3 Ways To Rebuild Trust
Every year I go on a 5 day wilderness adventure to the Boundary Waters. It’s a canoe only trip and it involves canoeing huge lakes but also some rivers along the way. Last year, as our group portaged from a lake into a narrow river, we noticed that something wasn’t right. The water wasn’t right. The color wasn’t right. And the longer we sat there, the smell wasn’t right. So we did as you would expect - we went upstream. What we found upstream explained everything we had been experiencing downstream.
Upstream, we found a massive dead moose.
It was rotting in the water. We were overwhelmed by the size of the carcass, but also the smell. What we did next is something I’ve been reflecting on. Want to take a guess? We did nothing. We didn’t address the issue. We didn’t try to pull it out of the water. We glanced at it and said what many of you say about the issues upstream in your life - “It is what it is”.
The difficulties in our lives, in our friendships, in our marriages, in our families... those difficulties... those points of pain that we experience downstream are all connected to a problem upstream. Downstream issues do not change when we do nothing upstream.
Trust is something that once broken upstream, it affects everything downstream. If you’ve broken, fractured or bruised trust with those in your life and you’re wondering how you can get it back, there is hope. It has to be earned. Quite simply, it takes 3 steps that get repeated over and over.
3 WAYS TO GAIN TRUST
1. Do it
Every time you demonstrate trustworthiness, you are doing one of three things. You are either:
repairing trust
building trust
protecting trust
Here are some examples:
If you said you’d be home by 5, BE home by 5.
If you said you’d stop, stop.
If you said you’d start, start.
Stop telling people in your life that you’ll try. DO IT.
2. Own it
No one is perfect. That’s unrealistic. There will be times when you fail to do what you said you would do, or when you flat out drop the ball on something. When that happens, OWN IT. That doesn’t mean make excuses, add a “but”, or shift any blame. JUST own it. Period. No comma, just period.
3. Wait for it
Healing broken trust does not happen overnight, even though we want it to. It takes patience and consistency. Trust is lost in a matter of seconds, but built in a matter of months and years.
Three simple steps - that are not simple, but worth it!