Listen to our Voice Notes on Spotify or read the transcript here:
Welcome. Just the mere fact that you're here shows already some level of trust. You start to listen to this podcast because it might add to your competencies, or it might help you develop further and be more successful. Or it just might help you while your time away. Trust and talking about trust are rather curious topics. If you Google it, you will find a lot of different aspects about trust, platitudes that supposedly help you to build more trust, and some kind of 10 tips for building more trust. You will find a lot of academic aspects around trust where it takes you hours to read them and you still won't understand them. So, there is a lot of bullshit about trust. We don't intend to add anything to that pile. Instead, we will be focusing on practically building more trust and traversing in the meantime a lot of topics around history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and whatever you can think of that is connected to practically building more trust. We will have a quick glance at those. But first of all, it begs the question, why in the first place would you be looking at how to build more trust? There are three very clear and simple reasons to focus a little bit more on trust.
Three good reasons to listen to a podcast about building trust.
Number one, and that is probably the most important aspect, is that if you can build more trust with your customers, teams and in your personal life, it is incredibly valuable to them. Trust is connected to our reward system. It makes us feel good. It makes us want to be with one another, interact, and transact. It makes us more confident, happier, and calmer. That is why Professor Wilhelm Salber, in the introduction to TrustLogic said that trust is like a gentle giant that can see far into the future and has the means to take us there.
The second reason is that it's incredibly good for you, yourself. However much you're trusted, you will find during this podcast that you're actually even more trustworthy than you ever thought. Now that we've established that every little bit more trust is actually incredibly valuable to those who matter to you. And in fact, it is very good for you to understand trust a little bit more.
The third reason to look more into trust is to really understand how it works, how it impacts us and how we ultimately build it. And that takes practice and that takes understanding how trust actually works in our minds and how we experience trust.
We always talk about the 10,000 hours to get to mastery. When we play a sport, we are always intuitive and with our natural talent get to a certain level. But if we want to get further, we need to take a coach. We need to take lessons. We might even watch videos about the topic. I cycle, road cycling. But I've been cycling since I was probably about four years old. But it was very different when I moved to the road cycle. I certainly needed a few tips from a coach to really do road cycling well. And that takes time. And it takes practice. Every time that I'm on my bike, I sometimes need to watch out what my technique is. Am I using all my muscles properly? What is my posture? But that's not a chore. It's actually a pleasure because I can see the results. I get a little bit faster. It feels a little more effortless. Also, it is not as painful afterwards. And, which I don't do it, but I could do, is competitive cycling. It's very simple. Only if I get the technique right, if I practice, if I take advice, then I am the one to win. And that's no different in all our other aspects of life. Whether it is being elected to the school board, whether it is a student being elected as a class leader, whether we are competing in our sales and we need to be chosen over others. The same situation arises every day in our personal and professional lives. And therefore, understanding how to build trust a little bit better, practising it and getting a few more tips every time will make life certainly far more fun, a hell of a lot richer and more successful.
Some of the typical pushbacks
But before we finish, a few of the typical pushbacks we get when we talk to people about learning about building trust. Number one often is that it almost feels insulting that we suggest that you need to learn about building trust. But am I not good at building trust? I am already trusted! It's an almost immediate emotional defensive reaction to it. And often the more senior the leaders are, the stronger that reaction is. Are we questioning their trust? That's nonsense, of course. Trust has been evolving in us through evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. So, we all have a fairly decent capability of building trust. And often those senior leaders actually have a very good capability to build that trust. But we also have an equally good natural capability to eat and drink stuff. And that still doesn't prevent us from looking more into nutrition and how it impacts us, how we could possibly eat better or drink better to be healthier, to feel better in ourselves.
It's the same with trust. However well you can build trust as your natural talent, you can improve your natural ability simply by understanding how it works.
The second pushback is often the question of whether it is ethical to build trust consciously. Isn't the very fact that we try to build trust already a betrayal of trust? That is a good question. If it is totally self-serving and if it becomes dishonest, yes, then it's unethical. However, trusting you even a little bit more is extremely valuable to your audience. Therefore, as long as you don't work to the detriment of those whom you want to build trust with and as long as you stay honest, there is nothing bad about it. It is actually a service to them to build more trust.
Lastly, it is the issue of people saying, but I am already highly trusted, do I actually need this? Consider this. Most of our clients say that trust is their key success factor. We ask them 'how important is trust to your success?' and it's always 10 out of 10 or nine out of 10. Then we typically ask the participants, 'how much time have you ever spent on understanding trust and how to build it?' Typically the answer is no time at all. Everyone spends hours and hours on end learning about technical aspects or even a lot of other totally useless things, but no one actually spends time learning about their key
success factor, trust. And the very simple thing again is........ if you're in a competitive situation, which we all are in most of the time, our key competitors, by the very nature of being key competitors, are equally good at building trust. So, it's about getting that trust advantage -who to the benefit of whom you want to build trust with and, of course, yours. That was another Trust Logic Voice Note. Don't forget to subscribe. You can find more info at www.trustlogic.info
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