A while back I hired a nutritionist.
It was 2016, I had been doing the “healthy food,” low-carb and fasting stuff since ’09, and I was in a hole. Mentally gone.
Anyway, he me doing three days per week of food logs, helping me “balance” my meals.
This “logging” was done on an excel spreadsheets with grams. Pretty in depth.
One friday, I’m knocking out all these jobs at the gym, I’m supposed to be logging food. I had leftovers for lunch… a snack before that, now I’m about to coach… so I leave it for a bit.
Later I’m trying to log it in, no idea how many grams I had, and I can’t decide if the banana with breakfast is considered “medium” or “large…”
But I did know what I was *supposed* to have had.
I knew what the balanced diet was meant to be… So, I put that in. It was probably close right? What’s a couple of days over the whole program anyway?
Of course the nutritionist called me on it, and helped me out (amazing results by the way.)
There’s often a gap between our words and our actions.
The gap isn’t there consciously, but through biases, lapses in attention, or habitual patterns.
When probed, we either want to say the “right” answer, or, we say what we “think” we do or want.
Either way, there’s often a gap between what we do and what we say. Or, what we say we want, and then what we actually choose.
This is big in your biz.
You really need to know your customer. But surveys, feedback forms, or focus groups are only going to take you so far. The gap.
People say what they think they should say, or what they think they want.
You need to *see* what they actually do, what they’re saying in the real world, or how they actually behave
The clothes we actually wear, the places we visit, the communities we engage in and the language we use is how we actually tell the story of our world views or narratives.
When you’re creating aspects of your business, watching exactly what your people say and do is a practice that can build empathy and a platform for creating things that resonate.
