Here is how I answered his question:

Distrust has a powerful effect on our bodies and emotions. In fact, it triggers the same bodily responses as fear. When you distrust someone you are “afraid” that person could – and likely will – cause you some form of harm.

When you encounter someone you distrust, or sometimes just think about them, a cascade of physiological events take place in your body: your heart rate increases, blood flow to your brain is restricted in favor of getting more to your arms and legs, and you experience other symptoms of your body’s preparation for “fight or flight”.

Along the way certain parts of your brain that perform higher order thinking shut down. If you’re truly in danger you need to act immediately. Your “thinking brain” takes too much energy and time to process information, analyze a situation, reach a decision, and initiate action. So the moment your brain identifies possible danger it begins to turn over control to what is sometimes called your “reptilian brain” which uses an automatic response system designed to keep you safe. Instead of using higher order thinking and problem solving you start using simple, “preprogrammed” responses that require less time and energy.

Each of us has our own repertoire of preprogrammed responses. They are our unique way of dealing with real and perceived threats in our environment. Some people withdraw, avoid and retreat when they don’t trust someone. Others may take a more aggressive approach. The responses we adopt for ourselves are the ones that worked to protect us from physical, emotional or mental harm when we were young.

From a strictly biological perspective it makes complete sense to use a simple programmed response; it saves time and conserves energy when our brain believes we are under attack. But as an adult, avoiding or attacking someone you don’t trust is not always the best thing to do. It would often be better to use your thinking brain to figure out a more appropriate strategy for the situation, such as engaging the person in a conversation to restore trust. Or maybe you need to calmly stand for what you believe is right without retreat or attack.

The good news is you aren’t stuck with your automatic responses. You can learn to intervene, stop the process of moving toward fight/flight and return control to your “thinking brain”. The first step is simply being aware of your habitual response patterns. When you can step back and see them for what they are – automatic, habitual responses – and not the “the only possible actions I could take”, you are already on the road to having more choices. You can also help yourself by planning different possible responses before you encounter someone you distrust. Your reptilian brain will be more willing to cede control back to your thinking brain if trusts you can handle the situation.

Oh, and one more thing. If your brain is running an automatic defense pattern, the other person – the one you distrust – is very likely doing the same thing. It’s almost always a given that distrust is very contagious. But if you are able to reengage your thinking brain you may be able to help the other person start thinking again, too, which will certainly lead to a better outcome for both of you.

I carefully – and gratefully – gave credit to those whose ideas I drew from as I wrote. In my acknowledgements at the beginning of the book it states, “There are no new ideas in this book. All I can claim are their unique arrangement and expression.” I had the privilege of drawing from a wealth of brilliant thinking on the subject of building, maintaining and restoring trust.

Some of what I wrote may, indeed, be very similar to what the caller says when he teaches trust building. I know there are many people out there teaching, writing and speaking on this subject who arrange and express ideas in very similar ways to what I did in my book. They often use my book in their work and have let me know. I’m grateful to them for spreading the teaching to many more people than I ever could on my own. It certainly isn’t “my teaching” but a fundamental human teaching that we all need to hear, repeatedly, until we know and practice it as part of who we are.

My mother used to say there is nothing new under the sun…

My mother used to say there is nothing new under the sun, just different ways of putting it. It’s the unique ways of expressing the same ideas that is important, given the diverse world in which we find ourselves. Each of us perceives the world differently, but we are all looking for the same basic things: safety, connection, autonomy, dignity, love, freedom to express who and what we are. If we are really to find what we seek in this world there are things we need to learn: to care, to set appropriate boundaries, to speak what needs to be said, and to listen well and, of course, to build trusting relationships.

This is so for those who would be leaders and those who follow, as it is for friends, lovers, partners, families. For citizens.

I do hope I didn’t inadvertently take the caller’s words and claim them as my own rather than giving him due credit. If I did, I apologize and will accept whatever the consequences are. And, it would be my hope that many people benefit from encountering those words over again from different sources, amid the otherwise different ways we each might be talking about this very important subject of building trust.

There is nothing new under the sun – except each of us. We each have to learn basic life skills like trust building anew for ourselves.

For my money this last group got it right: being trustworthy takes both strength of character and attention to behavior. It has to start with an unwavering commitment to being worthy of others’ trust. It’s a fundamental moral decision emerging from our character. People who don’t start from an intention to be trustworthy can still act the part well enough to fool some people some of the time, until their true character eventually reveals itself.

But from a practical standpoint building and maintaining trust requires more than the right intention. It’s what we say and do that people see and judge. Having good intentions gets us no points if people don’t trust our actions. In fact, people infer our intentions from our behavior, not the other way around. Even with a firm intention to be trustworthy we still have to pay attention to what we say and do.

