Whether you’re in sales, service or not, as we approach the end of 2023, I urge you to please take a moment to think about the impact of trust in your life, and the impact it has on your success, on striving to be the best you can be, and on helping you live a meaningful, flourishing and prosperous life.
I’ve been thinking deeply about what I see as a threat to trust in our professional and personal lives.
It’s not about trust … it’s about trustworthiness!
To be clear here, when I refer to a threat to trust, I’m actually referring to the undermining of trustworthiness based on the pursuit of success at any cost.
Sure, there is the dark side of AI that will continue to erode our capacity to confidently know what is real or unreal, truth or lie, unintentional mistake or intentional deception.
While this is impacting our confidence in who or what we can trust, the bigger emerging issue is the threat to our individual and collective trustworthiness.
Are you pursuing success based on others’ expectations?
So many of us are pursuing success, based on other people’s expectations and definitions of what success is or ought to be.
There is an ever increasing social, business, and political pressure to pursue success at whatever cost, to keep up with the Joneses, to have more, to spend more, to do more, for no other reason than it’s what’s expected or demanded of us by others.
It is this misaligned pursuit of success that is distracting us from what really matters most in our lives – our relationships … both professional and personal.
Stop looking for others to fix the trust problem.
I also fear and observe the danger that we look to our leaders or to some ‘group’ to take the responsibility and accountability for trust.
You see, if we expect that this decline in trust across the globe is the responsibility of business leaders, government, media, academia or any other group, we are making s mistake.
The responsibility and accountability for elevating trust, our self-trust, our propensity to trust in others, and our capacity to earn others’ trust (our trustworthiness), is not up to others … it’s up to each of us.
The idea of it’s up to them (whoever they might be), is devaluing the importance of our individual, moral, and human responsibility to intentionally and mindfully choose actions that elevate trust in our lives.
Intentionality Matters.
In my latest book LIVING in the Light of Day – How to avoid the ‘Success Trap’, strive to be at your best, and live a more meaningful, flourishing, and prosperous life, (now also available from Audible.com) I share amongst a range of trust-related topics, this most important lesson I’ve learned about trust.
I have learned both academically and experientially that our intentionality matters.
When we mindfully and intentionally choose to make decisions and take actions that will positively impact the lives of others in our professional and personal lives, we fast-track trust.
Why?
Because over time, our intentions, promises, actions and results will either promote us as trustworthy, or expose us as not.
So, as we approach the end of year, again, I urge you to think deeply about your intentions, your promises, and your actions. Reflect on your results across your personal and professional life and ask yourself, how is my sense of self-trust, trust in others, and trustworthiness impacting my capacity to strive to being at my best, and opportunities to live a more meaningful, flourishing and prosperous life?
