This book changed my life, trust me.
Would you like to know the easiest way to destroy everything you’ve ever built in your life? I’m talking from personal relationships you’ve cultivated over the years to the very business you built from the ground up and everything in between. All you gotta do is break trust on a regular basis. That’s it! Once you get that down, everything else comes tumbling down.
The other side of this coin is just as destructive: Trusting someone who broke your trust. If you’ve ever experienced broken trust, and who hasn’t, you know the devastation it causes, the obliteration of years of work down the drain, relationships that have evaporated into nothing.
It makes you not want to trust anyone or anything ever again. Just be an island of one and go about doing your thing? Unfortunately, trust isn’t an option in life. We can’t even get through one single day without trust.
Let me ask you a question: What did you have for lunch yesterday? Did you make it all from scratch? If so, did you grow all the ingredients by yourself? No? Somebody did. Do you know who? If not, you trusted whatever was in that soup, salad, or sushi you ingested isn’t going to kill you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have eaten it.
Because, according to Dr. Henry Cloud in his life changing book Trust:
“We are designed to ask one crucial question before any other: Is it safe?”
If it is safe, we eat the sushi, we continue the transaction, we build the relationship, we “move forward.” If it’s not safe, we back away, we get a “bad feeling”, we become cautious and start to “move away”.
Like it or not, Trust is as integrated and vital to our lives as air. It’s so critical Dr. Cloud goes as far as to say “Trust is the fuel for all of life. Nothing in life works without it—especially relationships. We are wired biologically, neurologically, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically to trust.”
So my dear Creator, the way I see, if you and I are to be successful in this life story of ours, we have to #1 develop into someone who is trust-worthy, and #2 discern who is worthy of our trust.
Development and discernment of trust is a lifelong process, but one that becomes much easier to remember when we think of Trust as a Diamond.
How is trust like a diamond?
1. Trust is extremely valuable
Dr. Cloud says, “Trust is the currency that drives everything. So we need to be good at it.”
Just like using diamonds to buy things, there is an exchange of goods and services that takes place when we use trust as currency. Those who use and abuse our trust do so by first gaining our confidence so they can get what they want. This is where the title “Con man” comes from, which is short for “Confidence Man”.
It refers to a person who gains the confidence of others with the intention of defrauding them.
Now, I always thought they called a person a Confidence man because he or she was confident. But in actuality it means they swindle another person's confidence, in order to swindle them out of their possessions.
What is critical to those who have been the victim of a con is our natural tendency to not trust anyone ever again. This mindset ends up hurting us because “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”- Anton Chekhov
Trust isn’t the problem. Trusting the untrustworthy is. But the good news is we can get better at discerning who is trustworthy.
How is Trust like a diamond?
2. Trust is formed from heat and pressure
Diamonds are naturally formed deep within the Earth over countless years through high pressure and high temperature.
Heat + Pressure
Trust is formed when the heat is on, and you’re under pressure. This is really obvious in sports. Take Basketball for example. When the game is on the line and the clock is down to its final seconds, who does the coach want to get the ball at the end of the game? It’s going to be the player he can trust to handle the heat and pressure to make that critical shot.
The coach gives them the chance because they have proven over time that they can handle the heat and pressure. It takes time to earn that level of trust.
When you see trust that way, Do you also see how cheap it is for someone who hasn’t gone through the heat and pressure to say, “Just trust me?” That’s not a diamond, that’s cubic zirconia: it may look like the real thing, but it ain’t.
How is Trust like a diamond?
3. Trust has 5 facets
This melted my brain when Dr. Cloud revealed this little gem (pun intended). Before, I had always thought of trust as a one sided concept: You either trust someone or you don’t. But when you see trust as having 5 facets to it like a diamond, it becomes a game changer for all your relationships in life. The 5 facets of Trust according to Dr. Cloud are:
Understanding: Do they know me?Motive: Do they have my back?Ability: Can they get the job done?Character: How do they get the job done?Track record: What is their past performance?
Understanding: Do they know me?
Motive: Do they have my back?
Ability: Can they get the job done?
Character: How do they get the job done?
Track record: What is their past performance?
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