This is how trust usually gets damaged at work. People assume all they need is the intention to be trustworthy and their behavior will take care of itself. It doesn’t. Workplaces are minefields of limited time, competing commitments, opposing demands, and everyday miscommunication. The result is that trust can get bruised, battered, or even completely destroyed in spite of those good intentions. To make matters worse, people often don’t even realize they’ve lost their coworker’s, boss’s, or subordinate’s trust until it’s too late.

So how do we know what behaviors to pay attention to? What builds trust and which actions can damage it? Unfortunately, there’s no handy master checklist, no app to tell us we’re about to blow it. There are some obvious trust builders, of course, such as telling the truth and keeping promises. But even if we are close to perfect in those areas it’s often the many small actions that add up in peoples’ minds, leading them to trust us a lot, a little, or not at all.

The only way to be sure you are a trusted coworker, boss, employee, advisor, or leader is to talk with people you work with about what trust means to them, and tell them what it means to you. Share what those behaviors are, big and small, that build trust, maintain it, or damage it. Then pay attention to what you’re saying and doing.

Having the character to be trustworthy is critical, but don’t stop there.

“You are not responsible for the mood you find yourself in, but you are responsible for staying in it.”
~ Julio Olalla, master coach

Why does this matter in the workplace? Aren’t we supposed to set our emotions aside use reason and logic at work? The truth is we can’t set emotions aside. They are with us no matter what we think. It’s a good thing, too. Research has shown that without emotional input we humans are incapable of making decisions. Our trouble comes not from our moods and emotions themselves, but from our lack of awareness about them and how they affect us.

Not only are moods and emotions are always with us, they have an enormous impact on what we think and how we act. Most people view emotions through the lens of psychology where they are seen as either benign and of no consequence, or pathological, in which case you are in need of therapy. From that perspective the desire that people check their emotions at the door is understandable.

So let me propose a different understanding of emotions, one that is more consistent with brain science research: emotions predispose us to certain thoughts and actions, and not to others. You can test this out for yourself. Think about what happens when you feel angry. What thoughts easily come to mind? What do you automatically tend to do? Now remember the last time you felt grateful. Do the same kinds of thoughts you have when you’re angry come to mind when you feel grateful? Do you tend to act the same way as when you’re angry? No. We think and act differently in different emotional states.

Emotions come and go quickly, usually in response to specific events like your boss saying good morning and giving you a big smile, or someone zipping in front of you and into the only parking space close to the store on a rainy day. Moods, on the other hand, are emotional states that stay with us over a longer time. But like emotions, moods predispose us certain thoughts and actions.

Imagine for a moment that someone who comes to work in a mood of resignation. His (or her) thoughts are you going to go something like “This isn’t going to work. It’s not going to get any better. They’ll just keep messing things up. I don’t have any impact.” Etc. If those are some of the thoughts he is predisposed to in resignation, what is he likely to do?

Now imagine the same person coming to work in a mood of ambition. He might be thinking “I’m going to get this to work. Things keep getting better and better. I’ll change what I can. I can make a difference.” And what is this person likely to do in a mood of ambition?

Take a moment and consider what mood you are in right now. What does it predispose you to think about? What are you likely to do in that mood? Is it the right mood for what you’ve got ahead of you?

Talking with someone you about trust is rarely easy. People have told me in all seriousness they would rather quit and try to find a new job than have to confront a distrusted co-worker.

But my experience after years of working with people around issues of trust and distrust is that talking about it usually does make a difference if you go about it the right way. Before saying anything to the other person, start by having a conversation with yourself.

Here are six things to consider before you actually talk to the other person.

1. Decide if you are willing to talk to the person about it by asking yourself the following questions:
   What might I lose by having the conversation?
   What will I lose by continuing to distrust this person?
   How will it benefit me, my team and my company to work this out so I can trust this person?
   
2. Identify what kind of trust the person has breached or betrayed.
   Typically we think about trust as just one thing. We don’t tend to distinguish between saying one thing but doing another (sincerity) and breaking a specific promise (reliability), for example. We just think “I can’t trust him”. But if you are going to have a successful conversation with someone about your lack of trust in them, distinguishing the specific kind of trust that’s been broken will help immensely. (Click here definitions of different distinctions of trust.)
   
3. Define the ‘standard’ you are using. The point of this step is to recognize that the other person may hold different standards than you regarding the situation. If this is so, then you can focus your conversation to arrive at a shared understanding.
   
