This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Reconciling Differences: Build Trust to Make the Impossible Possible, with Angie McArthur, CEO, Professional Thinking Partners and Co-author, Reconcilable Differences
Demystify trust
Trust is profoundly important to each of us because it can be a roadblock and it can also be a huge highway. When you trust someone it’s almost like the impossible becomes possible. Everything flows from that place. What I have found in the 22 years of looking at this is that we all consider trust to be different things. And so we use these words without actually understanding from one another what it means. So the first thing I would offer is for you to be in conversation with your coworkers, with your spouse, with anyone important to your life. What really helps you trust someone? And what diminishes trust? Breaking that down, demystifying it, becomes really important. For example, some of the people I just worked with, for them trust meant showing up on time and delivering results. Good to know. For another person, it’s means that I’m always sharing how I feel, that I’m transparent in how I’m making decisions. It means that you have a sense of who I am and what I’m going to do. So again, if we can demystify what we mean by trust, if we can break it down to one another and make it more explicit, talk about it, that in itself really supports us both trusting one another more.
Be aware of personal narratives
Each of us mistrusts people so quickly and so often, if we actually dive into it, the root of the mistrust is really a misunderstanding, miscommunication, or something that has caused us to go off with each other that is actually repairable. And so we create these stories all the time in our heads, and we call them personal narratives. There are narratives that we’re always saying in our heads, so for example, if you look at me a certain way, the narrative I’m saying in my head is, “Oh, she’s looking at me with that stern face again, that must mean that she doesn’t like me”, “Oh, that must mean I’m doing a poor job”, “Oh, that must mean that I’m not going to get the bonus that I was expecting”, and pretty soon I’ve spiraled. Then, all of a sudden I don’t trust you to be my leader because you’re not going to give me the bonus, because I get the sense that you don’t like me. The actual data is that you’ve looked at me with a non-expressive face. My own narrative has created the mistrust between us. There’s actually been no action.
The part that each of us can learn as leaders is to catch ourselves when we’re creating these stories in our heads. And we talk about two stories that we’re always creating with any piece of data–he did this, she did that, she looked at me this way, he moved his body this way when I did this. All these experience are happening all the time and our minds are quickly imagining these stories. These two stories we’re always flowing between are river stories, stories of possibility and growth, or rut stories, stories of impossibility and blame. The rut stories put us in a place of limitation and mistrust with one another. The other puts us in a place of possibility and growth with each other. So knowing your own personal narrative when they’re happening, being aware of them and being able to change them, is a really critical skill in building trust.