Trusting Yourself: The Key to Trusting Others
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In my experience as an improv comedy performer and actor, I have played a variety of trust exercises. As a director, I stopped using them years ago.
If you are not familiar with trust exercises, they involve putting people into situations where they have to trust each other. For example, one member may stand with his back to the group, and then fall backwards, trusting the others to catch him. When they do, his level of trust for the group increases. Or so the theory goes…
My issue with most of these trust exercises is that they hope to translate trust in one area to another. That is, they assume that just because I trust you to not let me physically hurt myself that that means that I should trust you to respect my ideas in the work place. I have enough faith in humanity to believe that most mature people, even strangers, would not let me fall and hurt myself. I also have enough of an understanding of people to know that many just don't know how to listen and work together effectively. Trust in one area does not necessarily translate to the other area.
In order for me to trust someone else in a specific venue (such as in the workplace), one of two things needs to happen. First, I could spend a lot of time working with that person. I would eventually learn that person's capabilities and develop a relationship that I understood and trusted. This is fine, and this is the way most trust is built, but it also takes a long time. This also leads to a situation where we force others to prove their trustworthiness to us, so we don't trust people when we first meet them.
The second way for me to trust someone else is for me to have enough confidence in my own abilities to take a chance and go ahead and trust them. A primary reason we don't trust others is that we are afraid of how their letting us down will impact our lives. If I trust you to complete a project on time and you don't, I could be in trouble with my boss. If I trust you to respect and listen to my ideas and you don't, I may feel bad or embarrassed. If I have faith in my own abilities though, then I have faith that if you do let me down I will be able to deal with it. This relieves a tremendous mount of pressure, and actually allows me to open up and trust people I don't know well.
This doesn't mean you should be naive. If you do have a big project and are working with someone you don't know, you should trust him but you should also stay on top of the situation. Weigh the risks and then decide, but in many cases if you believe in yourself you will be able to give others the benefit of the doubt.