At the end of my holiday, I stayed with old family friends who have known me since I was born. I love staying with them, it's relaxing and safe and I trust them entirely.

In my reading from last week - The Year of Living Danishly. Helen Russell listed Trust as the number one reason when she summed up the factors contributing to happiness.

Trying to understand this further, she discovered the belief that "life is so much easier when you can trust people" leading to her delving further - "if I feel safe and trust the people around me, I'm less likely to feel stressed or anxious and then have the headspace to be happy"

There was also an element relating to the size of the country- Denmark is a small country. People know each other and have connections (something I will be coming back to very soon again soon).

Trust is an interesting topic. It is the first of the 5 dysfunctions listed by Patrick Lencioni in his book "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team". How can you work as a team together if you don't and can't trust each other? If you don't feel safe to open up the team and the work will suffer. How to build that trust - Lencioni lists a few practical suggestions, starting with getting to know each other.

Watch a short video here where the concepts of trust as described in the book are shared.

For a different slant on trust check out the TED talk of the week from Onara O'Neil, She switches some of the common statements about trust and unpicks them further. The link is the vulnerability - making yourself vulnerable to the other person is good evidence that you are trust worthy. All we can work on is how we display trustworthiness. Trust itself is bestowed upon us.

Finally to Brene Brown. She describes 7 elements of trust. Her Courage Works school offered a short free online course - Anatomy of Trust. This has several exercises that can relate to home, yourself or to work. You can access one of the main videos that is used in this course via the SuperSoul Sessions here.

In this video she opens us up to the small things that build trust. To understand what trust is, Brene uses a acronym - BRAVING.  This picks apart the elements of trust so we can have more meaningful conversations about, why we feel there may be a problem with trust. It can help us understand fixable things rather than just saying "I don't trust them".  She ends by factoring in self trust and how need to build this in ourselves first before anything else.

Trust is one of the topics I keep coming back to - check out a new post on Trust here

If you want to explore how you build trust in your team book a call with me today and let’s talk.