Sally contends that the key is to unlearn being boring. That is, you need to learn how to elicit a strong emotional response to your business, and the personality of your brand, because while it’s easy to forget or lose interest in information, it’s much harder to forget strong emotion. You can do this by allowing your business to have some aspect of your own innate personality or quirks. Fascination in a product or service builds an emotional connection, and emotional connections hold attention.

The key is to tune in to the emotional states that are produced, or not, at each stage of the customer journey. You have to look for the emotional cues—a pinched brow, pursed lips, confused look, clenched jaw—and then ask, “What’s generating that emotion? How have we let this person down?

I’ve seen and heard a lot of feeling in my listening life. And I have yet to see anything but good from it. It seems only to heal and to allow the mind to work less impeded. Unexpressed emotion, on the other hand, seems to block both thought and health. So I am unbothered when people cry or say how angry or scared they are. I am pleased, actually.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

In one fascinating study, researchers divided a set of participants (who wanted a coffee) into two groups: one group was instructed to have an interaction with the barista, and the other to be as efficient as possible. Like the “strangers on a train” study that we mentioned in Chapter Two, the researchers found that people who smiled, made eye contact, and had a social interaction with the barista—in this case, a complete stranger—came away feeling better, and with a greater sense of belonging, than those who were instructed to be as efficient as possible. In short, having a friendly moment with a stranger was uplifting.

Small moments can provide an uplift for our mood and they can help balance out some of the stress we feel. An annoying commute can be softened by a short conversation with the security guard at work. A sense of disconnection can be alleviated when we say hello to our mail carrier. These kinds of minute interactions can affect our mood and energy throughout the day. If we get in the habit of seeking out and noticing opportunities for these daily uplifts, over time they can have far-reaching effects. Not only for us, but for our social networks as a whole; repeated casual contact has been shown to foster the formation of closer friendships. And sometimes even the most casual contact can open us up to whole new realms of experience.