Trust

I read a blog yesterday that reminded me that we tend to divide the world into to two groups of people, those we trust and everyone else. We then subdivide the second group into to two further sub-groups, those we ‘know’ we can’t trust and those we have no reason to trust yet. Depending on your culture, it can take differing amounts of time to make it to the ‘Trust’ group. As I mentioned the other day, some primitive tribes can move through this spectrum very quickly, sometimes in less than a day. In other cultures, it is possible to hang on to sins committed against your ancestors by certain groups of people and this is emotional ‘evidence’ for sticking an entire race or sub-group into the ‘Distrust’ group.

The fact is we have a basic human need for certainty. After all we don’t want to just hope that a chair will support us, we need to ‘know’ it will do so each time we lower our weary bot’ into it. We feel the same way about the people we interact with and depending on their closeness to our emotional centre or their impact on our security (like bosses and other authority figures); we need to know we are ‘safe’.

I witnessed what was referred to as a “spat” in a group I belong to over the last few days with hundreds of posts whipping back and forth because, in essence, someone felt that the actions / motive of someone else were not trustworthy. It isn’t often we see this being nakedly acted out like this, because we sophisticated 21^st century westerners have allsorts of polite ways to avoiding saying “I don’t trust you”.

There can be no relationship without a degree of trust; there can be no change in our lives without trust and just a little risk. Would you rather live in a world that is small and threatening or full of hope and possibilities? What you believe often shapes not only your interpretation of your experiences but actually shapes the experiences themselves… Today might be the vary day to choose….

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.” Franke Crane

“You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.” Indira Gandhi

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 08:48 and is filed under Business Change, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.