It is not you - it is me

In the last training course facilitated by me (called FlowFactor - training course for sustainable team management, you can read more about it here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/.../szilard-marton...) I learned, re-learned and remembered a couple of lessons, and these lessons had a deep impact on me during the program. I managed to compress them into 15 insights. I will share them here one by one. WARNING! It might be a long read - I understand if it is too long for you, and I appreciate it if you choose to read it fully. I will be grateful if once you have read the text, you will share your insights with me, either as a comment or by DM-ing me. Thank you for your care.

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Insight number 9:?It is not you - it is me

We live in a world of trust. Everything in our own reality is based on trust: the way we see the world, the monetary system, the relationships, the global and local economy, politics, and any relationship, direct or indirect is based solely on trust. As I mentioned in my previous article, Hiding is energy-draining (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/hiding-energy-draining-szil%25C3%25A1rd-marton-jospe/?trackingId=q%2BBotED6Tne0Raw%2FUFRvNw%3D%3D) cooperation is also based on trust. We are surrounded by a world, which is either trusting us or not. We are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of people every day and we are judged by them, being labelled either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

If my last sentence has created mild anxiety, I understand. It is quite demanding to live like somebody who is judged day in, and day out by family, friends, and strangers in all sorts of places… but does life have to be this heavy? I, like many others I am sure, had the understanding that in the case of trust, the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the person who is trusted. I have to carry your trust with dignity, and integrity, and making sure that I never ever abuse it in any way. In exchange, All the people who I trust have to carry my trust’s weight - it is their responsibility not to let me down, or else! It was eye-opening when one of my mentors in a training course at Olde Vechte Foundation said:

“Trust is not about you, it is about me. Whenever I say: I trust you, I actually mean I trust myself to handle you - based on my experience of you.”

While I invited this sentence to sink in, I felt a huge burden lifted from my shoulders - and a new understanding was unfolding.

How would the world look like, if trust were the responsibility of the trusting? How would the relationship change, how would the interactions between humans unravel? How would our experience shift, and what emotions would be there, what thoughts, what bodily sensations?

I could only imagine: myself choosing to trust you as an investment, a commitment, calculated yet offered in advance, changing only if for some reason it doesn’t make sense any more. Since I invest in people, I become trusting, not in a naive way, but in a more mature way, understanding that the basis of every good cooperation is trust, and if I initiate trust, I will get trust back in return. This way exchanging trust sounds so much more healthy and sustainable - and the benefit is that the trusted is free from the burden of the invested trust - sure, actions trigger consequences, and there can be misunderstood situations as well, but I can be free to be me, without the urge of satisfying your trust in me.

It was never about you, it was about me. This way I am also more accountable, I can do more about my surroundings, and I cannot be the victim of my circumstances: I can always change in whom I invest my trust, and instead of blaming, finding excuses or waiting and hoping I can just shift my focus to those who I believe would be a good trust-investment.

In the frame of the training course, I could see this dynamic between the participants too: some of them were wide open from day one, being available, playful and curious, making sure that they trusted the process, the peers and us, the trainers as well. Others were more expectant and in a sense more dramatic. Some of them, if something did not go the way they wanted it, pulled the trust card: “I trusted you, and you failed me.”, I heard these sentences directly and indirectly in our conversations and I observed this blaming in their behaviour as well. The trust card can be a heavy one for any trainer & facilitator, who works with bringing the behaviours to the conscious level. In a high-impact training course this, however, is somehow even expected. These people are not bad people in any way. They are just used to trust being a currency, instead of a connection and cooperation generating power-house. Most of them allowed themselves to learn to trust in a different way during the 8 days of the program, while the others had the chance to question their way of understanding trust.

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I believe the world is good. Even if we do bad things at times, we, human beings are good. We just tend to get lost in all that noise that surrounds us, and, in an act of the survival mechanism that kicks in when we feel alone or burdened, we hurt people from time to time. I have never experienced my trust being let down by anyone - and this gives me great satisfaction. Whenever I got hurt because I refused to see, what I could have chosen to see: this trust was not a good investment. Even these were a good learning investment, in the end.

In the last two days of the training course, the participants had a really good time. They were managing themselves and the challenges they had experienced with joy, enthusiasm and calmness. They felt safe to do so: they were in an environment where they were trusted and which they could trust.

What is your understanding of trust? What do you need, to trust sustainably? Is the trust that is invested in you a sustainable one for you? If not - what can you do, to make it more sustainable for yourself?