“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” —Maya Angelou...
  
How true those words are in our new era of pain and recalibration of values. It seems to me that we are witness to a time that asks us to learn how to process into a deeper meaning what we as parents, spouses, partners, homeowners, neighbors and friends are feeling as wave after wave of change and uncertainty crosses our bows.
 
And we do it most, and most of us do it best, when we surround ourselves and are surrounded with the people and things that we touch and touch us. And nowhere does this matter more and mean more to us than when we are in our homes. It is when we tuck our children into their beds, or stand before the stove, look up from the television to see the clouds move through the sky, place the flowers we have cut from our own garden into the vase we received from parents, hold the photograph of a moment in our hand or just listen to the song that always "does it," that we connect what we feel to a simple truth we often find easy to obscure. It is home that gives us a place to connect to deep simplicity and real honesty about ourselves.
 
For the companies that talk to us and serve us in our homes with their products and services, whether delivered online or face-to-face, we want them to know that we feel uncertain about things right now. Our lives have moved from stable to dynamic, and the environment around the place that roots us best is seemingly less strong. We want to give our trust to those who earn it, and we ask that they resist telling us what they can do, and listen, instead, to what we need.
 
We are inching away from a selling to a serving culture, where it is clearly seen that there is no sale without a buyer, and it is the buyer who has the answers to questions, and only if the questions are well asked. We want to feel our way to the sellers by way of a navigation that works for us, and we ask only, as Maya Angelou says, that it is the feeling that will make us decide, and more importantly perhaps to recommend them to others and, one day, return ourselves. If service is a really a circle in which both the buyer and the seller stand, passing the giving and receiving of service between each other, then words and deeds, promise and delivery are important, of course. But now the longevity and legacy of brands will depend on how you make us feel.

[main image: Wataru Yanagida | Digital Vision Collection | Getty Images]