I'm headed, I know on a deep level what's good for me and what's not. I certainly don't always choose what's good for me, but on a spiritual level I think the information is at least available. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be nearly as alive as I seem to be right now.

So... all that is what I bring to a tech support interaction. The customer is there, yes, and they have a problem, yes, and I'm committed to helping them solve it. But what I've discovered over the years is that it's easy to lose sight of my self in the midst of that complicatedness. And furthermore, when I DO lose sight of my self, things go a lot worse. People start to say things like, "you're not listening." I start to avoid looking at the things I need to look at or doing the things I need to do in order to make good on my commitment. I spend more time trying to look good and right than actually help. Or, on the other side of the coin, I spend a bunch of energy beating myself up for making a mistake, instead of seeing it for the bump in the road it is, learning, and moving on.

Just this morning I made some noise to engineering about an issue because it was awfully similar to a really terrible problem we'd encountered a few months ago. It was only the one customer I was helping that had run into it, but I was afraid and wanted to get out in front in case it was starting to happen again. Then I realized I could do some testing to validate it. I thought it would take a long time but it ended up being pretty simple, and it proved that the issue was small and isolated. So I needn't have made all that noise about it.

As soon as I realized, I felt a bit of shame. I could have wallowed in it, apologized, called myself stupid. Whatever. I've spent enough time doing that kind of thing, though, so I just noticed what was going on, accepted my limitations and shortsightedness and—yes—laziness, accepted the shame that was already there, took a breath, let it go, thanked the engineers, and moved on. It wasn't perfect, but this is the important part: it was healing for me. It was, as I said last week, a work of healing for the only person I am capable of healing: myself.

It was practice in coming home.

My hope is that the customer can sense that I'm doing my best to show up as a self-healing being who takes responsibility for himself, and that that creates some space where they can do the same.

In other words, my coming home invites the customer to come home.

And then we two less-encumbered beings can solve the problem more easily, more quickly, and with more joy, because we aren't so held down.

It's been my experience that at the resolution of every ticket where I've showed up this way, customers have been happy, energized, and ready to move forward with whatever they need to do next. They aren't even thinking about if they weren't listened to or empathized with. It's just not even on the radar.

The trick, of course, is that while there are a whole bunch of skills and strategies I'm employing throughout that kind of interaction, the skills and strategies aren't what's important. I know that because I fumble the skills and strategies every time. I make mistakes every time. No, the valuable thing that I think we need to figure out how to teach and empower our tech support folks to embody is this way of being, which includes awareness of self and tenderness for the healing of that self.

That being said, there are two challenges.

One, I have very little data to back this up. Does it actually work, or am I imagining it?

Two, how does one teach this?

And, oh, something I just realized: whatever solution there is to those challenges is going to have to involve gathering data not just from the customer, but also from the agent. So the question "how did this go?" is vital to know both sides of.

Well, that seems like fertile ground for the next few weeks.

Also of interest is your thoughts in response to all this. They've been invaluable so far, even when they've been hard for me to read. Thank you for engaging!