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My intention with each of these posts is that you’re challenged to interrupt the noise and routine in your life, just for a moment, to think more deeply about what really matters in life… your relationship with yourself and with others in your professional and personal life.
Action Summary
- Look for ways to develop your competence
- Look for ways to develop your reliability
- Look for ways to develop your character
The WHY:
There’s a lot going on in any relationship you have that cause people to determine if you are trustworthy. Your attributes are just one of these elements.
Attributes are not skills and not knowledge. They are all the other ‘things’ about your character that you carry around within you and express to the world about how trustworthy you are through your thoughts, words, actions and results.
A few questions for you in this post to help think about the messages you’re sending to the world about your trustworthiness that I’m asking of myself as well:
- How would you describe your strength of character?
- What are your attributes that you are most proud of?
- What aspects of your character would you like to work on and develop even more?
- What aspects of your character would you like to fix or remove?
This is about taking stock of your truth about you. This is an important activity in self-leadership and is an audit on how trustworthy you are. Over time, through your thoughts, words, actions and results, your truth and trustworthiness is reflected to the world.
Aristotle described it this way; “Our actions and behaviours are our morals shown in conduct”. Everything you say, everything you do sends loud and clear messages to the people around you about who you really are… about your truth about you. Over time, your intentions, promises, actions and results will either promote you as trustworthy, or expose you as not.
One of my favourite thought leaders around Trust is Rachael Botsman 1 who suggests trustworthiness is a combination of three elements. The first is your competence. The second is your reliability. The third is an assessment of aligned values. People assess what you do, how you do it and make an assumption about why you’re doing it… they then assess whether all of this aligns with their own beliefs and values. This helps them determine whether they will be willing to take the risk to trust you, or not.
I’d like to finish the message today with what I believe is a quote from Richard Holloway who said…
“Simplicity, clarity, singleness. These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.”
My best to you for now and remember when you intentionally improve the life of others in your professional and personal relationships, you set up the power of reciprocity … what you give out, you get back.
