Forcing It
I tell a story every now and then about pressure and soap - yes the white stuff that comes in a cake and sits on the bathroom hand-basin. The stuff that you gotta teach boys to use behind their ears (if you ever can!).
People don’t like being forced into something they don’t want to do. The more the pressure, the more the resistance. The more the force, the further the rebellion. In parenting its the same. The tighter the controls, the bigger the rebellion and its the same with a lot of things - staff, customers, dispute resolution, mediation and Search Engines (believe it or not).
It’s like soap . . .
Grab a piece of soap gently and you can move it around easily and it’ll do just what you want it to do. Hold if a bit too firmly, and . . . oops, she’s slipped out of your hands. But grab it really tightly, and squeeze it as hard as you can, and then you can get that little sucker puppy to pop right out of your hands and hit the ceiling, if you’re good. Well hypothetically you could if you wanted too - if you know what I mean.
The idea here is that when you try to force it, you don’t get the objective you’re trying to achieve. Taking it naturally however is a much better way to go. That’s getting smarter.
People who try to sort me out by force don’t generally get what they want. A colleague recently pushed it a little far and learned this lesson the hard way - after a year or two of extending grace, I put my foot down and said - “Oy, back-off! Nuff’s enough”. With a renewed approach, one that showed respect, and that took it a little easier on me enabled some pretty healthy discussions and personal conversations that have achieved way more in a few weeks than a few years of battling away at me.
It’s the same thing with kids - give ‘em some space and take the pressure off. Set the big-picture rules and give them heaps of freedom within the big boundaries and they respond positively to your wishes.
Same thing with employees. We recently went through a staff change. Somebody wasn’t up to the job and moved on. Our replacement has to work out a balance between what she’s capapble of, what she wants, and what we need and want. If we force her into the job and say “You must do this, and that, and this way, or else” then her job satisfaction, loyalty and performance will be less. Give her a chance to choose what areas of the job she really wants to do, and is good to do however, and she’s much more likely to give us what we need and want.
Same thing too with Search Engines - believe it or not - they’re just as cantankerous.
The idea behind Search Engine Optimisation is that your aim is to get your website higher on the Search Engines. We have been working with Rent-a-Dent, a pretty well-known New Zealand Car Rental company. that has been around some 20 years or so. With SEO, we work with a website to get it recognised on the Search Engines, but there’s two ways of getting results - forcing it, or doing it naturally. The trouble with forcing it - trying to get crazy numbers of hits all of a sudden is that the Search Engines, particularly Google, twig to what you are doing and you’ll get pinged for Black Hat practices, and you’ve lost the game, sometimes for good.
But take a steady professional long-term approach however, even though it may be truckloads of work up front like we did for Rent-a-Dent (their websites are all listed below*) and you’ll eventually build a good strong web presence.
Giving SEO a professional measured response, we can also develop other spin-offs like natural cross-linking. Giving our own website exposure gives us all additional benefit that would not otherwise have been gained by trying to force it: (http://www.gokiwi.net/articles/nz-car-rental-website-upgrade/).
I have met a lot of well-meaning Christians who try to force their religion down other people’s throats. It doesn’t work. It’s not respectful and it’s counter-productive. Gazillions of lapsed Catholics will tell you - forcing it just does not work. Think about Madonna for an example of how the bigger the pressure, the bigger rebellion!
The Good Book records David’s words of wisdom:
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Psalm 139:3
The theological big fancy word for this is God’s Omnipresence - basically that God is God, not a toy, symbol, idea or other nonsense - and we simply gotta trust Him on things because He knows.
Listen up, my fellow Christians, if the Christian faith teaches that there is a God who cares, that Jesus is alive and well (not a dead and buried historical figure); if we really truly believe that God answers prayer; if the bible says that the Holy Spirit is the one who reveals the truth and that He resides within us, isn’t it logical and sensible that we don’t really need to force our faith upon others? Speaking the truth in love, believing that the truth will “out”, that love will conquer is actually exercising faith. Forcing it isn’t.
Sure, we can talk about it and pray for people and love em, and maybe even banter with them over biblical stuff and so on, but force them? No. That’s for others who have to, because they’re missing the power and faith that the Holy Spirit brings us.
It’s not the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to force it. Stand firm? Of course. Force it? Nah!
* On 30 September 2008, Go Kiwi Internet published over two dozen websites for Rent-a-Dent, the New Zealand Car Rental company. The project was completed in just over two months and involved training around the country and a LOT of work.
We’re proud of what we achieved for them. Have a nosey at some of them:
North Island
Wellington Airport Car
Rentals
South Island
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