You Don't Lose Trust All at Once

I've been thinking about trust a lot lately.

Not the motivational poster version of it. The real thing. The kind that either holds or breaks when something matters.

I've been in a lot of different rooms over the years. Locker rooms, boardrooms, school gyms, conference centers. And the thing I keep coming back to is that the variable that separates the groups that work from the ones that don't has almost nothing to do with talent or resources or strategy.

It's almost always trust.
Or the absence of it.

On the Field

When I was playing at Tulane, the holder and I had about half a second on every single play to get it right. Long snapper and holder. The timing has to be automatic.

And here's the thing nobody talks about with trust in athletic settings.

It's not built in the game.

It's built in the thousand reps before the game that nobody watches.

By the time we lined up on Saturdays, I wasn't thinking about whether he was going to catch the snap cleanly. That question had been answered. Weeks ago. In practice. In the film room. In the moments that didn't count for anything except building the answer to that question.

That's what trust is.

The accumulation of answered questions.

And the only way to answer them is to show up consistently enough that eventually nobody has to ask anymore.

At Work

I worked with a team once where the leader was brilliant. One of the sharpest people in the room.

But every time someone brought an idea to a meeting, it got picked apart. Not developed. Picked apart.

And after a few months of that, people stopped bringing ideas.

They started bringing safe things.
Polished things.
Things that could survive being picked apart.

The leader thought the team was underperforming.

What was happening was the team had stopped trusting that it was safe to think out loud.

That's a trust problem, not a talent problem.

And the fix isn't a workshop.

It's the leader changing their behavior in the small moments. Responding differently to one idea in one meeting. Following up on something they said they would.

Tiny things.
Repeated.

In the Relationships That Matter Most

I don't think trust gets broken in the big moments as often as we think it does.

It gets eroded. Slowly. In the small ones.

The call you said you'd make and didn't.
The thing you noticed was off and didn't say anything about.
The moment you took the easier version of the truth because the real version felt like too much.

None of those things feel like a big deal in the moment.

And then one day you realize you're not leaning on the person. You're just near them.

The relationships where I can show up fully, where I don't have to manage what I say or protect myself from the response, were built in a way that was almost boring.

Consistent.
Unglamorous.
The same person across a lot of different situations over a long period of time.

That's it.
That's the whole thing.

So Here Is Where I Land

Trust is the infrastructure. Everything else runs on top of it.

And you build it the same way in every context.

You do what you say.
You show up when it's inconvenient.
You're honest when it costs you something.

You repeat that until the people around you stop wondering.

No version of that is complicated.

Almost none of it is easy.

Talk soon,
Aaron