[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan we're going to talk about a topic today which is trust which I think is kind of a fascinating one something it's been a topic in my family since I was little in terms of who can you trust what's the environment that creates trust but you're someone to my mind who is very astute when it comes to people and circumstances and projects so my question is how can you tell if you can trust someone what's your personal standard well first of all my goal is to have bigger and bigger networks of trustworthy people okay because from an entrepreneurial standpoint that's how you grow in an exponential way is that you are continually developing new trust relationships in the marketplace with trustworthy people but the starting point for this really is are you a trustworthy person yourself because it's hard to check it out in other people if you haven't checked it out in yourself I came up with some fundamentals very very early in life that there were four in particular qualities that's actually based on people's performance okay so a lot of our trusting people is to a certain extent knowing who they were before you met them you can't always know their entire experience and how they've handled it but the way that they talk about their experience kind of indicates to you whether it's based on solid foundations or it's made up to make an impression and what I've noticed in my own building blocks for my own trustworthiness are four and then I've added to Fifth and the four are that there's a Time L quality about whether things work or don't work namely that you know a schedule is that when you're supposed to be someplace so one of my things that I am very passionate about personally is that I show up on time okay not so much with myself I have a looser sense so for example if I have in my schedule that I'm going to exercise at 8:00 but I don't really start until 8:30 I've got enough flexibility in my schedule that it doesn't really matter and the other thing is that that doesn't really affect someone else okay unless my exercising actually keeps me from showing up someplace else and I'm really good about that I have a a really really welldeveloped time sense that throughout the day everything that's in my schedule I can show up at that time or even better I can show up early okay and particularly when other people are involved yeah well I'm entirely talking here about where other people are involved because I think that whether they consciously reflect on it or not there's a certain kind of certainty that comes in when someone always shows up on time and they're ready to go the other thing is the addition of showing up on time is that you do what you say you're going to do and this is in the area where you've committed that I'm going to you know create something or I'm going to present something and I'll be there and the thing that really keeps me in place here is the workshop schedule so this might be some inside knowledge for those who are listening but my workshop schedule is at the very least determined a year ahead because they're put in the dates but generally we have uh threeyear feel ahead of time and this is working with Babs and myself and then the te team members who do scheduling here is that I can look out three years and I can pretty well tell you generally what my workshop schedule is going to be 3 years out and I've never been late for a workshop and this is my 30th year of doing workshops so I've done over 2500 workshops never been late I've only missed one in 25 years and that's because of my mother died and it was a funeral but we had another coach fill in so I'm always always on time and then I have things like podcasts and I'm always on time for my podcasts I do videos and I'm always on time for my videos we have projects book projects every quarter and I'm always on time for that but not only am I on time I'm totally prepared with what my part of the project is so that's the second one the other thing is I always finish what I start okay and this bears some explanation that I've committed myself to something and I've determined about halfway through the project that it doesn't make sense to deliver what I committed and I'll get back to the person and saying look I've rethought this and I've come up with a better idea how to handle this so as far as the first project goes I'm stopping that right now which means I'm finishing that project but I'm replacing it with something better okay but I always deliver something not necessarily the thing that I said I was committed to unless this is absolutely what the other person needs you know you have to think of things through the other person's brain here you have to think things through other people's you have to see things through other people's eyes you have to hear through their ears but with very few exceptions I can't remember in the last 30 years where I haven't finished something that I said I was going to do and the for fourth one is I always say please and thank you and please means that I recognize that other people operate independently for me and therefore if I want some cooperation from them I want some results from them I'm going to approach them in a respectful way to say this would be huge for me if you could do this could you please do this and the other thing is that when other people do things that are of value to me I always say thank you I always say thank you for their performance thank you for how they've moved things forward the progress that's been achieved by then so I'll just stop there with the first four because there's another one that's becoming more and more important to me these four if you look at the trouble that you can get into life and I notice people who are talented they're smart you know they have great flare to them the only thing that's lacking is that they don't show up on time they don't do what they say they're going to do they don't finish what they start and they don't say please and thank you they can be very charismatic they can be very very impressive but after a while you cut them out of your life because you can't depend upon them you're always worried about this individual I want to place myself inside of other people's universe that Dan's always somebody who delivers the goods Dan always delivers that's my credibility out in the marketplace but there's a huge trust that people don't even have to think about and the same goes for me towards other people who always do those four things I never have to think about them at night I never have to worry about them I know they're going to show up I know they're going to deliver what they said and so cooperation and collaboration and creativity and greater success and productivity as possible simply by interacting with those individuals Dan what a great list and we've called those refer ability habits in the program we also substitute in credibility habits I think credibility they have massive credibility yeah yeah someone who's credible you will refer so I think it's the credibility the total trust you have in someone else makes it very hard for you to refer them to other people now I'm dying to know what the fifth one is yeah and it just has to do with the fact that how people present themselves in the first century is not equal to how they presented themselves when I was growing up so I was born in the 1940s and there was a certain concept called appropriateness that depending on the situation you show up for that situation so that you're appropriate the way that you're dressed the way that you act the way that you talk it's appropriate for the situation and if you're in a lot of different situ situations there might be a different kind of appropriateness in each each of those situations the one that it really shows up is external appearance you know how you show up you know the kind of grooming you have you know hopefully not but hygiene can work against you here and then dress are you dressed for the situation and what I would say is that you're appropriately dressed for a situation in the sense that nobody thinks that you're inappropriate right cuz appropriateness kind of indicates that the person really doesn't understand the context they don't understand how they're showing up you know and I'm kind of casual that way but there are situations where I have to wear a suit in tie and I I