Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac .
”George Carlin
Anyone who has ever dealt with crucial confrontations realizes that a person s behavior during the first few seconds of the interaction sets the tone for everything that follows . You have no more than a sentence or two to establish the climate. If you set the wrong tone or mood, it s hard to turn things around.
This can be troublesome because when someone lets us down or behaves badly , the last thing we re thinking about is the climate we re about to establish. More often than not we re completely immersed in the details of what just happened . And if that doesn t consume all of our time and attention, our emotions eat up anything that s left. Consider the following example.