- The book explains what trust is, why it is important, and how it works in different contexts. It also distinguishes between trust and distrust, and how they affect our relationships, performance, and well-being.
- The book identifies the five aspects of trust that are essential for any successful relationship: character, competence, connection, communication, and consistency. It also provides practical tips and exercises for developing and enhancing each aspect of trust in ourselves and others.
- The book tackles the challenging topic of repairing trust when it has been broken. It outlines the steps and conditions for repairing trust, such as acknowledging the problem, taking responsibility, making amends, changing behavior, and rebuilding credibility. It also warns against the pitfalls and obstacles that can hinder or prevent trust repair.
Trust (2023) is a sensitive and practical guide to this essential part of human relationships. It reveals the deep significance of trust as a factor in our lives and outlines the five essential elements for building and maintaining it.
Table of Contents
What is your story with misplaced trust?
It is tempting to think that trust is simple, that we should be able to spot a lack of trustworthiness relatively easily. But we all have our stories about being burned.
When trust breaks down, so does our ability to move forward in life and in business.
In TURST, Dr, Henry Cloud will help you:
- Determine who is trustworthy and who is not.
- Identify and develop the attitudes, practices, and behaviours you need to become a trustworthy person for other people.
- Run a business or organization that invites the trust of your customers and stakeholders.
- Repair trust when it has been violated and broken, even when it feels broken beyond fixing.
- protect yourself in the process of rebuilding trust that has been broken.
Introduction: Learn the art of forging trust.
The Russian playwright Anton Chekov once said, “You must trust and believe in people, or life becomes impossible.” Trust is the foundation of nearly all our social relationships. Our businesses, governments, and justice systems run on trust; as do our families, friendships, and love lives.
But who should you trust? How can you get people to trust you? And how, for that matter, can you make yourself worthy of trust?
In this summary, you’ll learn about the five key elements needed for trust to flourish, whether that’s in your private or your public life. You’ll also learn how , when trust has been weakened, you can rebuild it and learn to trust again.
Trust holds life together
Trust is the bedrock of our lives. From the moment we’re born, we’re placed in the hands of caregivers we can’t help but trust completely. As we grow, our circle of trust expands to family, friends, and communities.
Studies show that people with higher levels of trust enjoy better physical health, greater overall happiness, and greater satisfaction with life. In business, trusted leaders are more effective and trusted brands are more successful and lucrative. Teams whose members trust each other consistently outperform their low-trust counterparts across a slew of metrics.
Even at the level of nations, interpersonal trust contributes to economic development, through increased investment and capital flows.
Okay, so we’ve established that trust is important on many levels. Let’s look at the five steps to building it.
Take baby steps toward trust
Picture this. A thief is cornered by police during a failed bank robbery. Panicked, he grabs a nearby child as a human shield to secure his escape. Police surround the bank and call in a hostage negotiator to resolve the situation.
Now imagine that hostage negotiator is you. You’re holding your phone and the hostage-taker is on the other end of the line. The stakes could hardly be higher.
What do you do? Do you convince the hostage-taker of the danger he faces, appealing to his sense of self-preservation? Or do you appeal to his conscience and ask for compassion for the child?
As it happens, the first step would be neither of these things. The first step is simply listening.
What’s your name? Can you tell me what happened? How are you feeling right now?
Hostage negotiators know that for someone to trust you enough to engage, they first need to feel that you see them; that you recognize who they are on some level. This is a bit counterintuitive. After all, a child’s life is in danger – and you’re supposed to focus on making the person responsible feel heard? And yet that’s where hostage negotiations typically begin.
Let’s see why this is the case. Professionals know that empathy and active listening are key skills in this kind of high-stakes situation. That’s because the first ingredient of trust is understanding. Your first job when building trust isn’t to persuade anyone, it’s to do your best to know them and empathize with them.
It’s baked into our psychology. When we feel recognized, something inside us softens. Feeling that we’ve been heard and understood is a prerequisite for us to start listening, in turn.
Conversely, if someone is too focused on themselves and their goals to even see what matters to us, an essential and viscerally-felt sense of trust is missing.
