The Meaning Of Trust

Jan Risher -

I have come to love Seth Godin, not in the sense that my husband has cause for concern, but in the sense that I think he's brilliant and offers one of the best and most insightful takes on things that I've found in a good, long while.
If you don't know who he is, check out his website/blog at by clicking here. He is smart and funny. He uses words, examples and concepts that are easy to understand but convey big ideas — really big ideas. For example, on Saturday, he wrote a short post about trust. In it, he said, "We trust people because they showed up when it wasn't convenient, because they told the truth when it was easier to lie and because they kept a promise when they could have gotten away with breaking it."

Wow.

Who among us can't identify with that?

It's something everyone over the age of one month old has experienced. We trust the people who get up in the middle of the night to take care of us. We trust the people who feed us when they're exhausted. We trust the people who take us places when they want to be sitting in their jammies on the sofa. We trust the people who tell us when those pants look awful, when they could have said, "Fine, they look fine." We trust the people who show up when they say they're going to show up even when they got a better invitation that we may or may not ever know about.

You get the picture.

And, of course, the reverse of that statement is true, as well. Eventually we lose faith and trust in the people who don't show up — in the people who don't tell the truth. The fact is that some of those people we really, really like. Some of them we may even love. I've experiences relationships when I wasn't even aware that I didn't trust that person anymore. In fact, that's the way it was for me when I read Seth's blog Saturday. It was like a light bulb went off, and I realized that there are some people who always show up for me and tell the truth, and there are some who don't.

When push comes to shove, it's easy to figure out which ones of those any of us want in our corner.