Trust (part 1 of 2)

I've had something on the subject of trust bumping around in my head now for over a year, but not been able to really get to grips with it. For a while I thought maybe it was leadership I needed to put pen to paper about. Actually I think it is both, and this is part one of two.

There is an quote (source unknown) “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”

 I’m not sure I entirely agree….

 Trust is defined as a “belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something”, and a belief is “an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof”.

So when we talk about Trust being earned or built, I’m not sure we’re talking about the right thing. An acceptance based on experience is something slightly different. Trust requires that leap of faith, to accept that something “is” without prior experience or knowledge.

 Trust can be granted very quickly, which is where first impression count. Or trust can be about the confidence of the trustee, what their appetite for risk is. A horse and rider place trust in each other as soon as they start to work together. They have to – their safety depends on the other.

 That initial trust will be bolstered by good experiences, which reinforce the faith you have placed on whatever or whoever you are trusting. Even a neutral “nothing bad happening” will back the trust up with experience.

 But it is equally true that trust can be lost as quickly as it is given.  A misplaced word or step, and the trust starts to be broken down. Depending on the degree of the “break”, it can be catastrophic or simply eroded. And breaking that trust often takes you past zero into the negative; you are going to need to earn your way back to the start point before you can even think about rebuilding what you lost.

 When we give a “second chance”, we’re often looking for reassurance that the breaking of trust was a one-off and will not happen again. Every betrayal of trust makes it harder to repair. And yet we will persevere, looking for reasons to continue to trust. The failure of trust isn’t just about the something/someone that has proved untrustworthy; it is also about the trustee needing to adjust their value system for that breaking of trust. And we don’t really like to do that.

 I trusted someone for over a decade, and only found out after he had gone that my trust had been misplaced. It led me to question whether I had missed the signs, missed chances to expose what was going on. In this particular situation, the trust was being deliberately broken and my behaviour was consistent with my values.  But while I don’t think I could have done anything differently before uncovering the trust-breaking, it does leave a legacy. I am less likely to accept that things are as they seem on the surface, more likely to question. Despite that I am still not likely to micro-manage the situation to prevent the possibility of trust being broken. After all, how do I know if I can trust that person if I never put them in a situation where trust is required ?

And yet that is exactly what I did with my horse (“Fi”) – micro-manage the situation. We didn’t start with a trust issue. I was confident that I was a good enough rider for her, and could handle her anxiety or lack of confidence. But I was used to a partnership that was fairly even – a 55/45 type of deal – with my previous horse. Fi doesn’t really work that way. If someone isn’t obviously making all the decisions for her, her anxiety goes up and she starts to feel she has to take responsibility for everything, and everything becomes a risk. She needed me to go in with more like a 90/10 deal, and I didn’t realise that at first. So I was under-delivering – 55 vs the 90 she was looking for. It led to a few bad experiences for us both,  which meant the trust started to break down between us. By the time I realised she needed me to step up to the mark (at 90% or more), my confidence was dented and that made it even harder for me.

 I started to micro-manage so that we didn’t have any more train wrecks. But that only worked short term because it meant the communication was all one way – me telling her. I wasn’t listening, and that made me a bad leader, even at the required 90%.

 Being 90% responsible for the decisions includes understanding your partner and knowing what *not* to ask of them. My current equestrian partner (“Rosie”) was very unconfident but also very opinionated. She didn’t really see the point of all that hard work; asking nicely wasn’t going to hack it, but asking (too) strongly was just seen as rude and unreasonable. The gap in between those two was incredibly small at first. As I have found ways to motivate her, she has realised that I *will* listen. And when it really is about confidence rather than “can’t, shan’t won’t”, I will find a way to make it safer and easier for her. As she has come to expect that from me, the “can’t, shan’t, won’t” has slowly decreased over time and she’s now regularly trying her heart out for me.

 So it turns out you can turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one. With Fi what I needed to do was set some physical boundaries in terms of what we did (for example, we stopped hacking out), and by stepping up to that 90% ask within those boundaries, we started to rebuild the mutual trust and confidence. And the interesting thing is that as that confidence grew, Fi could get to the point she could accept less than 90% from me. Which meant I was less out of my comfort zone. But she always has to know I am capable of being there at 90% of the team/leadership for her. As long as I *am* capable of 90%, I don’t have to be ! Fi has now retired, but it was the learning she gave me that helped me with Rosie.