Trust

Synthesized and edited by Brett Mallory Miles

The Foundation of Valued Relationships

You already know that trust is required to have loving, connected, and powerful relationships. You may value such relationships. Many do. However, you and others often don’t trust. You may look for and find “evidence” not to trust. Influenced by fear to protect yourself, you lack trust, experiencing distrust. You can change that. Start by learning what trust is, how it works, and how you can create it, not wait for it. Creating and building trust determines your success in life and relationships.

Integrate these ideas and principles into your thinking, beliefs, and actions to successfully lead your life and people.

1. True leadership (of self and others), whatever else it may be, can be based on nothing less than authentic trust (no lying, masking, or fear-based acting).
2. Trust and control must not be confused. By easing the reins of control, it improves efficiency, effectiveness, cooperation, team spirit, employee morale, and chances for success.
3. The core of trust involves freedom, not control.
4. “Power” by way of trusted authority (such as with a Doctor) is very different than “power” that forces cooperation through coercion and obedience through fear. With coercion, there is a loss of creativity. Possibilities are diminished.
5. Reliance on enforcement and sanctions is the death knell of a relationship, an enterprise, and society.
6. Trust has its limits. Trust involves risks. See these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.
7. Trust is created by and tends to be reinforced by trusting. The same is true for distrust. Both tend to be self-confirming. Do you want trust from others? Then, show and express trust.
8. Self-trust is the most basic and most often neglected form of trust. Distrust is often a projection of missing self-trust. You don’t trust others. Look no further than your lack of self-trust.
9. You decide whether or not to trust. Either way, the consequences are dramatic. Deciding to trust requires that you begin by trusting trust. Without trust, all proclamations of goodness fall into self-righteousness, alienation, and loneliness.
10. Trust is being free to speak one’s ideas. It’s is being free even to think those ideas. Trust creates freedom. Trust is an opening up of the world, not a diminution of it.
11. Trust is a kind of freedom, not only the freedom from suspicion and distrust but the freedom to realize all sorts of possibilities, especially with other people.
12. Trust is an option, a choice, a decision. It involves skill and commitment. It is an emotional skill.
13. Our mutual choices of trust determine nothing less than the kinds of beings we are and the kinds of lives we will live together.
14. How you are being with trust shapes all of your experiences and therefore your reality.
15. Living with and from trust creates loving, connected, and powerful relationships.

For more insight, read:

Building Trust in business, politics, relationships, and life by Robert C. Solomon & Fernando Flores, Oxford University Press, Copyright 2001

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., Copyright 2002

The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M. R. Covey, Free Press, Copyright 2006