This applies to businesses and organizations as much as to individuals. Before you can sell something to customers, you first need to understand them – what their lives are like, what problems they have, and how they experience your product or service. Successful companies immerse themselves in the perspective of their customers, before giving them a hard sell.
After understanding, the second ingredient for trust is motive. Here, motive means keeping the other party’s best interests in mind; so, not just knowing about their perspective, but actually caring about their interests.
When we encounter someone new, it’s natural for us to wonder, What are their goals in this interaction? Are they considering my well-being, too? Sure, people can have their own self-interest and stick up for that, as well. But if we’re confident that someone is also keeping our best interests in mind – that they care about what happens to us – we can feel safe and lower our defenses.
So understanding and motive are our first two ingredients for building trust. Let’s look at the rest.
There are three more ingredients for trust
Let’s say you’re founding a startup. Searching for cofounders, you consider a dear friend you’ve known since childhood. Nobody understands you better than they do. You’ve been through it all together and they’ve always had your back.
So, as a friend, you trust them completely – but does that mean you trust them to go on this journey with you? Not necessarily.
The third ingredient of trust is ability. This is hardly a mystery. If you’re going to entrust someone with something important, it’s not enough that their heart is in the right place. You need to know they have the competence and ability to safeguard it – to get the job done, in this case.
Sometimes this is just about skills. If your best friend is a reclusive Luddite who’s never touched a computer and never had a bank account, they may not be the best choice of cofounder in your financial technology business.
On the other hand, skills aren’t everything. They also need to have the right personal traits and temperament. So the fourth ingredient of trust is character.
Your cofounder might have all the skills in the world, but if they lack crucial character traits like self-control or perseverance, you’ll have a hard time feeling safe running a business with them. It all depends on context. In order for you to trust a potential spouse, they may need other traits like flexibility or emotional intelligence.
The fifth trust factor isn’t rocket science – but you’d be surprised how often it’s neglected. This last ingredient for trust is track record. If you want to know how someone will behave in the future, their past behavior isn’t a bad place to look. Our experience shows us what we can expect – and those expectations live, not just in our heads, but deep in our bones.
Picture the house you grew up in; picture the layout. Think, for example, about the way the front door connected to the hallway, the hallway to the living room, and beyond that the kitchen. Barring major renovations, that layout was probably something that you could rely on implicitly. It’s something so consistent, so stable, you never need to give it thought. This is the powerful kind of certainty that a person with a solid track record can give you.
That’s not to say people can’t change – they can. But to really trust that change has occurred, a person needs to demonstrate it with their actions. That is, they need to start building a new track record.
Alright, those are the five ingredients for trust: understanding, motive, ability, character, and track record. If you want to show that you’re trustworthy, make sure the other party can check off all five. And the next time you’re recruiting job candidates or just going on a date, you know what to look for.
But of course, nothing’s certain in life. People make mistakes. So what if the worst happens and somebody close to you betrays your trust? Let’s look at how to move forward.
Rebuilding trust that’s been broken
As business magnate Warren Buffet said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
We’ve seen how involved it is to build trusting relationships. And yet even more challenging is rebuilding trust once it’s been broken. Think about a spouse caught having an affair. This is trust-building in hard mode.
Success isn’t guaranteed, but it is possible. Let’s finish this summary by looking at the six steps to repairing trust once it’s been broken.
Let’s say you’re the one who has been betrayed. Before dealing with the other person, your first step is to start to heal. Betrayal can be deeply upsetting; it can undermine your whole sense of security and normality. Healing takes time and it can’t be rushed. So seek out friends you do still trust and ask for their support. Let them into your life and share your pain and vulnerability with them.
The second step is a hard one. It’s moving toward forgiveness. But remember, forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing someone’s behavior. In fact, without the recognition of a wrong, there can be no forgiveness.
Forgiveness can feel unfair. But remember, you don’t grant forgiveness because somebody deserves it. Forgiveness is a gift – a gift that you choose to give to someone who’s wronged you. It’s an act of grace from you to them. And yet forgiveness is also one of the best gifts you can give to yourself. It allows you to get the closure that you need to move on – to clear out the cobwebs and move forward with your life.
