The Challenge of Developing Trust
Trust takes a mix of time, effort, and faith.
Ours is not a trusting society. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
All you have to do is look at the disturbing bias in media. It’s frighteningly easy to get only 1 side of every political, moral, and business debate. Confirmation bias – seeking and finding info that meets your expectations and refutes any opposition – is everywhere. Given recent decisions on the part of big business caring way more for money than their employees, and the government being increasingly by and for the billionaire class, trust has eroded exponentially.
Yet modern humankind needs a degree of trust to function. Most of this level of trust, however, is taken for granted. Obeying traffic lights is a perfect example of this. We trust people will stop on red and go on green. We trust the alarm clock to go off at the time we set. Easily taken for granted, but still elements we trust regularly.
Trust between people is far more challenging. Most of us address trust on 4 levels: the impersonal, the semi-personal, the personal, and the self. And what it takes to establish trust at any level is a mix of time, effort, and faith.
The impersonal and semi-personal
Impersonal trust is trust in things you have little to no control over. Some of this is extremely vague and open-ended, like trusting that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening. Along this line, trusting your car will start and your toaster will toast, then moving to trusting the police to protect you from criminals and your elected officials to give a shit about you.
Impersonal trust can be eroded, often more easily than any other form of trust. One huge scandal in business or government can make you lose faith in people helping people. Stories of atrocities and tragedies can make you lose trust in basic human decency.
The reason this is impersonal? You can’t do a damned thing about it. You have ZERO control over these things, and your trust is built almost entirely in faith and time.
Semi-personal trust generally applies to people and things you interact with. Teachers, bosses, cashiers, and waitstaff fit here. Your smartphone, body, and living space are also here. You have some influence and sway, but little to no control when it comes to all these things.
It’s easy to have semi-personal trust shaken when your waiter is rude, your smartphone bricks, or some other matter erodes or eradicates trust. Often, because this tends to be tenuous, it’s a matter of circumstance.
Semi-personal can become personal, but that’s a matter of time and effort. Someone you are on a first date with is a semi-personal connection. When you start to build a rapport, that can shift to personal trust.
Trust with the personal and the self
Personal trust is almost entirely related to people. This is interactions with friends, family, and loved ones. Putting your trust into these people comes naturally to some degree, but still requires time, effort, and faith to build.
As a baby, you put all your trust into your parents to shelter, feed, and clothe you. Hopefully, that trust develops into love and caring relationships. Along the way, you learn to trust your friends and family to be honest with you, help you through challenges as you grow and evolve, and to give you guidance and advice.
When this trust erodes or vanishes, it can be devastating. Here was the next-closest-to-you person(s) you trusted. Time and effort that might get shattered when your trust in them was broken.
This can be big or small. A cheating spouse is, arguably, a more thorough breaking of trust than a friend skipping ahead on a streaming show you’re binging together. But the emotional reaction could still be the same. There is no right or wrong way to react to a violation of trust, whatever form it takes.
It can also be consequential. Death taking a loved one can ruin trust as much or more than a loved one abandoning you.
After early life lessons, nobody teaches you how to build trust in and with the self. Self trust is the only trust over which you have near-total control. I say near-total, because your body can and will betray you in unexpected ways (like when I put my hand on the banister to go down the stairs and a nerve pinch sent pain shooting through my thumb).
What you can control is trust in yourself and in your ability to make choices and decisions to impact your life experience. This takes time, effort, and faith.
Trusting in the choices and decisions you make
Unfortunately, self trust can be eroded by media, influencers, outmoded beliefs and values, and other elements you interact with consciously and subconsciously. It also doesn’t help when society at large views kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring as a weakness.
When you can learn to trust yourself, you can learn how much trust to give to the personal, semi-personal, and impersonal levels. But if you don’t start with yourself, where you have near-total control, you’re creating an unnecessary handicap.
The only person in your head, heart, and soul is you. Ergo, you, and only you, can know what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your approaches, and your actions. That knowing, that knowledge, is how you mindfully make choices and decisions.
Establishing the knowledge of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions is where it begins. Trust in yourself to know your conscious self. From there, you can use that trust to make choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are.
This takes work. It takes time, it takes effort, and it takes faith. Faith, because while you can’t betray yourself, betrayal from what you don’t control can and will occur. Hence, your knee giving out unexpectedly can erode your trust in your ability to do something with someone you love.
You get to choose how your trust is won and lost. Starting with knowing your mind can’t and won’t betray you, so long as you engage your conscious mind (because your subconscious – where your beliefs, values, habits, and imperfect memories live – can only be engaged consciously).
Note
You WILL get things wrong. You’ll make bad choices and decisions. You might feel that you can’t trust yourself. But with active conscious awareness, you can build trust with time, effort, and faith in yourself. You’re incapable of self-betrayal, which mindfulness will show you to be true.
Developing trust, especially in yourself, isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that you alone control your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions, you can use them via mindfulness to apply time, effort, and faith in yourself to build trust. Knowing that trust has 4 distinct levels (the impersonal, the semi-personal, the personal, and the self) and that only the self is wholly in your control, you can work with that more confidently, more consciously and mindfully, to develop trust.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-fifth (635) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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