For contact professionals, it is imperative that — regardless of the circumstances — they maintain their professional face when operating in their professional capacity. When a person lets slip their professional presentation to the world, the results can be career-limiting in the extreme.
A Cautionary Tale
This recent story is an unfortunate example of what happens when this principle is forgotten:
Pharmacist calls customer ‘retard’ over cancer meds
An abusive pharmacist is under fire after he failed to provide painkilling medication for a cancer patient — before a furious tirade on his Facebook page branded the customer a “retard”.
Why the Professional Face Matters
Gary Klugiewicz from Verbal Defense and Influence once showed me a slogan — a mantra, if you like — that a police service in the USA uses to help its officers internalise this key concept of human communication:
“We treat people like ladies and gentlemen, not because they always are, but because we always are.”
There are ten key concepts for effective communication in the midst of conflict that we use in Verbal Defense and Influence — principles designed to redirect, contain, defuse, and reduce conflict during high-stress encounters. The entire methodology is built to enable contact professionals — and indeed anyone — to treat the people they interact with with dignity, by showing them respect.
The Platinum Principle
The first, overriding principle that gives momentum to the whole effort is the Platinum Principle:
Always treat people the way you would like to be treated in identical circumstances.
⚠️ Warning: When we forget to engage our empathy — when stress, fight-mentality, or the urge to dominate overrides our calm — “natural language” replaces “professional language,” and the results are often professionally catastrophic.
The Social Media Trap
One further lesson here is that social media is a double-edged sword. It can build relationships and bring people together — but it can also ruin them and destroy human contact. The social distance offered by the internet creates a false sense that we don’t all share essentially the same space on this tiny blue dot. Yet we are all connected, professionally and personally.
A single interaction, one ill-judged Facebook post, can become a news item and a trending social media storm in hours.
The Golden Rule for Life
I’ll leave you with one last directive — something I learned as a young sales professional in Tokyo, Japan, about building relationships rather than destroying them.
Remember, everyone is somebody’s someone.
Gerard O’Dea is a conflict management, personal safety, and physical interventions training consultant. He is the training director for Dynamis, a specialist provider of personal safety and violence management programmes, and the European Adviser for Verbal Defense and Influence — a global programme addressing the spectrum of human conflict.