What is the number one survival tool for house cleaners?
I'm going to answer that today.
Hi there, I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask A House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now today's show is brought to us by housecleaning360.com
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Okay, on to today's session, which is the number one survival tool for house cleaners.
I got asked this question the other day, and I stopped to think, well is it this one or
is it this one?
Because there are two.
Oh no, there are two, and I'm only going to tell you about one.
Okay, the number one.
This actually trumps number two.
Number one, the number one survival tool for house cleaners and the house cleaning business,
is the ability to think quickly and rationally on your feet.
Wow, that's it.
And until we meet again ... No, I'm kidding.
I won't end this so quick.
Let me explain.
When you are a house cleaner, you're going to run into a lot of things that I wish you didn't.
You will have all kinds of problems from the initial walkthrough where people lie to you
and they tell you things about their house that are not true.
You will run into challenges where you have employees that, for whatever reason, don't
show up, and you have clients you need to serve that day.
You will run into problems where employees will tell you things that are not true and
you have to learn to read between the lines and rationalize and reason with those people
because they're going to come back every day and work for you.
You are going to have problems where things happen inside someone's house that you're
not expecting like a toilet breaks on you, or you break a sink, or you shatter the glass
in the oven of their door, or you light their house on fire, or you break their shower glass
door, and a whole array of other things that you are not expecting that are going to happen
on the job.
Now it's one of the reasons we're bonded and insured and all these things, because things
that we don't expect will happen.
I promise you that.
Okay, so your number one survival tool.
A lot of times as house cleaners we have a tendency to, check this out, be human.
Something bad happens like we shatter the glass door in someone's shower and our first
reaction is to freak out.
We start cussing and we're like, "Whoa, what are we going to do?"
Then we go into this panic mode.
When you are in panic mode, all of your ability to reason and think clearly disappears.
It's just gone.
There you are left there with your eyes wide open and your mind is like fog, and you can't
think clearly.
It's like when you're in danger and you go to call 911, and you touch your cell phone
and you can't remember the number, and you don't even know how to get to the place on
your phone where you dial the numbers.
Your mind has gone into a panic mode.
It's the fight or flight syndrome.
When that kicks in and that adrenaline rush surges through your body and it hits your
brain, for a second everything whites out.
You just have this moment of a deer in the headlights.
The ability to reason and think clearly on your feet is a learned skill.
You need to learn it as your number one survival tool in the house cleaning business because
things will happen a lot.
You're going to need this skill more than any other skill.
What happens instead of cursing, if cursing is your default, that's what you do, stop.
Stop and realize, wait a second, I'm having one of those moments.
I need to calm myself down.
I need to come back to center and I need to focus on what's happening.
Now for me, there's a trigger.
In my house, when anything malfunctions, and it's one of those "oh my goodness" moments,
I say to myself, in a calm mode with no expression, no emotion, it's completely generic,
"I wish that didn't happen."
Now it's a generic enough statement that it brings me back to focus because it's true
I wish that didn't happen.
I'm acknowledging whatever this is, just happened.
I wish it didn't happen.
Now I can stop and I can ask myself, "What do I wish did happen?"
That gives me a different frame of mind where now I can start looking for solutions, not
"How am I going to clean this mess up" or "How do I get myself out of this?" or "How
do I hide from this so people don't think I did this?"
The answer is, "What do I wish happened instead?"
I wish what happened instead is I wouldn't have used such force cleaning the shower door
that caused it to break, or I wish I wouldn't have sprayed this on the oven at this particular
temperature in order to cause the glass to break, or whatever it is.
I can wish something instead.
When I wish something instead, that often shows me it's probably the exact opposite
of what I just did, but it shows me the solution to what I wish would have happened instead.
That's my second default.
What that does is that lets me know in the future, to prevent this from ever happening
again, here's what I now will do instead.
Before I even clean up the next, I've acknowledged the mess.
Number two, what do I wish happened instead to future-proof myself from it happening again.
Then my third default is what am I going to do about this particular scenario right now.
What are my options?
I don't want to just default and start doing something.
I don't want to hurry and start cleaning something up and just whatever, because maybe what I
need to do is take a picture of it first.
Maybe there's an online house cleaning forum that will allow me to get advice from other
people so that that will inform my future decisions.
Maybe I need a picture of this before I clean it up to file with the insurance company to
say, "Hey, I was cleaning a person's house.
I need my insurance to cover the cost of a new shower for these people."
But if you've already cleaned up all the glass and you've killed all your proof, okay, now
you reacted too quickly.
It's easy to confuse that with anger.
A lot of times some of the things that are going to happen to us is anger.
Anger is one letter away from the word danger.
If you spell danger and anger, there's one letter difference, and it's the D. You don't
want to go into a panic mode where you do something you will later regret.
In that moment, "Oh, I wish that didn't happen.
Okay, what do I wish did happen?" and then, "What am I going to do about this particular
scenario?"
Sometimes the three to five seconds to process all of that will save you endless amounts
of trouble on the other end.
Your number one key to survival in the house cleaning business is to slow everything down
and just stop, and to be able to think quickly and clearly on your feet.
Because there will always be some kind of weird things that are happening, and if you
just default, if you react instead of respond, and there's a huge difference, but if you
just react, a lot of times your choice will be incorrect and it won't serve you for the
long term.
Take just a second, bring everything back to focus, and now you have the chance to respond.
Then you can respond in a way that will serve your business, that will protect your reputation,
and then will help you make wiser decisions for the future of your business.
Your number one survival tool, and this is without a doubt the number one, it is to be
able to think clearly and efficiently in the moment.
Bring yourself back to focus.
Alrighty, until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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