Right or do the Right Thing
- by CoachMatching
- Category Interesting Articles
- Read 2196 times
Is it better to be right or do the right thing...?
On a recent flight from JHB my son and I had ring side seats as an incident unfolded. A husband, wife and their three year old daughter were boarding the aircraft and it was pretty clear that he was very agitated and angry.
His first words to the stewardess confirmed why…he and his family had all been given completely separate seats, which any travelling parent will appreciate is not a winning formula. Worse still his 3 year daughter had been seated in between two complete strangers. His initial request for help to sort things out was not greeted with any empathy or enthusiasm in fact the stewardess managed to further agitate him. I wondered at what point she would realise that this was shaping up to be a lose lose situation.
Clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer she persisted to talk to him in a very unfriendly and patronising tone, suggesting eventually that they might be able to do something if he and his family just took their seats until take off. This was the point were in my opinion he ‘lost it’. He asked if she had children. To which she replied his question was irrelevant…oh dear! He persisted and my son and I watched the emotional temperature rise….
A few people offered to move however the stewardess then intervened asking them not to until everyone was seated and even suggested that they ‘didn’t have to’. My son at this point commented to me that she was being very red (Colin Hall’s description of negative energy). For a mother this was a wonderful teaching moment so I suggested that her being red was making him redder, which he totally understood. Why don’t you do something blue Mummy? (Colin’s description for effective positive energy).
We watched as things went from bad to worse until completely over the edge he asked to speak to the captain or the airline manager….. he stormed off the plane brushing past the stewardess who accused him of pushing her…quite frankly I wanted too! She told him that he couldn’t travel and that he was going to be offloaded.
Self interest kicked in …I wanted to get home and offloading their bags would result in a significant, and for the airline, costly delay. So I turned to my son and said ‘lets go do a blue thing’….I stepped on to the jetty spoke respectfully to the husband, listened to him, and empathised. He was still furious and was refusing to get on the plane with ‘that woman’. As he calmed own and started to become more logical I explained that the way he was handling things probably wasn’t going to get him what he wanted and there was no way the aircraft could take of without a full crew compliment…after a few minutes he agreed to come on the plane….drama over. My son was beaming….
About 30 minutes before landing I spoke to her (by the way none of the airline staff even said thank you to me). I suggested that she had contributed to the situation to which she replied that she was ‘doing her job’. That may be but in my opinion she was so stuck in being right that she omitted to see an opportunity to do the right thing. It was a wonderful lesson for Gianluca, my son, to learn