Activities like entertaining guests, holding a conversation, staying in touch with friends and loved ones, interviewing someone and so many others related to communicating can be perfected to the point where they become a work of art.
They can also be personalized, customized, tweaked, and adapted in order to reflect who we are and our style of doing things.
The same can be said for both welcoming people and making them feel welcome.
They may seem synonyms, and yet they are not.
[Welcoming someone is a very personal act,
when it is not just about good manners and etiquette]
Welcoming people is what we usually do while meeting someone either for the very first time or at the beginning of some kind of interaction (in person, via chat, during an event, at a party, and so on).
In a hypothetical scenario, we could welcome someone at a social gathering out of politeness and afterward ignore them completely for the time being. Even so, we would have still welcomed them, technically speaking.
Making people feel welcome, on the other hand, is what we do when we engage with people on a regular basis throughout an interaction and consistently behave toward them in a way that conveys the fact that they are welcome. That we see them, accept them, and that we are glad that they are there with us.
Making people feel welcome is the ultimate goal, and yet all starts with welcoming them in the first place.
And by doing it in a way that suits us and them as well.
Coaching question of the day:
"What's your style of welcoming people?"
Tags: Coaching question, Self-coaching, Self-awareness, Self-reflection, Human dynamics, Welcoming someone, Emotional intelligence, Communication styles
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