Warmth Is A Strategy

Somewhere we learned that being kind and being taken seriously were opposites. They are not.

There is a tone that businesses adopt when they want to be respected, and it is cold. Clipped. Faintly impatient. It communicates that the writer is busy and important and that you are lucky to be receiving their attention at all.

I understand where it comes from. Warmth has been coded, for a very long time, as soft — and soft has been coded as unserious, and unserious as cheap. So people harden their language in order to be taken seriously, and in the process they become indistinguishable from the large, distant organisations they are supposedly an alternative to.

Warmth is not weakness, and it is not niceness

I want to separate two things that are constantly confused.

Niceness is the avoidance of discomfort. It agrees when it disagrees. It softens a real problem into a manageable one. It tells a client their idea is interesting when it is actually a mistake. Niceness is a failure of nerve dressed up as good manners, and it is genuinely useless.

Warmth is something else entirely. Warmth is the assumption that the person you are speaking to is worth the effort of being understood. It can deliver extremely hard news. It can say no. It can tell you your website is not working and your positioning is confused and the thing you are proudest of is the thing that has to go. It simply does all of that as though it were on your side, because it is.

You can be the most direct person in the room and still be warm. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Why it works commercially

People do not buy from businesses. They buy from people, and they buy most readily from people they believe are not going to make them feel stupid.

That is the actual barrier, and it is much larger than price. Every small business owner has, at some point, been made to feel foolish by an expert — talked down to by an accountant, patronised by a developer, sold something they did not understand by someone who enjoyed that they did not understand it. They carry that with them, and it makes them cautious about asking again.

So when someone arrives who is plainly expert and plainly on their side and plainly not going to enjoy their confusion, the relief is enormous. That relief is worth more than any credential on your website.

What warmth sounds like

It sounds like using ordinary words for complicated things, without ever implying that the person should have known.

It sounds like answering the question they actually asked, rather than the more impressive question you would have preferred.

It sounds like saying I do not know, and I will find out. Like saying this is not something I am good at, and here is who is. Like telling someone the truth about their business in a way that leaves them better able to act on it, rather than merely corrected.

None of that costs you authority. All of it earns you trust, which is the only currency that actually converts.

This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.