When I was walking across Turkey, my life depended on strangers in ways it hadn’t before.

One of the things I did to size up the people around me was to spell each person’s name out loud and make lots of mistakes in the process.

There were a couple reasons this was a useful practice:

First, while we were getting the spelling of their name right, I would need to maintain extended eye contact with that person and watch that person as he or she maintained extended eye contact with me. Great when you are trying to understand someone’s personality.

Second, I could begin to estimate their patience. Even if I was spelling a simple and very common name like “Ali,” I could make a “mistake” and watch what patience and humor they had while they corrected me.

If I had been a Turk, there is no way that my playing dumb like this would have worked (everyone can spell Ali, come on). But as a foreigner, I was able to get away with things a Turk wouldn’t.

My point is that the measuring of trustability when you are in a new situation is really important. In fact, that’s one of the main things I help people with now, in the form of rewriting sales documents for solo- and small-shop consultants so they can build trust better with their own potential clients.

This podcast episode with Sevil Kubilay was very interesting in many respects, but one in particular was her comment that when you are representing a big-name company, trust is usually built quite easily (“Hi, I’m Joe from Microsoft” usually does the trick), but when you make the transition to solo consultant it’s something different altogether (“Hi, I’m Joe from Joe’s Small Consultancy” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it).

It’s something I had already seen and suspected, but it was very interesting to hear her mention it explicitly.