The third step to repairing trust is to consider what you actually want. What do you hope for, going forward? You may decide that the best choice for you is to simply part ways with the person who hurt you. That’s completely legitimate. But if you want to try and patch things up, you’re onto the next and fourth step.
That step is to see if reconciliation is possible. What exactly does that mean? Reconciliation is returning a relationship to good standing in some sense. And it’s only possible, both, when you forgive and when the other party takes genuine responsibility for their behavior. They’re not making excuses or denying the harm they caused. Instead, they’re repentant and remorseful for their actions. And critically, they cease any deception and “come clean” to you.
The next step toward trust is something you know about already. It’s assessing the five ingredients of trust we discussed earlier. Remember, those are: understanding, motive, ability, character, and track record. Now that the person has come clean, it’s important you keep evaluating them according to the five factors to make sure that your trust is warranted.
Finally, the last step in rebuilding trust is looking for evidence of genuine transformation. It’s not enough to know that a cheating spouse isn’t currently cheating again. You need to know it won’t happen ever again. So are they charting a course for change? Are they demonstrating transformation, day by day? You need to know that they have either become, or are in the process of becoming, the kind of person who wouldn’t repeat what they did. Remember that while forgiveness is a gift, trust must be earned.
Relationships can heal from even deep betrayals. If both sides really put in the work of repairing trust, a damaged relationship can end up even stronger than before.
Summary
Trust is the glue that holds your personal, family, and business relationships together. It’s essential you know how to cultivate it. Trust has five essential ingredients: understanding, motive, ability, character, and track record. When trust has been broken, follow the six steps outlined in this summary to find out if your trust can and should be repaired.
Dr. Henry Cloud is an acclaimed leadership expert, clinical psychologist and New York Times bestselling author. His 45 books, including the iconic Boundaries, have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. He has an extensive executive coaching background and experience as a leadership consultant, devoting the majority of his time working with CEOs, leadership teams, and executives to improve performance, leadership skills and culture.
Genres
Sex, Relationships, Management, Leadership, Corporate Culture, Self Help, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Christian Living, Business, Self-Improvement, Personal Growth, Personal Transformation
Review
The book is divided into three parts: The Nature of Trust, The Five Aspects of Trust, and Repairing Trust. In the first part, the author explains what trust is, why it is important, and how it works in different contexts. He defines trust as “the ability to rely on someone or something to do what is good, right, and beneficial for us and others”. He also distinguishes between trust and distrust, and how they affect our relationships, performance, and well-being.
In the second part, the author identifies the five aspects of trust that are essential for any successful relationship: character, competence, connection, communication, and consistency. He describes each aspect in detail, giving examples of how they are demonstrated or violated in various scenarios. He also provides practical tips and exercises for developing and enhancing each aspect of trust in ourselves and others.
In the third part, the author tackles the challenging topic of repairing trust when it has been broken. He acknowledges that trust can be fragile and hard to restore, but he also offers hope and guidance for those who want to rebuild trust in themselves or others. He outlines the steps and conditions for repairing trust, such as acknowledging the problem, taking responsibility, making amends, changing behavior, and rebuilding credibility. He also warns against the pitfalls and obstacles that can hinder or prevent trust repair, such as denial, blame, avoidance, rationalization, and resentment.
The book is a comprehensive and insightful guide on how to understand and manage trust in every area of our lives. The author draws from his extensive experience as a psychologist, leadership expert, and business consultant to provide relevant and useful information and advice on how to build and maintain trust in ourselves and others. He uses stories, anecdotes, research findings, and biblical principles to illustrate his points and engage the reader’s interest.
The book is well-organized and easy to follow. The author uses clear language and examples to explain complex concepts and ideas. He also provides summaries, questions, and exercises at the end of each chapter to help the reader review and apply what they have learned. The book is suitable for anyone who wants to improve their personal or professional relationships by developing or enhancing their trust skills.
The book is not without its limitations. Some readers may find the book too long or repetitive at times. Some may also disagree with some of the author’s views or assumptions on certain topics or issues. However, these are minor drawbacks that do not detract from the overall value and quality of the book.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about trust and how it affects our lives. The book is a valuable resource for managing one of the most complex and fundamental of human bonds. It will help you to experience more fruitful and rewarding relationships in every area of your lives.