There is a Scottish Gaelic proverb that reads, “Coinnichidh na daoine far nach coinnich na cnuic”, it translates as: The people meet each other but the hills do not.
It basically means that in life some things are impossible, for instance like two mountains meeting, but people can always meet.
I’ve always found it to be a nice hopeful phrase, particularly among today’s 24/7 Internet driven world, where often you could call a customer service department for what you think is a local company, and be speaking to someone half the world away.
More and more we are becoming a faceless society, it started out in business as an easy way for multi-national companies to coordinate efforts across offices and regions. Then with the rise of social media, personal relationships started to become virtual, now at the end of 2018, we probably all have more friends on things like Facebook than we have in real life, but out of the new friends you made purely on these sites, how many have you actually met?
Relationships too have fallen foul of this move to the Internet, no one seems to meet in a pub, or at a café or just in the street anymore in the same way they used to. It all seems to be increasingly coordinated through dating apps and social media.
In many ways we are becoming mountains that never meet. The very nature of our businesses as real estate agents too is often very solitary, how often do we speak to our potential and past customers and clients as we work from our cars and homes?
As convenient as this makes things in our lives, it is sad in a way that these personal points of contact have been lost.
Consumers still value the interaction with actual people, if not more so in a world where it is becoming a rare privilege, so in our businesses it’s important to find points that enable us to make actual contact, to put an actual face to our customers and for them to see us. Loyalty isn’t built around companies and services, but around people.
In this holiday season, can you find a way to actually get face to face with people?
People are social, they need each other… the hills will take care of themselves.
