Trust and Opportunity

What does trust have to do with opportunity? Trust is the gateway to exploration. When you know that you can rely on others to provide safety and support, it is easy to create and use opportunities to good advantage. In the absence of trust, we often create shelters that box us in rather than keep a window open for new possibilities. Consequently, we narrow our chances to try new behaviors, meet new challenges or exercise our creativity.

Trust is based upon our belief and confidence in others to rely upon their integrity, ability and strength to come through for us. We invest them with a shared responsibility for our welfare. When people consistently do what they say they are going to do, when there is compassion and closeness, the space to safely reveal one’s vulnerabilities and there is reciprocal courtesy and attention paid to one another, trust thrives. In the absence of any of these behaviors, trust will diminish and disappear.

I’m sure that none of this is news to you. And yet we so often miss opportunities to create trust or we act in ways that foster distrust. What seems to be missing in both instances is positive, clear communication. Each one of us has our own rules about trust. What are yours? How did you formulate them? Are they based upon your own past experience or are they rules you adopted from others? Most importantly, how often do you share your rules with the people in your life? It seems that this is one area of life that many of us are loathe to talk about. And yet, our rules are are essential to successful interpersonal interaction.

What’s the opportunity available from revealing our rules? One opportunity that I can see is that we can reduce the chances of misunderstanding and unwittingly hurting one another. I used to do a lot of volunteer work for organizations and individuals. I enjoyed being helpful and I met wonderful people. However, at some point I became over extended and I also realized that my services were being taken for granted. Now I have a rule that I will only do a certain amount of volunteer work during the month. Once I am at my limit, I stop. I let the people for whom I’m volunteering my time know what my limit is in advance. This way we can both plan accordingly. Now I no longer need to be angry with them for not appreciating my time and they don’t need to get angry with me for seemingly being uncaring about their need.

Another opportunity that arises from sharing our rules is a deepened sense of intimacy. In sharing my rules, I have come to know myself better and I am known better too. Sharing my rules also inspires others to reveal their rules to me. We know what we can expect from one another and there is an ease that is created between us. Being conscious of each others’ rules creates alignment and shared responsibility in relationships.

Trust is key to creating new opportunities. It is also true that there is always an opportunity to deepen your sense of trust in any relationship in which you are involved. Imagine your most treasured relationship… What one step could you take to further deepen trust in this relationship? Now imagine another relationship that is not as close… What step could you take here to deepen your trust?  Where are you not trustworthy? What are you willing to do to rectify this situation? Imagine a world in which we all have deep trust in one another. I believe that this is definitely an opportunity worth exploring.

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This entry was written by Judith Cohen, MCC, CPCC and posted on May 18, 2009 at 3:29 pm and filed under Ethics, Psychology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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