You must trust and believe in people or
life becomes impossible. –Anton Chekhov
My life experience continues to confirm my belief that TRUST is the crucial element in developing, nurturing and sustaining healthy relationships. So, gentle reader, I invite you to consider TRUST [what follows is my current thinking about Trust]. It is also important to remember that at our best we are imperfect human beings and that when it comes to ‘Trust’ we will more often than not ‘stumble the mumble’ rather than ‘walk the talk.’
Trust = a tap root that feeds healthy relationships [P.O.T. = Personal, One-to-One, Team – ‘Team’ is any organized group of three or more folks]
Trust Defined: trust is one’s willingness to act rooted in integrity and to be vulnerable to another based on the confidence that the other is benevolent, honest, open, reliable, and competent
Integrity = commitment to moral and ethical principles; one is rooted in the soundness of his/her moral character. The goal is to consistently act rooted in integrity at all times.
Vulnerable = transparency, risk-taking, & openness. The root is from the Latin, vulnus, which means ‘to carry the wound gracefully.’ Part of being vulnerable also includes taking a position that you will act as if the other person is acting out of good faith. Vulnerable also means that we commit to being BOTH ‘trust-builders’ and ‘trust-repairers.’ ‘Trust-repairing’ requires that we offer forgiveness, we offer reconciliation and we offer healing.
Benevolence = the confidence that one’s well-being or something one cares about will be protected and not harmed by the trusted party [one’s good name, for example]. Trust rests on the assurance that one can count on the good will of another to act in one’s best interest, that the other will not exploit one’s vulnerability even when the opportunity is available.
Honesty = honesty concerns a person’s character, their integrity and authenticity. Trust means that one can expect that the word or promise of another individual, whether verbal or written, can be relied upon. Trust implies that statements made were truthful and conformed to ‘what really happened,’ at least from that person’s perspective, and that commitments made about future actions will be kept. Without the confidence that a person’s words can be relied upon, trust is unlikely to develop. At times leaders, for example, have to ‘bite their tongue’ in the face of criticism from others who do not have all of the relevant information (a good leader will make decisions for the common good, given the information at hand, with the belief that the majority of the led would make the same decision given the same information). One can act with integrity and ‘lie’ at the same time.
Openness = openness is a process by which people make themselves vulnerable to others by sharing information, influence, and control. Openness in information means disclosure of facts, alternatives, judgments, intentions, and feelings. Openness in control accepts dependence rooted in a confidence in the reliability of others and delegation of important tasks to them. Openness in influence allows others to initiate changes to plans, goals, concepts, criteria and resources. With openness a spiral of trust is initiated which serves to foster increasing levels of trust in the organization. Openness initiates a kind of reciprocal trust, signaling a confidence that neither the information nor the individual will be exploited, so that people believe that they can feel the same confidence in return.
Reliability = the sense that one is able to depend on another consistently.
Competence = the ability to perform a task as expected according to appropriate standards. A problem is that we are not always honest with ourselves (or sufficiently insightful) about our ‘growing edges’ [Note: I do not like the term/concept ‘weakness’] or our loss of skill or our impairment of judgment; thus we need to be able to trust others’ assessments and insights.
For me, Trust is the root principle that nurtures and sustains three relationships: P.O.T. – Personal, One-to-One, and Team (any organized group of three or more folks).