4. Identify the specific actions or behaviors that have led to your assessment of distrust. This is a critical step. Telling the person specifically what they do and/or say (or don’t do/say) that you interpret as untrustworthy can help them understand how to rebuild trust with you.
   
5. Determine what you need from them in order for them to regain your trust. What can they do that will address your concerns and reassure you that you can begin or resume trusting them? Think it through from the other person’s perspective. Is this something they have the capacity to do? Can they do it in the context of their work environment? How can you help them regain your trust?
   

At this point you are either ready to have a conversation with the other person, or you have decided you are not going to try to repair the relationship. If you do want to try talking about it, there is one final step.

1. Ask the other person if he/she would be willing to have a conversation with you about something that concerns you. Agree on a time and place that are mutually convenient and private. Avoid blindsiding them by bringing this up as part of a conversation about something else. You want the other person to be calm, thoughtful, and open to listening to your concern, and not defensive.

In a future post I’ll talk about how to start a conversation of this kind in a way that sets you up for the greatest likelihood of success.

Distrust has powerful effect on our bodies and emotions. In fact, it triggers the same bodily responses as fear. When you distrust someone you are “afraid” that person could – and likely will – cause you some form of harm.

When you encounter someone you distrust, or sometimes just think about them, your heart rate goes up, blood flow to your brain is restricted in favor of getting more to your arms and legs, and you experience other symptoms of your body’s preparation for “fight or flight”.

In this process certain parts of your brain that do higher order thinking get shut down. If you’re truly in danger you need to act immediately. Your “thinking brain” takes too much energy and time to process information, analyze a situation, reach a decision, and initiate action. So the moment your brain identifies possible danger it begins to switch over control to an automatic response system designed to keep you safe. The part that begins to assume control is sometimes called the “reptilian brain”. It redirects your energy to be available for fight/flight if necessary. Instead of applying higher order thinking and problem solving to the situation you start using “preprogrammed” responses that take far less time and energy.

These preprogrammed response patterns are developed early in our lives. By the time we reach our teens they are completely habitual and automatic. After the fact you may tell yourself, “I chose to avoid that person.” But your “choice” of action is really not a choice. It is a ready made program your reptilian brain pulls off the shelf and runs without your thinking brain even thinking about it.

You say you withdraw, avoid and retreat when you don’t trust someone. Each of us has our own repertoire of preprogrammed responses. They are our unique way of dealing with real and perceived threats in our environment. The responses we adopt for ourselves are the ones that work to protect us from physical, emotional and mental harms when we are young. And from a strictly biological perspective continuing to use them makes complete sense; it saves time and conserves energy when our reptilian brain believes we are under attack.

But as an adult, avoiding or withdrawing from someone you don’t trust is not always the most effective thing to do. It would often work out better to use your thinking brain to design a more appropriate strategy for the situation. For example, it might be useful to engage the person in a conversation to restore trust. Or maybe you need to stand up for what you believe is right without retreating.

The good news is you aren’t stuck with your automatic responses. You can learn to intervene, stop the process of moving toward fight/flight and return control to your “thinking brain”. The first step is simply being aware of your habitual response patterns. When you can step back and see them for what they are – automatic, habitual responses – and not the “the only possible actions I could take”, you are already on the road to having more choices. You can also help yourself by planning other possible responses before you encounter someone you distrust. Your reptilian brain will be more willing to cede control back to your thinking brain if trusts you can handle the situation.

“But, the problem is,” she added, “I still have to work with the man. I can’t just avoid him day after day.”

I asked if she thought it would be possible to have a conversation with him about repairing trust. Her response was, “How do you even talk to someone like that?”

Judging by the tone of her voice this was a rhetorical question. I treated it like a real question anyway and suggested she probably didn’t want to start by telling him he has a nasty character flaw he needs to fix. She conceded that would not go over well.

I asked Anne what she thought might happen if she had a conversation and kept it focused completely on his behavior. “How might it go if you started out talking only about facts, the specific things he has done that have damaged your trust in him?”

Anne was skeptical, but she also understood the cost of continuing to distrust her fellow VP. It was causing big problems for her, the people in her group (and his), and even the entire company to some degree. Doing nothing was no longer an option. She decided to try talking with him. This meant talking about just the VP’s behavior without including her assessment of the behavior, at least at the beginning of the conversation.

This isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Our minds glue an assessment (aka interpretation, opinion, belief, judgment) onto our every experience almost the instant it happens. When we observe someone’s behavior we can’t help but assess it. Pulling our experiences apart from those assessments takes awareness, and some practice. And the difficulty of doing it increases considerably when we perceive the person as a threat, which is definitely the case when distrust is involved.

