Here's where we lose trust with people.
If a good friend comes up to me and says, “oh my God, did you hear about Caroline?”
“They're getting a divorce, and it is ugly, I'm pretty sure her partner's cheating”.
You have just shared something with me that was not yours to share,
and now my trust for you, even though your
gossiping and giving me the juice, now my trust for you is completely diminished.
How many of you in here have ever struggled with trust in a relationship,
professional or personal? And so what you end up saying to someone is,
“I don't trust you”. “What do you mean no trust me,
I love you, I'm so dependable, what do you mean no trust me?”
How do we talk about trust if we can't break it down?
And I put together an acronym, BRAVING.
Because when we trust, we are braveing connection with someone.
So what are the parts of trust? B, boundaries.
I trust you, if you are clear about your boundaries
and you hold them and you're clear about my boundaries
and you respect them, there is no trust without boundaries.
R, reliability. I can only trust you
if you do what you say, you're going to do. Accountability.
I can only trust you if when you make a mistake,
you are willing to own it, apologize for it and make amends.
V, and this one shook me to the core, vault, the vault.
What I share with you, you will hold in confidence.
What you share with me, I will hold in confidence. But you know what, we don't understand
and this came up over and over again in the research,
we don't understand the other side of the vault, that's only one door on the vault.
Here's where we lose trust with people.
If a good friend comes up to me and says, “oh my God, did you hear about Caroline?”
“They're getting a divorce, and it is ugly, I'm pretty sure her partner's cheating”.
You have just shared something with me that was not yours to share,
and now my trust for you, even though your
gossiping and giving me the juice, now my trust for you is completely diminished.
Here's the tricky thing about the vault. A lot of times we share things
that are not ours to share as a way to hotwire connection with a friend.
Yes or no, like our closeness is built on talking bad about other people.
You know what I call that? Common enemy intimacy.
What we have is not real, the intimacy we have
is built on hating the same people. And that's counterfeit, that's counterfeit
trust, that's not real. So the vault means.
You respect my story, but you respect other people's story.
I, integrity.
I cannot trust you and be in a trusting relationship with you,
if you do not act from a place of integrity and encourage me to do the same.
Here's what I think integrity is, three pieces. It's choosing courage over comfort,
choosing what's right over, what's fun, fast or easy,
and practicing your values, not just professing your values.
N, non judgment. I can fall apart, ask for help and
be in struggle without being judged by you, and you can fall apart and be in
struggle and ask for help without being judged by me.
Which is really hard because we're better at helping
than we are at asking for help. And we think that we've set up
trusting relationships with people who really trust us because we're
always there to help them, but let me tell you this,
if you can't ask for help and they cannot reciprocate that,
that is not a trusting relationship. The last one is G, generosity.
Our relationship is only a trusting relationship if,
you can assume the most generous thing, about my words, intentions and behaviors,
and then check in with me. What understanding trust gives us
is words to say, “here's my struggle”.
“You're not reliable with me, you say you're going to do something,
I count on it, you don't do it”. Or maybe the issue is non judgment,
but we can break it down and talk about it and ask for
what we need, very specifically, instead of using this huge word
that has tons of weight and value around it, we can say here's specifically what's not working.