18 Mar How You Can Create and Sustain Trust for Beneficial Results Now
© 2025 By Ruth Schimel PhD Career and Life Management Consultant, Author
Trust is one of the best bargains available to you. Though it’s not for sale, you have the powers to build it when you’re willing to invest in the process and take smart risks.
Once you make your integrity and commitment apparent, a river of good will flows forward for mutual benefit and useful results. On the other hand, its flow can be easily dammed by oblivious behavior, purposeful disingenuousness and worse, as you’ll see later in this article.
Meanings of trust. There are several valuable layers in the seemingly obvious five-letter word. The noun “trust” derives from Scandinavian words related to protection, firmness and consolation. The Gothic trausti meant covenant. In today’s world, trust is the foundation for commitment in a range of relationships, including personal, professional, community, spiritual and civic.
“Trust” as a verb opens possibilities — the opportunity to hope, to make a leap of faith about a person, group, institution or situation. It also relates to local, national and international situations. According to the dictionary, to trust means to:
- rely, depend
- be confident, hope
- believe
- place in the care of another
- grant discretion or confidentiality
Trust put into action not only contributes to healthy work and love, but also offsets fear. As poet Marge Piercy says,
“The waters of trust run as deep as the river of fear
through the dark caverns in the bone.”
Appreciating the process. As with any investment of long-term value, building trust involves patient work, smart risk and good judgment. Many of the choices — how, where, when and with whom you develop it — remain in your hands. However significant the outcomes, the process itself involves small, sometimes nonlinear, steps that accrue over time. Since your actions often have consequences, why not enhance both by integrating awareness of trust building into most situations that have meaning to you? (How to make your life feel more meaningful: https://bit.ly/3EU8fLd)
You’ll also benefit from at least these two personal developmental processes for creating and sustaining trust:
- understanding who you are now and who you want to be (which may not be entirely clear early on or at certain junctures of your life)
- choosing how you will relate to people and situations that are important to you
In themselves, both processes provide opportunities for cultivating your authentic self, an important foundation for acting in trustworthy ways. Neither emerges from the quick fix of a particular act, nor do they exist in a vacuum. For example, you’ve probably experienced the tension between honoring your own needs and preferences and being a member of a couple, family, work group, community and country.
To ease and benefit from your developmental processes, consider and adapt relevant aspects of the seven suggestions below. Your choices will help you be true to yourself and design who you want to be. Adjust them to your values and interests, adding your own ideas.
Creating trust starts within you because integrity and commitment emerge from:
- staying clear about what is important to you
- identifying specifically what you want to accomplish and your purposes for the foreseeable future
- being transparent about your motives to yourself and others, as appropriate
- communicating openly, including addressing important issues
- striving to be honest with yourself and others
- being consistent in important actions, including what you say as well as your non-verbal communication and tone of voice
- delivering on promises or alerting others to your inability to do so in timely ways
You probably know of other ways to create trust from the inside out. Together, do they seem too tall an order? If so, think of them as continuing processes for sustaining a good life for yourself and contributing to others’ quality of life as well. Then, they may seem more accessible and worth the effort. For now, though, just start with one manageable step related to what’s important to you.
Why trust? First, your efforts to be authentic enrich yourself. As you hear your true voice emerge through thoughts, emotions and actions, consistency and predictability join to bring you increased ease, confidence and effectiveness.
Secondly, your choices can benefit others, possibly eliciting their authenticity, comfort and hope. Yet, be alert to when you put others’ requests and needs ahead of your own. If you have that tendency, make sure it will help them become more self-sufficient rather than stimulate continuing dependence or neediness. Sometimes this can show you’ve succumbed to people pleasing which does not benefit your true interests. Since that’s also a way of avoiding conflict, you’d miss the opportunities of working through it for mutual resolutions. Ultimately, trust is a catalyst for doing that.
Since trust evolves best in healthy relationships and interaction, it tends to be a multiplier. The more you give trust, the more you tend to receive it. The greater the reservoir available to you and people you care about, the larger the ripples of benefits outward – as long as there is balance of give and take.