don't argue with it in this situation this is expected that you have a suit and tie and it should be a good suit and it should be good shirt and tie and your shoes should be shined and everything else but it all depends upon the situ ation now I've consciously designed my life where that's not required so last year I only had one situation in 365 days where I had to wear a suit and tie I wore suits but not a tie and it was a private club where the schedule got changed the day before and said we're going to this private club and private club required suit and tie so I put on a suit and tie you know I went design my life so that there was a lot of that in the future but this wasn't about me it was about me being a guest for someone else and I wasn't going to be inappropriate well and I think also showing up overdressed for a casual situation I think it it's very contextual it's very situational what appropriateness is but I think that's a great addition to that list because if someone shows up inappropriate you will question them that the trust will not be there the way that it would be if someone seem to get all the cues in order to be yeah I have strategic coach clients who show up for their first workshop and they're wearing a suit of tie where we put out the word before people come to the workshop that you should be casually elegant yes business casual business casual which you know can be jackets can be sweaters it can just a shirt a good shirt and they'll show up in full business suit with a tie and I'll just very casually in the first hour said you know by the first break you should lose the tie because you're making other people uncomfortable you're you know it's not appropriate for the environment in the setting I said I understand that in the world of business that you operate in that uh suent tie is what's required and what's appropriate but it's not appropriate here yeah I love that Dan there's just one other point about trust that you've mentioned before and that you said trust is often a calculated risk which I thought was a great way of talking about that so it's not necessarily always that trust is a little bit of you don't know for sure and when you're four or five credibility habits really kind of minimize that risk but trust is in fact a calculated risk that we take on behalf of other people what we think they're going to do what we can expect from them what's your take yeah well it is because you're going on intuition there you're saying from what I can see and what I'm picking up this person is worth trusting but I don't know completely what the person has done before I met him or her and I don't know how they're going to perform but since it works for me to trust people until I'm proven run I'm going to take the calculative risk that this person is worth trusting but then I have my eyes and ears out around showing up on time doing what you say you're going to do finishing what you start saying please and thank you and being appropriate and if the the alarms start going off well you know I've noticed that we've had three meetings now and all three meetings the person showed up late I said you know not trustworthy for the future in that extent I can't trust that in the future they're going to show up on time and then the other checkpoints you know the doing what they say they're going to do finish what they start say please and thank you and are they appropriate and we go along and people who just prove themselves over and over and over again the amount of trust that you have becomes close to 100% And you know there can be outside circumstances which cause them to be late or things that interfere and you take that into account but then you ask them if you were rethinking this situation that caused your lateness possibly you know could you have done it differently to guarantee that you're here one of the things I do is just to get people to actually reflect on the experience of what's it like where a meeting has started and you walk in late how do you feel before you walked in the door knowing you were going to be late how are you feeling did you have a lot of confidence about going into the meeting and they said no no I was really worried and everything else I said well take that seriously that you are showing up for something that's in the schedule but you're not going to be confident when you get there is there a way that you could arrange your schedule in such a way that you got there 5 minutes early and you were sitting there ready to go and what's your confidence level there so it's paying attention to just what your emotions are if you show up inappropriately you're not dressed right what's that feel like are you going to say well that's stupid their rules are stupid and I said well not only is that going to close doors to you there are doors that are not even going to be opened to you because the word will go around that this person doesn't have a sense of appropriateness about who they are and how they show up so I can't trust people who don't have a sense about what's appropriate I love that Dan trust around people you don't know is actually really essential to entrepreneurism and in fact to capitalism can you share that fabulous quote with me yeah well it's a quote by a Nobel prize winning economists by the name of initials were fa hyek h a ye K Austrian wrote a wonderful book called The Road to serfdom and he believes that the road to surom is the opposite of capitalism and he says that capitalism is thought badly of in the world because it was named by people who hated capitalism and he says that everybody thinks that it's about Capital it's about doing anything to make profits irregardless of what happens to other people and you see that you see that in the movies you see that in the Daily News you see this in politicians talking about the heartlessness of the capitalistic system and Hayek said well that's because it was named by people who hated the capitalist system he says but actually he says capital in capitalism is just a byproduct of something much more powerful that's happening and he says capitalism is an ever expanding system of increasing cooperation among strangers okay he say the more cooperation there are among strangers and in other words people you didn't they're not your family they're not your friends but you trust them he says all of a sudden there's a blasing of capability and resources and capital you know for further growth and he said capitalism at its start has only to do with trusting other human beings to cooperate and I would say that my five little checkpoints goes a long way towards actually understanding that this person is worth cooperating with and if they're not I'm going to cut off my cooperation and find someone who's better socialism on the other hand is trusting no one and therefore everything has to be regulated you have to be regulated to do appropriate behavior capitalism depends upon individuals making up their own mind to be cooperative so wherever socialism is actually tried what you notice that a less trusting environment is immediately created through socialism because based on the framework that people are completely self-centered and therefore they can't be trusted to actually cooperate and create in a voluntary way just because of who they are as individuals so that's my understanding and it's a kind of a silly I mean but you know the educational system now people getting their accreditation now they're told a very false story about what actually makes the world work mhm and I love these five habits you know behaviors but the point here is to be trustworthy yourself first you can count on me you know I mean that you have to be able to say to yourself 100% you can count on me and because I can count on myself I have a framework for understanding on how I can count on other people because I don't want to damage Myself by being around untrustworthy people I'm a trustworthy person and I don't want to be harmed or disadvantaged by people who aren't trustworthy I love that that is such a great sort of model and way through and that will be how you achieve those bigger and bigger networks of trustworthy people thank you my pleasure if there's someone in your life or your network who could really benefit from what you've learned today why not share this episode with them you could be their hero today just by clicking share