I’m going in two different directions with this post.

(Also: hello! It’s been so long! Thanks for sticking around!)

Direction 1 regarding names

Alexandra Armstrong. That’s my name. A.L.E.X.A.N.D.R.A-A.R.M.S.T.R.O.N.G (yes, I triple checked that last one to make sure I didn’t misspell my own name in my effort to be dramatic). And you know what I get all the time? AMANDA. Consistently. From complete strangers. That don’t know each other. I find it fascinating, and I want to know the science behind it, but haven’t found the right combination of words to Google.

Here’s what really gets me: I will email someone for a work-related issue, so they don’t know me, but my name is on the signature block AND the email address, and they’ll TYPE back: “Hi Amanda…” WHAAAAAAT. My only rationale is that our human brains are pretty amazing, and they just look at all those letters that spell out Alexandra Armstrong, and for some reason re-string them together to something that maybe they’re more familiar with, which apparently is consistently Amanda.

For the record, I’ve also gotten Allison, Victoria, and some other random ones, but Amanda is the consistent one.

But I prefer Alex.

Anyhow, if any of you know or are super smart science people and are just better at Googling things, please let me know if you find a scientific answer for this phenomena!

Direction 2 regarding names

My work had a speaker for our management team back around August, Trudy Arriaga, and in her presentation she talked about the importance of knowing someone’s name, how knowing that you are known by name by others can be so fundamentally important to that person recognizing their own worth.

She quoted Darlene Price:

 “The most important word in any language is one’s own name. Your name carries a potent amount of emotion. When you make the effort to learn, remember and use another person’s name appropriately, you not only convey to that person that he or she is important to you, you instill self-worth within them.” 

And it struck me how true that is, and how much it reflects my lack of self confidence because I always assume no one remembers my name (maybe it’s because I’m always being called “Amanda”). Whenever someone higher up in management called me by name, I’d be so surprised, “they know MY name?!” I’ve never really felt that I’m important enough to be remembered – but I guess the truth of the matter is that we’re all important enough to be remembered, right? (This is me giving myself a pep talk and giving myself the positive reinforcement that I would typically give to someone else, but never myself).

So I completely related with that quote and completely agree with how much of an impact simply remembering someone’s name can make. Which also made me realize that I’m terrible at remembering people’s names and I should really make more of an effort, because it DOES matter.