The Essence of Trust – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

How do we build that firm hope in someone or something?

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

The biggest challenges are met through trust: trust in ourselves, in others, in the belief that the future always holds something good, in how a positive outlook changes our mind, and so on. In The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey writes about the trust account and how our deposits and withdrawals make us more (or less) trustworthy. The Royal Spanish Academy defines trust as "the firm hope one has in someone or something." It’s striking how we can hold a firm hope that things can change for the better and improve dramatically. Life itself keeps offering all kinds of opportunities as proof that the best is always yet to come.

What makes us gain or lose trust? Our biggest doubts about whether something or someone can be trusted always come back to ourselves. Our greatest fears usually grow out of unfounded beliefs. Whether we trust often depends on our ability to help that trust come true. The very idea of trust should remind us that it takes work, work to turn that hope into reality. Trust depends on our willingness to give and to let go of everything we can’t achieve without trusting something or someone else.

How does trust connect with our goals or purpose? We need inspiration for everything in life, and in tough moments we need a special push. That comes from having a clear purpose and knowing what we hope to achieve when the day we set for a goal arrives. The third big factor is trusting from day zero that we’re ready to do what’s in our hands, find the resources we lack and surround ourselves with people who will support us along the way. Those last three call for trust in ourselves, in providence and in others.

Can we live without trust? Of course. The only drawback is a life spent wasting two resources that could go toward something greater: energy and time. A lack of trust erodes our relationships with the world and with ourselves. If we want to set an example of trust, we first have to trust ourselves, and for that we sometimes need to go back to the most basic element of any human life: our own responsibility for our destiny. That integrity, that moral way of living in the knowledge that we alone answer for our destiny, comes first, before we go out into the world and try to trust others. The next big step is choosing where to focus our efforts (our goals), and everyone’s ultimate north, our greatest destination, is pursuing our purpose for a lifetime.

Trust is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves, and one we can offer others too.

Warm regards,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA (what I was Watching, Listening to, Reading and Learning):

• Watching: Critical Thinking. One of the most important skills for coping with the ignorance we can slip into in a world of information overload.
• Listening to: Scale Up: Empresas de Alto Crecimiento (High-Growth Companies). A video of a conference several INCAE alumni organized this week. It’s a wonderful program designed by Harvard, Babson and Fundesa for Guatemalan business owners who want to strengthen their companies in every area (operations, finance, management and more). The third cohort is about to start, so the video is worth watching to see what it offers.
• Reading: The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I. Volume I finally arrived this week, so I had to set Volume II aside. As I said in my last post, these books tell a recent history many people don’t know, and today, on the brink of a war, they hold lessons we must not forget.
• Learning: How to make kombucha. A very special discovery for me and a new venture into the world of fermentation 🙂 Any tips are welcome.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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