Trust

Trust (van Dyke)

This subject will give one sleepless nights and lots of time for contemplation. It seems that everytime we trust and allow people close to our humanity it turns against us. No matter how much you help them it matter little to them. In fact the more you do for them the greater the pain and betrayal.

It is often called the butler syndrome, yet it is at the core of most partnership and friendship destruction. Jealousy, Arrogance, Ego and just plain greed are key ingredients of this illness. So how do you build TRUST in the right way??? This is what I came up with researching this subject that has caused me the most pain and disappointment thus far in my life!

We all want to be seen as trustworthy, we all want to be seen in a positive light and be respected. Trust is essential to relationships in both a business setting and a personal one. But not everyone is able to instill that sort of trust. In fact many people do not even have the trust of their close ones. So how can you build it? Here are some pointers;

1) Honor your words.

How can one believe you when you cannot even honor your words. If you say you are going to show up at some place at a given time no matter what, then don’t break that promise no matter what. If you have made a commitment to someone about doing them a favor, then do it. Don’t back out at the last moment. Such behavior over time will ruin your reputation, lead to a lack of respect and you will never be able to build much trust.

2) Make sure your behavior is consistent.

Would you trust someone who promises you great things and sometimes delivers on them but most of the time, does not? You probably wouldn’t as the person’s degree of trustworthiness is rather erratic. So why do you expect anyone else to trust you if your trustworthiness seems to change from time to time as well?

Make sure honoring your words and keeping promises becomes a habit, only then will you build a trustworthy reputation that will not be so amongst the people you interact with but also amongst people you have never met. Good word spreads around! If you maintain the right behavior consistently, even people you do not know personally will trust you without you having to earn their trust!

Remember, most people will rarely believe what you say but they will often believe what others say about you.

3) Conduct yourself with integrity even when the people you interact with are not around.

This is again about the power of the word that spreads. If you think you can put on an act of incredible trustworthiness in front of people but completely lose your integrity when they are not around and still get away with it, you are wrong! Word spreads. Integrity is not just about how you act in front of people, it is about you staying true to your words and not displaying hypocrisy even when those people are not around. If your integrity is an act, sooner or later people will see through it, word will spread and you will lose any trust you built.

4) Reveal any information relevant to the other person as soon as possible

When it comes to building trust you can either choose the passive route or the active route. The passive route is where you when you wait for the right conditions to show that you are trustworthy. The active route is when you prove your trustworthiness even when it is not needed. Suppose you want to build trust in a business setting. You can either offer them useful information relevant to them from time to time or you can keep hoping and praying that the right opportunity arises. Obviously the latter relies on hope and may never happen.

5) If you made a mistake in the past, admit it yourself and never repeat it

Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes from time to time. Everyone does things they regret later. What separates people with great integrity from those with a questionable one is the willingness to admit their mistakes and being honest about it. If you have done something that you shouldn’t have done then it is better to tell it them yourselves instead of them finding out from someone else. Do not get defensive or try to blame someone else. Accept personal responsibility. Accept that you screwed up and made a mistake. If the mistake is relatively minor, you will be forgiven, but you will have to ensure that you never repeat the mistake again.

This will hit your trustworthiness to some degree but if you made the confession yourself and never repeat the mistake again, over a time the trust will be rebuilt.

6) Don’t share secrets

If someone tells you something and expects you to not share it with anyone else, honor that secret with your life. In fact one does not have to explicitly state that what they are telling you is a secret not to be shared with anyone else. If common sense tells you that what the person told you is the sort of information that you would not like to be revealed to someone else, if you were in their shoes then GUARD it. If you let the secret out, sooner or later they will find out because we all know words spread faster than fire. And if you were the only person they initially shared it with, they will know it is you at fault and the trust will be shattered.

If you share secrets in any sort of relationship, whether business or professional, things will inevitably have a bad ending.

7) Earn it

Trust takes time to build. It doesn’t happen automatically. Trust between two people is not something that one develops overnight. There is a reason that as a little kid you are taught not to trust strangers. Because there is a huge degree of uncertainty involved. Similarly, as an adult, usually trust develops only over time when you get to know everything you can about a person, their thinking, observe their actions and their behavior towards you.

A girl and her dad were crossing the bridge. The father was concerned about the daughters safety. So he told her “Sweetheart, hold my hand.” She told him, “No Dad, you hold mine!”. The father found it funny and said “What’s the difference?” The little girl responded ” If I hold your hand and if the bridge collapses and I may let your hand go, but if you hold it, I know no matter what, you will never let me go.” That is trust!

I suppose age and time are the ultimate teachers of this principle... even Jesus did not escape betrayal, so don't feel bad if it happens to you. Learn from the experience, flip the page and move on. We all make mistakes, which can be corrected, but blatant miss use of another's TRUST needs to be left to Karma. It is the true equalizer to balance bad behavior without affecting your experience in this journey called LIFE!