A friendly face.
It’s a lifeline.
When we’re faced with novelty, a friendly face can make all the difference.
Friendly is familiar. And familiarity can cut through the jitters of uncertainty.
So, we seek out a friendly face at any opportunity. We seek to build a stable of people we can trust.
We believe that we’re setting ourselves up for success by doing this. But we could be booking a one-way ticket to trouble instead.
I’ve often been described as trustworthy.
Many times, I get this feedback directly. Sometimes I see it through the actions of others.
I take this accolade as an honor and a responsibility.
While it’s great to have others believe in me, I know I can’t rest on my laurels. I must work continually to validate that trust.
For trust is not a rubber stamp. It’s a contract.
If I fail to deliver on my end of that contract, it evaporates. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates. And I end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.
And if I abuse the contract entirely — blatantly violating its terms for my own gain — it ignites. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates when the truth comes to light. And they end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.
Yes, what builds us up can also tear us down.
And so, I am deliberate when it comes to trust. I strive to model trustworthy behavior, but I don’t overtly seek out the trust of others.
I simply put myself in a position to earn that label. And once I receive it from someone, I work extra hard to maintain it.
The stakes are too high to act otherwise.
Confidence artists.
We have a complicated relationship with them.
We love it when our favorite characters on the silver screen are putting on a ruse. But we loathe seeing such sequences play out in real life.
The gap between these two examples might seem stark. But they’re closer together than we might want to admit.
Whether it’s James Bond or Bernie Madoff, confidence artists draw from the same well — our sense of trustworthiness, and our unwillingness to question it.
And while it’s easy to trivialize those victimized by confidence schemes — labeling them as the naïve, the uber-rich, or the movie villains who had it coming — such dissonance misses the point.
All too often, we play fast and loose with the concept of trustworthiness. We hand over the keys to the Rolls Royce that is our life. And we just expect the valet in its charge not to go joyriding with it.
We hope that everyone’s better angels will shine through. But what if they don’t?
We have no contingency plan for the devil in our midst. We head out into the chaos of the world without an inch of armor. And the results are predictably tragic.
Perhaps it’s time to change the calculus.
My parents are both educators.
Ever since I was a child, they’ve been entrusted with the well-being of schoolchildren. During the busiest part of the day, they share a classroom – with no parents in sight.
This alone isn’t noteworthy. Or it shouldn’t be.
After all, the school system has been set up this way in America for two centuries. We entrust educators with our kids, no questions asked.
But recently, things have changed.
Revelations of physical abuse in the classroom by teachers have shattered any sense of trust. Schools have had to face tough questions about how they operate.
This has impacted my parents. They’re consummate professionals who have proven worthy of the trust bestowed upon them. But they now face a bevy of regulations and restrictions that impact how they teach.
There’s no question that these changes were needed. The old method of blind trust allowed predators to lie in plain sight, and plenty of lives were ruined in the balance.
Still, the current climate in classrooms isn’t exactly sustainable either. Education can’t happen in a trust vacuum, with all its mechanisms eroded away.
The solution lies somewhere in the middle, in the gray area between carte blanche and a surveillance state.
And it’s there, in the fog and the mist, where the path forward is so difficult to navigate.
Trust but verify.
Back when I worked in television news, I internalized these three words.
Speed was the name of the game. Getting the scoop, being the first to report — that meant everything.
But accuracy was the name of the game too. Putting the wrong information out there could get you in a boatload of trouble.
Choosing between these two edicts wasn’t an option. So, I went with the trust but verify approach.
Essentially, our news operation would implicitly trust the information we came across. But we’d still check with a second source to verify that intel, ensuring it was accurate.
This trust but verify approach speaks to the paradox of trust. We need it, but we can only rely on it so much.
There’s no true guidebook for this paradox. There’s no silver bullet that leverages the upside of trust without exposing us to those nasty downsides.
The best we can do is to approach the situation with eyes wide open. To lean into our vulnerability and to prepare ourselves for the worst outcomes.
We can do this by honoring the trust placed in us. Instead of taking this goodwill for granted, we can act to validate it day in and day out.
And when it comes to the trust we place in others, we can take our time. Instead of diving right in, we can verify that our faith is indeed justified.
On their own, these actions won’t mean much. Trust can still be broken. People can still get burned.
But as more and more of us follow these principles, those risks will diminish. We will bolster our faith in each other while working together to deliver the goods.
That’s a future we can all get behind. But it starts with our actions today.
So, let’s get started.