Why 'Trust First, Ask Questions Later' is Bad Advice
I feel compelled to write this episode about trust after seeing a LinkedIn post saying that if you are emotionally intelligent you will trust first and ask questions later. I was horrified to say the least and wanted to put out better quality and sensible information relevant to real life to help people prevent the damage that that can cause, people being getting hurt and blindsided after giving their trust. It’s simply bad advice. I’ve seen the fall out of this kind of approach in my office for years and this type of misinformation given under the banner of ‘mental health’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ is really rubbish. We should be able to do better as a profession in helping people develop skills to navigate life and relationships more easily. The general reaction I get when I ask clients the salient question ‘how do you know you can trust someone?’ is generally ‘I don’t really know’ and seeing how important trust is in forming healthy relationship it’s no wonder many are struggling. When we give our trust we also make ourselves vulnerable in a relationship which is wonderful if the person is trustworthy but can wreak havoc if they are not. We can end up really hurt and confused and it can affect how we make future connections. So what is the answer to the question ‘how do I know I can trust someone?' The first fundamental is the idea of moving from rigidity to flexibility in how you apply trust. What do I mean by that? If we trust everyone then we have a rigid response, meaning no matter who presents themselves to us and no matter how they present themselves, we give trust first. There is no flexibility in this. Flexibility would be – I can trust some people, I can’t trust others and there are some people I am not sure about yet. In Dr Michael Yapko words there is a lack of ‘discrimination’. This means that we need a way to discriminate who to trust and who not to. This discrimination takes the form of a question that we need to carefully consider our answer to so we can filter people into ‘someone to trust’ or ‘someone not to trust’. I would also add that seeing as trust is a process and not an event – it’s not an on off switch - then there will also be a range of people that you don’t have enough knowledge or experience of to know which category they belong to as this can take time so they go in ‘still assessing’ category. The discrimination question would be How do you know who you can trust and who you can’t? and who do you not have enough experience of knowledge of yet to know? One answer or filter to this discrimination question is The Trust Formula the trust process requires that a person’s words and actions match up fairly consistently, over time this is a clear, maybe simplistic but effective way of assessing the people you interact with and how trustworthy they are. It speaks to that old adage ‘words are cheap’ and that it’s action that is important as it is visible, tangible and generally requires something of the person to follow through on. The ‘fairly consistently’ is there because most of us aren’t always one way (rigid) and we all make mistakes with the match up of our words and actions so it’s not about perfection but consistency. The ‘over time’ is part of the formula because trust is a process and it takes time to have enough experience and knowledge of someone, observing them in different situations to know if their words and actions match. Some additional filters to watch out for are Confidentiality: Does a person keep private information confidential? Accountability: Are they able to admit their mistakes and take steps to repair them? Respect for Boundaries: Does the person respect your boundaries? The last thing I would say about trust is that you don’t have to give your trust to someone for everything. You can trust someone with some things in your personal life like relationship advice but not trust them to give you sound financial advice for example. You would trust someone in a professional capacity but not in a personal one. You could trust someone to deliver a parcel but not to take care of your children! Again it’s about being able to be flexible with how you apply and give your trust so that you have a reasonable chance of it being well placed. If you are struggling with an issue around trust, please get in touch today.