I don’t trust you

As a sales trainer I’m acutely aware that Trust is an emotive issue. Daily, I help others develop and maintain trust but my experience is limited to …. my own experience. I need help to develop and I know many others do to. Perhaps you need help yourself. Can you help me and others?

My objective here is to open up a discussion around the science and art of building trust.

In networking iTrust is at the foundation of most relationships. Occasionally greed comes into play but few of us will give our hard earned contacts and risk our credibility unless we feel that the other party is trustworthy.

Let’s explore that word for a moment – trustworthy or worthy of trust. It’s basis is that we judge others and assess if they are worthy of our trust. What criteria do we place against that worthiness? Track record, what they say, what they do, age, responses to our jokes, race, religion, gender, height, weight, eye colour, shape of the nose? At what point in the relationship do we feel they have earned it? In the first meeting, after several meetings or in the first 30 seconds?

How to we accelerate that trust? I have certainly found a way through my membership of BlackStar to shorten it …. in the short term. I see these people more often, I meet them regularly, we drink together, and in many cases we can even go to war together and I believe they’d be by my side or watching my back. And many I don’t … because they are people with their own agenda, they don’t always live up to promises (I have failed to live up to all mine too – I’m only human), they have their own needs and they don’t coincide with mine. That’s perfectly fair. Back to the question how do we shorten the cycle of trust building.

I don’t believe you do that online, certainly not in a sustainable, highly repeatable manner and cettainly not just online. My experience is you have to meet, press the flesh, eyeball to eyeball, toe to toe another person. Was it Michael Marr or Dennis Barker who recently posted about slow networking working? It does. Without question. But can we shorten it.

I believe we can, but it takes a fundamental shift in some of our beliefs and a change of behaviours.

Who do you trust? I mean really trust? People you know? People you don’t know? People you’ve only just met for the first time? Many of us will take a risk on someone and trust that our instincts are right, we might even buy something over the phone or on the web but what makes us take the plunge.

There are several factors and I can only cover a couple here.

1. Their subconscious bonds with my subconscious and we have a meeting of minds. Is that physiological, psychological or pathological? I leave that for you to argue.
2. We understand one another. I take the time to actively listen to you, your story, your hopes and fears, your aspirations and ambitions and demonstrate that I not only listened but HEARD. How does that make you feel? For another person to actually hear what you are telling them, and be interested in you?
3. Congruence or believeability. If I tell you I’m a high roller and I drive a beaten up rustbucket, come in a torn suit and when I come to pay my bill, my credit limit on all my cards has been maxed out, do you believe I can lay my hands of £20 million to buy out your company? Congruence seems to be a combination of evidence and behaviours – tone, pitch, cadence, emphasis, hesitation or tremors in our voices, a badly timed sideways glance, the words we use, the tense we choose to describe something.

That is, in my opinion, why online networking on its own can’t work to build real trust, total trust. The face to face interaction enables you to discover if someone is a nitpicker far more quickly, if their habits will get on your nerves or frustrate your network contacts.

1. What helps you build trust in another person?
2. What examples have you got of building trust quickly?
3. When has your first impression been so wrong it’s embarrassing?
4. What do people need to do to break trust in your world?
5. What stories or advice can you give to others to help them establish more trusting relationships?

This isn’t the most original blog in the world but from a networking, parenting, sales, social or management standpoint the subject and skill of trust building is vital. Can you help us?