In addition to enhancing your own personal and professional powers and quality of life as you create and sustain trust, here are nine specific examples of benefits to you and your relationships:
- quicker, more natural flow of communication because it is relaxed and authentic
- enhanced outcomes because understanding and actions are not half-baked for fear of offending
- increased fun because you and others are spontaneous and open
- richer experiences because full selves are engaged and expressed
- less to remember about what was said to whom because of habits of truth-telling and frankness
- better use of time for cooperative activities because clear priorities focus choices and actions
- improved opportunities for pleasure and productivity from shared values and honesty
- likely chances to limit or avoid discomfort, fear, anxiety and other negative emotions because there’s a sense of safety
- unanticipated creativity from effective collaboration
Dangers of trusting. Almost anything important that involves human behaviors and connections has risk. In the public realm, for example, there are many reasons to distrust. A new head of the Red Cross recognized that “We have to add to that trust account on a daily basis.” Though the phrase “cooking the books” emerged in 1636, corporate and accounting manipulations continue today. A chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission, started in the 1930s due to insider trading, self-dealing and exploitation of investors, was disgusted with today’s similar “shenanigans.” Optimistically, he vowed to wipe them out, without likely success. The Catholic Church faces the continuing scandals of some priests’ betrayals of trust. And increasing usurpations of presidential powers suggest attention must be paid to who is benefitting and for what purposes.
In work as well as in public and private life, people lie, lead on, manipulate information, hide their true feelings behind polite facades and camouflage reality, to name typical behaviors that make trusting risky. Even seemingly benign situations can implode, especially when thinking that things will work out or blow over postpones dealing with issues that need to be addressed.
But making the leap of faith implicit in creating and sustaining trust is still a better alternative than getting stuck in the mire of distrust. The specious comfort of repeating old habits is a poor substitute for the many positive reasons for trusting listed earlier in this article. Instead, accept the reality that controlling others or your environment is unlikely. That also leaves room and energy for using your influence through what you stand for and your actions.
So, continue to be alert to how others use their greater financial capacities and powers to get their way through fear and intimidation. To offset such malevolent people and forces, collaborate, organize and develop resources for action with people you trust and respect.
Avoiding the dangers. To protect yourself from the dangers that come with naive or uncritical leaps of faith or trusting inappropriately, consider, adapt and add to the following. To avoid overwhelming yourself, choose your preferred 2-4 actions that will work well for you based on previous experience and observations as well as suggestions in the paragraph above.
- Listen to your intuition which is based on deep knowledge that may not be appreciated or conscious.
- Use your critical thinking.
- Check out proposed actions and relationships that are important with people who merit your trust and respect.
- Develop further your sense of humor to lighten the load and retain perspective.
- Lengthen your antenna for identifying insincerity, manipulation, cant, lying, exaggeration and absurdity as well as empty promises.
- Keep your expectations modest and your efforts consistent with your values.
- Pay attention to your emotions, another aspect of your intelligence.
- Avoid, as much as possible, people who are mean-spirited, slimy, ungenerous, jealous, insecure and self-absorbed. Also beware of the takers who tend to tire, drain and bore you.
- Hone your conflict-resolution skills.
- Review past mistakes in trusting in order to identify themes and situations that expose your vulnerabilities; perhaps write a personal alert list to protect yourself in the future.
Just as trust brings opportunities for creating a richer, more meaningful life, the processes for avoiding the dangers of trusting will contribute to the quality of daily existence. Though there can be ebbs and flows in your experiences with trust, varying with your confidence, expertise and circumstances, eventually improved levels will be reached with practice and self-aware choices.
Perhaps the continuum of trust below will keep you alert to a range of related attitudes and behaviors and their connections to one another. Most people experience many of them over time.
Unquestioning trust—– Willingness to trust based on data, emotion and experience ——Careful discrimination—— Trust—— Vigilance—— Collection of reservations—– Distrust—– Paranoia
At any point along this continuum, you may encounter dangers. The challenges and opportunities involve finding the appropriate behaviors for particular situations while seeking your most productive comfort zone. That could best be among careful discrimination, trust, and vigilance.
Building further on what you know. You likely have useful experience with creating and sustaining trust as well as making some mistakes, often a good source for learning. So, assess what that experience has taught you.
- In what kinds of situations do you feel at home and willing to trust?
- What kinds of people are safe and stimulating for you?
- Who and what do you want to avoid?
- What circumstances allow you to be true to yourself and bloom?
- What skills and abilities do you want to cultivate further in order to foster the opportunities that come with savvy trusting?
Use your responses to create an alert list to guide action over time. As you wish, design your choices around your answers to the foregoing questions and all other ideas you develop. Trust and verify your own intuition and common sense as you honor them with modest steps.
Your increasing confidence and delight in the results you get in work, however you define it, and relationships will confirm the value of trust building. What better foundation is there for creating and sustaining trust in yourself and with others who are worthy of your trust? What better way to move from fear to hope?
© 2025 Ruth Schimel PhD. Do not reproduce without permission of the author. Not to be used for commercial or other purposes without written permission. Contact Ruth is you want to use this article and/or comment on it: ruth@ruthschimel.com www.ruthschimel.com 202.659.1772.
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