“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.” – Confucius

My toddler has learned to say, “Help me” when he needs assistance. He pronounces it with a soft “h” so it comes out “elp me” but it still is very effective at signaling when he wants help opening or moving something.

What’s fascinating to me is that even at 2 ¼ years of age, he is already learning some selectiveness of who he wants help from. He’s happy to let his older sister help him open pouches (those packets of apple sauce he can squeeze out and drink down) and fruit snacks because she doesn’t like those and never takes a cut off the top. But he does not want her to help him open candy or toys because she often takes a sample first.

Watching these two, it’s like they are illustrating the concepts of trust from the recently aired Brené Brown Dare to Lead podcast with author and leadership coach, Charles Feltman entitled Trust: Building, Maintaining and Restoring It.

Charles Feltman’s definition of trust is: “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.” Wow – I had to listen to that one twice.

And when we choose to trust another person or company, we not only expect that they’ll take care of what we value but do it how and when we want. This makes me think not only of many examples from my career but also of the precious few clothes that I take to the dry cleaners and entrust them to take care of them, clean them and get them back to me on time.

Charles Feltman colors the definition in with several additional factors: sincerity (meaning what you say), reliability (meeting the commitments you make), competence (having the ability to do the job), care (having the other person’s best interests in mind).

The podcast had so many great examples at how we build and also destroy trust at work. Often overcommitting so that we can’t actually meet the deadline or pretending we have competence that we don’t are some of the ways we erode trust. Those descriptions brought back my first year of work after graduating college. I had been hired to build out the computer network for the local electric utility using Union labor from their Communications department. I overcommitted all the time and pretended I knew what I was doing again and again before I learned my lessons to check with the team before making promises.

But eventually my reliability and competence caught up with my care and sincerity and I was able to build and in some cases rebuild, trust. And then I moved on to manage people and experience the other side of the relationship.

All of this gives me great hope for my daughter who wants to be a big help to her brother but can get distracted by what she wants. My kids are learning to trust and to be trustworthy one interaction at a time. They don’t always get it right but they seem to learn a little bit every time they negotiate it as do the rest of us!