How's Your Trust?

How’s your trust?

Trust is putting your well-being in another’s hands, believing they are on your side, working for your benefit. To trust someone, you take a risk of being hurt or overlooked. In relationship to your spouse or friend, hopefully you are also trustworthy. When trust is mutual and the people involved have built a track record of trust between them, it is a beautiful thing with lots of benefits.

Trust is so important that people notice when it is not present. Sometimes we take it for granted when trust is there, but it becomes painfully obvious when it is not. You notice when you don’t feel you can trust someone; you feel ill at ease. The risk of telling them something vulnerable is too great, cooperating with them on tasks to be done has some danger. Trust is so powerful that it makes everything go more smoothly and its absence gums up the works in marriages, friendships, and businesses.

There is an interesting book about this idea, called “The Speed of Trust,” by Stephen M. R. Covey. It says everything goes better and faster when trust is present. The opposite is true as well, everything goes more poorly and slower when trust is not present. When trust isn’t present, people can’t be totally honest with each other because they don’t know what the other will do with the information. The time it takes to figure out what is safe to say or do, and what is not safe, slows everything down.

You can probably quickly think of people you have complete trust in. And you can probably think of those folks, who as the saying goes, you “don’t trust them as far as you could throw them.” You just don’t trust them much.

So, since trusting is risky, let's just not do it. Hmm, how would we go about that, just not trusting anybody? You would have to be totally isolated (which is impossible by the way), and it would be a very lonely life. To trust is to risk being hurt, but to not trust is to give over to cynicism and be self-absorbed.

To build trust we need to ask for what we want in relationships, then see if the person will give it. We must also be people of our word with kindness; being trustworthy. May your relationships now and in the future be trustworthy. And may you be a trustworthy person.