Trust. Is there anywhere in life you notice an absence of trust? and what to do about it.

An Essential Foundation…

I think it’s pretty clear that ‘trust’ is a vital pre-requisite for pretty much any kind of relationship or collaboration or even just to be in a shared space with someone. If we don’t have trust, how can we create anything together?

But what comes before? What does it mean when you’re told one of your tasks is to ‘build trust’? And quickly because you’ve got important business to be getting on with!

How can you (easily) steward your colleagues into that place of safety and openness? And what can you do when you feel the trust is missing, misplaced or lost?

Doing Less…

My job involves talking to people and bringing people together to talk to each other. to be honest, open and willing to share things they don’t share with other people, and then to try things they’ve never tried before. (As I write this words, the image of parachuting pops into my mind although I’ve never had anyone say it feels quite like that—and I’m absolutely not someone who advocates ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’—usually we’re in the calm equivalent of the coffee shop down on the tarmac! Oh well!)

What I notice in these interactions—especially when I’m bringing groups together and pairing people to talk about things they don’t usually reveal to their closest friends, let alone random strangers on a zoom call, is that there’s nothing, literally nothing, that gets in the way of creating trust.

Again and again, people who didn’t know each other before, come back to the main room and marvel at what connection they felt, how peaceful it was as an experience, how supported and ‘heard’ they were, how fascinating the other person is, and how easy it was to open up and explore whatever topic we are placing on the table for them.

And yes, of course there is some scene setting by myself and my occasional colleagues with whom I run these kinds of events. But less is always more here. We son’t need to do anything other than be ‘ourselves’, with nothing to prove, no clever ideas to share, no reassurances to give—even though we’re aware that people come often with little information and uncertain expectations.

We know that we don’t need to ‘do’ anything.

The Default

What’s obvious is that it’s easy to fall into trust when we don’t come with a lot of preconceptions about the other person, who they are, what they might think of us, or what we think that means. There’s no need for a constant ‘how am I doing?’

And yes, at one level it’s low stakes to show up on a seminar and share a zoom breakout with someone who isn’t marking your feedback form… ‘I never have to see this person again’, you might think.

It’s much more common, I find, that strangers share contact details and new friends, professional connections and perhaps future collaborations emerge.

It seems obvious that the only thing to do to create trust is realise that it’s the default; that it’s there when we don’t get in its way.

Show up and trust comes with.

In Its Absence…

And the reverse looks much the same. When we experience an absence of trust, what are we really experiencing? It’s like saying,

I feel breathless!

when you’re surrounded by oxygen. No-one is denying the experience and the panic it induces, but it passes quickly as soon as we remember the feeling of breathing and we’re able to slow down to the speed of our body.

It’s the same with the absence of trust—we’re looking at an experience, real as it is, that happens in the midst of the thing we think we need. A bit like all those bad drivers and red traffic lights on that day you slept in for a meeting.

It might be interesting then, in those situations where you feel something lacking, to notice the moments, or seconds, of connection, rather than the opposite.

To practice looking through those stories we spin, to ignore the confirmation of the difficult colleague that looks so real, and see only what is beneath his or her own perspective. To test, if you’re willing, the idea that there’s something already there that doesn’t need to be created, only remembered.

Like peeling back the layers of paint on an old fireplace or a piece of antique furniture you might find there is something beautiful already there, just waiting to be revealed.

With love,

Cathy