Authentic Trust Building
Being on time, or better yet, what happens when I am late.
There is this interesting conundrum around morality vs ethics and I think about being late for a meeting as analogous to all the other commitments we make in our lives.
I grew up not only military, but Southern Baptist as well. “Be on time” ethics coupled with “You will burn in the fires of hell” morality. I can vividly remember the preacher of my childhood pounding his fist on the pulpit and casting out demons in the congregation. It really was impactful for an impressionable young man.
These voices from my childhood can usually be suppressed, but sometimes, like when I am late for a meeting, they seem to bubble up. It makes me wonder how much different I am from other people. Do we all still have narratives spilled into us from childhood following us around?
When, as rigorous and disciplined as I strive to be, inevitably, I have a breakdown or the world conspires in just the right way to thwart my best efforts, I end up hearing Lewis Carroll's white rabbit in my head echoing “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late” accompanied by a gnawing pit in my stomach.
I try to calm that voice of morality with the voice of reason. I ask myself if this is an anomaly or a pattern and if it is a pattern, what can I do in the future to arrest it and change myself. In either case, anomaly or pattern, what can I do, in this particular instance, to recover trust?
If this particular instance will produce not just discontent in them, but also some kind of breakdown, then I ask myself if there is anything I can do in this moment to mitigate the ill effects I am producing for them. If I answer myself ‘yes’; I strive to execute on that, with the focus on taking care of others and stuffing my silly little ego aside. Both of the voices that say ‘I’m late’ and the egotistical one trying to compensate for my failure are really of little use; what matters is, what I can actively do to take care them.
Most of the time, this is not an issue. Whether it is being late or some other commitment I have made, Most of the time, things go well. Of course, when things are going well, my character isn’t really being tested. It matters more, what action I take, when, as an inevitable part of being human, things go wrong.
Ironically, it is when things go wrong that the true character of trust is revealed. Authentic trust is built around breakdowns.
Call it damage control if you will, but I want to be clear, the damage I am attempting to control is the damage I am causing to them through my breakdown, rather than the damage to my identity or my pride; my ego. At this moment, those are secondary to the mitigation of the damage I am producing in the lives of others.
There is a whole stream of actions I can take and apologies I can make and actions around apologies that I can make that will help take care of them. And I will do those. That is part of my ethic. Effective apologies are action oriented, not just words. But apology effectiveness is not the key point right now. The key point is this dichotomy around morality and ethics.
When it comes to my ethics…how I actually take action…the fire and brimstone morality in my head and in the pit of my stomach are basically useless voices from the past because those voices do not actually help the other person.
There is no cookie cutter answer here, but it is, I believe in my heart of hearts, the ethic of taking care of others despite the inevitable breakdowns that are a part of life that makes all the difference. No posturing….just action. I do my best to focus on taking care of them. That’s the key thing to building authentic trust. And it is in some serendipitous magical way, this taking action for their sake, that actually quells the pit in my stomach and silences the voices in my head.
Can I get an ‘Amen’?
