A different approach - creating an environment of trust
I am advocating for an easier approach to building trust within yourself and with others.
Forcing vs. Creating A Field of Trust
Forcing trust is when you try to create incentives and policies for people to build trust with you. There is nothing wrong with this approach except it is not sustainable (how long can you dangle incentives and rewards?) and tends to disempower and disenchant people (you can discover this by interviewing people in companies that only use HR policies to build trust.)
Forcing trust can seem like a quick shortcut, but in the long term fails to deliver consistently.
A field of trust is an environment where your confidence and the confidence of your team grow together. This confidence is not arrogance, but a genuine fulfilled desire to work together and make a positive difference.
How do we forge this Field of Trust?
1. Start with Your Inner State
Build your own inner strength and confidence by starting to reflect on your strengths and weaknesses with more depth and intention. This will require a refreshing honesty where you are willing to tell the truth about where you lie or misrepresent yourself. This is where your real balls/ovaries and guts start showing. Some people may be confronted (this is good) and others are impressed (this is also good.)
2. Start handling the Inner Critic
While you deal with areas where you may not be authentic or genuine, you handle the inner critic which is a part of your psyche which tries to keep you safe but disabled in entertaining opportunities. This requires real compassion for yourself. As you work to be compassionate with yourself, you become more compassionate with others. This is again a more honest compassion - not some icing on a mud pie.
3. Trust Yourself and Others Will Feel Comfortable Around You
As you build yourself internally, there will be less if not no need for the following:
- False Modesty: pretending to be humble.
- Humble Bragging: pretending to be humble while actually bragging.
- Outright Arrogance: no real interest in the welfare of others.
- The Right / Wrong Context: A world where you are either right or wrong with no nuance, poetry or art that uplifts and gives a bigger and better perspective of situations.
- Domination / Avoid Domination / Victim: A world where you either dominate others or avoid being dominated. Both are two sides of the same hand.
- Image Management: Avoiding Embarrassment / Enhancing Your Image: A world where you are focused only on your own image.
- Worrying about Politics: Assigning resources to position yourself and your interests while battling others along these lines.
- Powerless Complaining: where you and others gather around the proverbial drinking fountain to commiserate on what is wrong.
4. Your Self Expression & Leadership Naturally Follows Your Inner Comfortableness
I remember as I built myself up internally, I was being courted for leadership positions. This appears to be a mysterious process, but it really is not. Your ease and comfort with yourself as you build yourself up inside out, begins to attract others because this ease and comfort is so rare. Your peaceful and settled inner state puts others at ease.
5. The Willingness to Fail and to Succeed
As you build yourself up internally, you will have more confidence to both fail and to succeed. You need to have freedom within yourself to both fail and to succeed - to inspire others to follow you. People know that they could fail at the game with you. But they want to participate because of the positive side effects that arise by working with you.
You don't have to demand respect from others (force.) You need to command it by creating this level of refreshing honesty. This is real authority that is stimulating, inspiring and downright sexy.
6. Expanding the Game
- A bigger vision, a better design, better messaging and better execution
These factors (vision, design, messaging and execution) are the critical parts of your leadership. Creating a vision is an art and a science that comes from experience. You must develop the capacity to co-design how the vision can be implemented in reality - in order to build out more leadership. But if you cannot message why your vision is important, all of this will fail. Once you message and get people on board, your ability to duck the rocks thrown at you, coupled with your ability to dance with inevitable bumps in the road, will determine your success as well.
All these factors arise better with the right training and with your dedication to building your inner state as well.
- Teaching others and passing your wisdom on to others
As you build yourself well from the inside out, the stronger will be in the internal will inside of you to find successors and other people to assume the mantle from you.
- Your exit and onto another game
The more you build yourself up internally, the more comfortable you will be with the idea of exiting your game and going onto another.
This keeps life refreshing for you.
Are you ready to start building yourself up from the inside out?
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
