UpClose & Personal - Steve Capellini

Recently I was packing up my various supplies for the spa therapy workshop I teach in Boston each year, making sure to include each and every item out of the hundreds that have to be there when I arrive on site in order to make the class go off as planned. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at this, and I’ve even, perhaps anal-retentively, created a detailed checklist that aids me in my preparations. For those products I don’t have on hand before the class, I have to call the vendor or manufacturer to drop ship them to the workshop site. This forces me to have a good deal of faith in people’s ability to drop ship.

Now, drop shipping is not rocket science. It is not brain surgery. But neither is it an activity that should be left in the hands of inexperienced individuals. Droppers and shippers ought to be skilled in their arts in order to make things happen smoothly, and I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people on a daily basis, have to have a bit of FAITH when it comes to that implied skill level of all such professionals.

And so it happened, as it often does, that I arrived in Boston on the day my workshop was scheduled to begin only to find a particular box very obviously missing. Now, there are at least a dozen big boxes there as part of my class, with many smaller boxes contained within the outer shipping shells, but for my practiced eyes it was easy to spot the missing one. No one else at the massage school where the workshop was being held could have known that it was missing because there were just too many boxes to deal with.

Luckily, I had my cell phone with me and I called home to have my wife give me the number of the vendor who was going to have the products drop shipped from the manufacturer. These people are friends of mine, I’ve worked with them in the spa industry for years, and I did not want to cause a tsunami of discontent to well up between us over a small incident, but in the meantime, I could not offer the class in the way that it is scheduled to be offered and in the manner people expect it to be offered. Not without those products.

I called the number. They did not know what had happened. So I said, in my calmest, most soothing voice, “That’s OK, but it would be really great if you could find out what’s happening with it since I’m here teaching this workshop and can’t really proceed without that shipment.”

“OK,” she said, and hung up the line, promising to look into the matter. At that point, there was really nothing else I could do. It was already the end of business hours Friday, too late to order a similar product from someone else, even if I could find it. It’s a hard to find item. So, what I ended up doing was concentrating on feeling relaxed about not having the product. I couldn’t pretend the product was there and that I was fine. And neither could I pretend that I wasn’t constantly thinking about the product not being there minute by minute. All I could do was admit the reality of the situation and my thoughts, and then relax about them.

People often comment that I look relaxed on the surface. I think that is a result of so much furious internal concentration on not getting upset. I do it all the time. Really I’m a raging inferno, as attested to by my blood pressure, if left unchecked. I’m like a volcano under a lake.

So there I was calmly steaming, when the phone rang. It was my products. They had been found, accidentally shipped to the wrong address that must have been in the vendor’s database. The business name of the massage school where I was teaching was almost identical to the business name of the clinic where the product was now sitting, fortunately in the same city.

What could I do but say, “thank you?” There really was nothing else for me to do. I don’t know if this is true for you, but I’ve found that crises and all other manner of situations are really more about the relationships involved than the outcome of the situation itself. As it turned out, the woman at the school who was assisting me in the workshop was friends with the woman who owned the business with the similar name, and voilà, she was over there in a jiffy picking up the product and brining it back to its rightful place. To compound the serendipitous occurrences surrounding this event, the business owner had taken my workshop a year earlier and was happy to talk to me about how things were going, and share with me how surprised she was at the arrival of the products on her doorstep.

Somehow, outcomes turn out for the best if what you focus on is relationships. Or at least I’ve found that to be true for myself as I’ve gone through almost twenty years in the massage field and discovered that, as much as I like to sit in a room either by myself or with just one other person at a time (which is no doubt why I migrated to the profession of massage therapist/writer), still what the world and life is mostly about is relationships. Concentrate on them. Nourish them. Think about them when what you think you should be thinking about is the situation. It’s not the dropping or shipping that’s important. It’s the relationship.

It’s the relationship. It’s the relationship. It’s the relationship.

That’s my massage mantra.

Steve Capellini
www.royaltreatment.com

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