During a typical workday, you meet people who are not directly involved with your business as employees or clients or suppliers. They could be people you meet through acquaintances. They could be people you meet through your Chamber of Commerce or another association. Or they could be people you meet through volunteer activities in your community.  

You may meet with these people occasionally or you may meet with them regularly.

Over the course of years, you may have talked about your business with these people many, many times. You may believe they have a very good understanding of what you do when you go to work…that they understand the value you create when you are at work. 

Because it is important to you, you probably go out of your way to help some of these people understand what you do when you're at work.

If you do that, you may be very surprised to find out later just how little most of these people know about what you do while you're at work. 

I have had a number of discussions with friends on this topic, recently. Many people are telling me they are surprised to find that even close acquaintances do not understand what they do at work. In some cases they have had numerous meetings with people and provided numerous explanations of what they do and how they go about doing their work. Regardless, they find out later that other people do not understand what they do at work. 

When they find out this is the situation, many people are extremely disappointed, their feelings have been hurt. Their ego has been let down. As a result, they share their concerns and wonder what's going on.  Some people have asked me, Why does this happen? 

It seems to me, there are some fundamental reasons why this happens. Here are two examples: 

• Many people think they are too busy so they act accordingly. The rush through things. The fact is - they simply don't listen. 
• Perhaps, people think others who explain what they do at work are too aggressive, too pushy and too self-centered. So they turn off in the presence of those people. Again, they simply don't listen.