Trust is Out There — We Just Need to Know How to Rebuild It

When trust is low, everything can be affected. We need trust in Government, Society, Institutions, Workplaces, and human interactions to feel safe and stay healthy. If trust is absent or low, there is less wellness and increased threat to us as individuals. As a result, we may end up trusting only ourselves, which can become a very lonely and unhealthy path away from wellness, enjoyment of work, and strong relationships.

Trust has been a foundation of individual and collective growth and safety for all of human history. When Trust is strong, humanity enjoys survival, collaboration, resource sharing, community safety, and sharing together in child raising. When trust is low, all the elements of a healthy workplace and world are going to suffer.

Low trust is a natural outcome of stressful times and ongoing crisis. Low trust drives us away from each other and pushes us into an insular version of self — a solitary version where our brain's primary goal is to avoid the threat of a low trust experience. As this happens, we enter into a subtle but impactful mode of SURVIVAL. And this happens without us even noticing it until we ask aloud: "Where has all the trust gone?"

Trust is seldom intentionally restored. Most of us simply let it take its own course. But today is the time to act. When we realize that the past handful of years has done a great job at dismantling trust, we can start to understand where trust has shrivelled and then intentionally un-shrivel it. Strength-based trust building always starts with identifying where trust has drifted, dissolved, or disappeared almost entirely. Trust is rarely rebuilt without intention and is always built on an individual process of micro-trust moments leading to a macro-trust journey.

The answer to rebuilding trust may come as a surprise: if you want to feel like you can trust your neighbor again, or the healthcare system again, or your employer again — we may have to start with rebuilding our own ability to trust again. The neurons that fire for trust have literally pruned away. In one keynote session, we asked groups to complete the sentence: "I trust my boss to ________!" One honest individual said: "I trust my boss to wear pants to work!" This was a collective realization that even when trust is low, there is always a smidgen more than zero. Finding that spec of trust is how we begin to dig for pockets of trust.

Trust will ebb and flow through life — it is never at zero percent nor is it ever at one hundred percent. The Spectrum of Trust is our reality, and accepting that a fluid spectrum of trust is what every person has is the beginning of rebuilding it. The next step of the Strength-Based Trust Building process has us intentionally digging for micro-trust elements to place on the Spectrum of Trust. This is how we break the cycle of neuron pruning to begin to trust again — even if it starts with something miniscule like trusting someone to wear pants to work.