What or who do you trust in? What does the word ‘trust’ even mean to you? Typically people speak about things like consistency, reliability, competence, depth of relationship with something or someone and certainly any academic review of trust highlights all of these things.
Reflecting on our trust in life itself may find us deeply challenged in these times – in fact we could be forgiven for saying that the only thing that is consistent or reliable is unpredictability, uncertainty and not knowing. Finding those aspects of life and relationships that we can place our trust in may be proving harder than ever.
Trust is so powerful in enabling us to move with grace and confidence and bring forward the full expression of our capabilities. Trust enables us to share our gifts, resources and talents freely and without feeling the need to protect ourselves. Trust creates an environment of abundance and hope where scepticism and protectionism narrows, constrains and limits.
Opening ourselves to being trusting on a deeper level may be what is called for. Our human, often very short-term perspective tends to see things through a very narrow lens. We see what is happening to us and to others in the immediate sense but may not always see the deeper patterns and rhythms or the emerging shoots of hope and new aspects of life. Depending on our relationship with change and uncertainty, fear and anxiety may keep us gripped in such a way that we only see problems and challenges and our baseline of trust may become eroded.
By exploring our cornerstones more deeply we may find that there are many more reasons to engage from a place of trust. Cornerstones such as resilience and coping mechanisms, qualities and capabilities, belief structures and perspectives. We must ask ourselves which of these are serving us now, which need refreshing, and which need to be accessed more fully.
Trusting ourselves and others is empowering. Trusting in life is generative. Finding the highest point of trust we can may reveal a new level of ‘knowing’ – an expanded sense from which to make sense of the curved balls and challenges of life. Maybe we’ll discover there is more beauty, more reasons to be hopeful and more joy to be found. Maybe we’ll have more impact as people, as leaders, as co-workers and more as we exude our own well-placed confidence and positivity.