This is a milestone day in my family. My father passed away a number of years ago, but had he lived, today would have been his 99th birthday. I have added a photo of my dad and I when I was about three years old. My dad was an independent contractor and I learned a lot about business from him. We had very similar paths in starting a business. Both of us were 35 years old when we launched our own business. Both of us walked away from the previous job with no strings attached – the sink-or-swim approach to starting a new company based on our ability to sell our hard work. Both of us had our first son the year we started our business. Although none of it was planned to be this parallel, in a very strange way, it turned out to be so.

I could pass on to you a lot of great business advice I learned from my dad. He was very good at what he did and his customers were extremely loyal to him. Customer service and treating people fairly to build trust were paramount to his success. However, I want to talk about a very different aspect of my father that I think is lacking today, not only in business but in life in general.

The ability to communicate with people

The art of talking to people face-to-face is one of the best things you can do for them. There is something about looking someone in the eye that can never be matched by any other form of communication. Try to convey your emotions in a text, an email, an old-fashioned letter, a phone call or any other means of sharing information and it will fall short of simply talking to people in their presence. Even if you have something that they will disagree with, it is best to convey your message in person. Why is this? Other forms of interaction lead to missing cues that are available to us when we see someone’s face and hear them talk. There is expression, both verbally and non-verbally that tells us what a person means. Have you ever had someone misinterpret what you meant in some form of written communication? Has anyone not understood you in a phone call? These missing cues lead to a lot of conjecture – people fill in the gaps of what you mean when they cannot see your face at the same time they hear your voice.

My dad always made it a point to talk to his clients when he finished his work each day. He explained to me how important it was for him to do so while I cleaned up our worksite, loaded our truck and got ready to leave. He explained that if we just left without telling the customer about the work we did, they would fill in the gaps in their imagination with things that were not true. For instance, we might be taking longer to complete a job than was originally estimated because there were problems we ran into that were unforeseen. If we didn’t talk to the customer, they could imagine all kinds of things that would reflect badly on the company. However, even if the job was going swimmingly, telling the customer we were on time was reassuring to them.

The art of talking to people is something I have seen nearly disappear. People are afraid to have a conversation. Like I said before, this is more than just business conversations. This is all of life. The way I see things, people were made for face-to-face talking. We connect best when we do so, but in many instances, we have convinced ourselves that interacting on a tech device is an equivalent substitution. It is not. I learned it from my dad a long time ago.

Give this a try: if you are a person who finds most of your communication happening on a device, try going to lunch with someone without any technology and having a conversation with them. After you get done, think about how you feel about the other person. If you come away feeling like you are closer to them, you see what they care about and understand them deeper than before your meal, you have proven my point – or I should say, my dad’s point.