The paradox of power (2)

In my most recent article I spoke about the paradox of power.

One of my regular readers (who is not a dentist) sent me a very nice and highly informative email. It runs as follows:

“I have come across this too, particularly when I was doing the options trading courses and part of our role was to sell people on more courses.

Earlier on there were other USA based instructors coming out here too. They did their typical USA high pressure pitch, and we did our low key “present the facts, let the benefits speak for themselves, and trust peoples ability to see value and make their own decisions” approach.

Our sales were consistently over double what the USA guys did, and eventually they stopped using them and we did all the courses.

Culture has a lot to do with it I think. Maybe that approach works better over there – perhaps people expect it and maybe even want it. I don’t know. All I know is that it doesn’t work here.”

It’s nice to see that what I pointed out last week doesn’t only apply to healthcare. Even in an industry such as investing, where you’d think that people might be a little less sensitive to pressure, the following still applies:

“The harder you push, the more likely you are to meet resistance.”

If you pressure patients you will, of course, have some successes but they will be fewer than those you will have if you didn’t apply pressure.

So, my conclusion is — never pressure patients. It’s bad for them, it’s bad for you and it doesn’t work as well as the alternative.