But mastering the ability to separate someone’s actual behavior from your assessments of it is key to being able to talk to someone about a trust issue. It doesn’t guarantee a beneficial outcome, but it will significantly increase your chances. Otherwise what the other person will hear right away is some version of “You have a nasty character flaw you need to fix before I will trust you.” And you can imagine where the conversation will go from there.

Ever hear something like that? In a previous post I talked about how we can repair trust with someone when we’ve done something to break it. It requires acknowledging and apologizing. But we humans frequently fail to get to that point. Instead we try to justify our behavior, often by making the other person wrong. And our justifying precludes any possibility of repairing the trust.

Don’t believe me? Read Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The authors tell it the way it is, with plenty of evidence to back them up. We are prone to justifying our thoughts and actions rather than questioning them, And we stick to our justifications even in the face of clear evidence what we did was hurtful, foolish, or just plain wrong.

The culprit here is cognitive dissonance. It’s a term psychologists use to describe the unpleasant sensation we get when we’re confronted with two beliefs or opinions that are inconsistent with each other. The theory was originally developed by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. It says that human beings are driven to make sense, order and meaning in our lives, and that information which challenges the way we’ve made that meaning produces physical discomfort. When this happens we are driven to resolve the dissonance tout suite.

Over 3,000 experiments have looked at different aspects of the theory. Most recently neuroscientists have identified the areas of the brain involved in cognitive dissonance, demonstrating the mechanism is hard wired. But – and here is the important part – we don’t have to give in to our immediate desire to justify. It is wired in, but so is the capacity to stop ourselves. We can take an honest look at the validity of contradictory information. We can even modify our beliefs. But we have to be willing to bear a little dissonance.

You want to be seen as a completely trustworthy person, and you believe you are. Yet here is someone telling you she doesn’t trust you, which blows your story. Yikes! Your first reaction is to stick to you’re your story and ignore this evidence that seems to contradict it. If you can’t make it go away by ignoring it, maybe you can discount it, call it a misunderstanding. Another strategy: make her wrong – “she’s over reacting” or “she’s being defensive”. Ahhh, that nasty, uncomfortable feeling’s gone now. Everything’s ok.

Except it isn’t, because she still doesn’t trust you. In fact, her distrust has grown since, as she sees it, you ignored her concern and made her wrong. As for you, you’ve not got a story that she overreacts and is defensive and you’ll be on the lookout for evidence to support it. Where does this leave you two? At war, to put it bluntly.

A better approach is to listen to her story with an open mind and honestly look at the situation from her perspective. From her perspective, remember, not your idea of what her perspective should be. Then, if appropriate, you can acknowledge your actions and apologize for any damage this has caused her. This, guaranteed, will leave you in a better place than justification and blame.

Wrong. The truth is sometimes, in spite of your best intentions to be trustworthy, you are going to end up damaging someone’s trust in you. Even when you practice trustworthy behavior as consistently as you can you will still end up making mistakes now and then. We all have our blind spots. You may know how to be trustworthy in one area, such as keeping commitments, but are completely unaware of how your behavior damages trust in other ways.

To make matters worse, you often don’t even know it until you notice others are behaving differently around you. Maybe they’re avoiding you, or their manner is curt when they talk to you. Eventually, if you’re lucky, someone tells you, either the person whose trust you’ve damaged, or someone else who cares enough to say something. Or you figure it out yourself.

It doesn’t matter how you realize it. What matters is what you do next. The only good antidote for betrayal of someone’s trust is to acknowledge it and apologize for it.

To acknowledge a betrayal means recognizing something you did damaged something the other person considers important. Even if you didn’t intend it, whatever you did hurt them in some way, and they want to know you realize and take it seriously.

“Richard, I realize when I sent out that email about the project you worked very hard on and didn’t mention your contribution it looked to you like I don’t value what you do. I can see it also diminished your credibility with other people outside our department, particularly the field sales organization.”

To apologize is to take responsibility for what you’ve done, ask forgiveness, and declare your intention to redeem yourself. This makes it possible to have a conversation about how you can reestablish trust. Redeeming yourself in the eyes of someone you have betrayed usually means making a commitment to not repeat the action that led to betrayal. It may also entail helping fix whatever problem your actions created.

“I apologize for not acknowledging your contribution in my email. I do value the work you do, and I believe others should know about it. I won’t do it again. And I will send out another email today to the same people to tell them that you were a major contributor to the project’s success. Is there anything else I can do to help repair your trust in me?”

Acknowledging and apologizing almost always opens the door to repairing trust. It seems like a simple thing to do, too, right? So why don’t people do it very often? The answer is self justification, which will be the topic of my next post.