|| TRUST || There are so many different types of trust. Physical trust, mental trust, emotional trust… group-trust and self-trust to name a few. We all experience trust in different ways. Take a moment to consider what trust feels like for you. How do you communicate trust to others? How do others respond to you when they trust you or when they are unsure of you? Can you tell the difference? As an acrobat and a presenter, I have worked with trust my entire life. First as a gymnast I learned to trust myself in competition. Later as an acrobat working with a partner, I learned to trust someone with my life and what that required. As a teacher and a speaker I am always experimenting with ways to create trust with groups and audiences. Once a strong connection is made, amazing things can happen. This is where collaboration begins; authentic creative processes that involve risk can take place once trust is there. I think the mistake we often make is to proceed with complex group projects (business development, culture shifting, organisational change, creative work) without having developed the pre-requisite connection. Does this sound familiar? From my reading and experience, I suggest that this connecting starts with trust. If we are going to make mistakes together and struggle together, trust is an essential glue. Without it things fall apart easily. An exploration of trust can tell you a lot about your communication style and approach to working with others. An awareness of fields such as body language, emotional intelligence and the psychology of interpersonal skills and group communication is a great place to start to find strategies to build trust in yourself and with others. For example: in developing the ability to accurately read body language, we consider the notion of congruency. Is what we are hearing from the person matching their non-verbal communication? We trust people when their body language matches their words and tone of voice. We should be leery of what we are being told/sold when these are out of sync. Trust is developed through repeated positive experience. Consider some of the ideas in this piece and take a trust audit of your environment for yourself. Review the questions in the first paragraph. I hope you can find a few valuable discoveries by trying to answer these questions. Skilled-communicators work on this everyday; even once a level of mastery has been reached. Working with people presents an ever-changing environment. As moods, ideas, intentions, strategies and desires shift, so must we. Keen to hear your thoughts on trust...get in touch - Dan Aubin - @daring_humans