My son lulled me into a false sense of security. We got about four good months of his being the perfect two-year-old before the terrible twos started in earnest.  And man, did they start. Every little routine daily activity was no longer routine — it was a battle of wills between us. He got mad. I got mad. His mother got mad.

Worst of all, it was affecting how we felt about our parenting. It’s hard to feel good about raising the youth of tomorrow when you feel overwhelmed, frustrated and utterly emotionally beaten.

Thanks to a little nugget of wisdom, though, things are better. Not perfect, mind you, but better. A lot better.

My mother was an elementary school educator for more than 20 years. She knows a thing or two about kids, and if my brother and I are any example, she’s not bad at parenting, either. So when she called me out of the blue and told me she was sending me a copy of Tovah Klein’s “How Toddlers Thrive” because it was the best book she’d ever read about early childhood development, I listened. And, two days later when the book arrived, I read.

Turns out there’s a trick to dealing with toddlers. Not only that, but without even realizing it, I’d been using the same trick to develop great relations with clients. I even used it to get great interviews from some not-so-easy to interview subjects.

Just like the title of this post says, everybody wants to be appreciated.

With my kid, it worked like this. Instead of “No, you can’t have a lollipop” followed by an utter meltdown, I switched to something more like this: “Buddy, I know that lollipops are awesome. I know that you’d eat about three dozen of them a day if you could. But we’re about to have dinner, and it’s more important to eat dinner than lollipops.”

Sure, he still gets bent out of shape, but not nearly as bad. He knows that I understand what he wants, I understand why he wants it, and I gave him a reason why it wasn’t going to happen. His wants were appreciated, even if they weren’t fulfilled.

In dealing with clients, we’ve built a great base because we aren’t a video company that swoops in out of nowhere, grabs a whole bunch of footage, then poops out a one-size-fits-all 30 second spot two weeks later. We make sure to take time in preproduction to get to know exactly what gains the client wants to see from video, and how their business works. And when they show us their business, we make sure to let them know how cool it is.

They’re all cool businesses, by the way, from the auto shop on the corner to the clothes store in the mall to the HR department of a medium-sized city. No matter what a client does, we find something about it that’s interesting – and important. Balancing tires might be something a technician does eight hours a day, but when I walk in with a camera and find him doing it with a frickin’ laser, I’m going to mention how incredibly awesome that is to me.

New type of fabric in this line of men’s suits? AWESOME.

Planting millions of onions in a huge field on a multi-ton deathbeast of a tractor. HOLY CRAP.

When I was touring with a mid-level musical act, I was playing the same songs every single night. There were times it got old. But I never could let that on, because somewhere out in the audience there was somebody who’d never seen our band before. God forbid they tell their friends “Yeah, that band kinda sucked. The keyboard player looked like he was about to fall asleep the whole show.”

Your clients are doing really cool things. Let them know you appreciate it, and they’ll come back to you every time.

I had a rough set of interviews this week. We’re producing a pretty comprehensive look at the workings of a division of a city’s government. It’s very much an “unsung heroes” kind of vibe. I was out in the field getting great shots of people working hard in 100/100 (degrees, percent humidity) conditions, and the client requested that I interview lots of his people.

Nothing “60 Minutes”-esque. Just looking for names, titles, thoughts on their job, etc. For anyone who’s been in front of a camera before, it’s simple stuff.

But almost none of these people had ever had someone put a DSLR rig up in their grill. They didn’t know me. I had a big, intimidating camera pointing at them. Most of them had no idea what to do, and went with the default of completely freezing up.

So I let them know they were appreciated. Before recording, we’d talk a bit about what job they were doing that particular day. I’d always try to impress on them how cool I thought their job was, and how important it was to regular folks. Politicians can say whatever they want about “big government,” but the people I interviewed were the boots on the ground that make everything — I mean everything — work. Basic building blocks of society kind of work here.

After adopting that tactic, everyone warmed up. They got animated. I’d ask them “what’s something the general public doesn’t know or appreciate about your job,” and they’d come to life explaining just how crappy city life would be if they weren’t busting their butts daily. Our little pre-interview talks also had the advantage of giving them a few friendly minutes to collect their thoughts. They weren’t being grilled by some video guy who didn’t give a damn. They were talking to their new friend Jake, who understood that they were human beings, they were important, and they did really cool things at their job.

They were happy, I was happy, and we got a series of interviews that are about as far away from the stilted “My name is X. My job is X. I’ve been here X years” as you can get.

A little empathy goes a long way. Everybody wants to be appreciated.