UpClose & Personal - Steve Capellini

Over the years, people I’ve not yet met email me to ask questions about spas and massage careers. They’re referred by friends, my books, or the Internet.

I almost always respond in as helpful a way as possible. There have been occasional lapses, some due to forgetfulness and others due to an unwillingness to reply to the request that has been sent. For example, the ones that say something like, “Please list, in 10 pages or less, all secrets, tips, techniques, contacts, personal anecdotes, and ideas you have in order for me to become successful and wealthy as soon as possible. Your prompt response is appreciated as I am on a deadline.”

Yes, there have been emails such as that. Most of them, though, are from well-meaning, thoughtful people. However, even correspondents with the best of intentions, including myself, sometimes get their wires crossed and end up sending messages they didn’t really want to.

Email is great, but it can lead to unforeseen consequences. Recently, I spent an entire day feeling horrible about an email faux-pas I was a part of. A friend of a friend I’ve never personally met wrote asking some questions about spas, which I gladly answered. We carried on a lively little correspondence for some weeks.

After that, I continued to receive messages from this correspondent, as part of a mass mailing, sent out to several people on a list, with items of general interest, about health, people in distress, and other issues. I’m careful with these messages as they may contain viruses. And, I don’t like to take the time to read the thousands of them that have filled my inbox over the years. With time, friends have learned that I don’t respond to mass mailings, and so I don’t get many of them any more. Whenever I do receive them, I ask to be taken off the mailing list.

This most recent instance was a difficult one. When I asked to be taken off the list, the correspondent took it as an insult, and so a massage therapist and budding spa developer now thinks of me as a heartless cad. This is a shame, because I actually devote hours of my time to helping people I don’t know who correspond with me directly.

I love computers, and the Internet, and email, and most things technological. But the one issue on which I have not yielded yet is mass mailings. It’s easy to push that button and send several people the latest appeal for help, advice, or humor. But I don’t do it because I feel that there is one thing more important than the content of any given message. That one thing is the personal voice of the person sending it.

I need to be spoken to directly, or else it feels like bulk mail from a credit card company I’m receiving, not words from a friend, or a friend of a friend. For this same reason, I find it difficult to read the letters some people send out with their Christmas cards each year. If you don’t have time to write to me, don’t write.

Perhaps this is a quirk indulged at great expense to others’ sensibilities, and perhaps I should change, but so far I feel the same way about mass mailings as I do about mass massage—they shouldn’t be given. If you’re going to touch people, whether in words or in fact, it’s best to individualize your communications, lest your impact be lessened. If you’re writing for mass consumption, as in a book or article, you do so with the understanding that your readers can take or leave your message at any time, and so this caveat doesn’t apply.

Emails, though, like letters, are personal, or at least they are for me. I only send one if it is meant specifically for one other person, or two at most, with similar interests, and I address each recipient in the text. It’s a strange quirk I stick to, I know. But in a world of disappearing quirks, I guess it’s something I’ll continue to follow, at least for now, touching just one person at a time.

Steve Capellini
www.royaltreatment.com

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