When I trust as a way of being in the world, it doesn’t mean that I am always happy or happy with what happens to me. It just means that I refuse to allow my personal fears, or any collective ones I’ve picked up along the way, to taint how I see the world and interact with it. It doesn’t mean that bad experiences won’t happen; it just means that whatever does come my way, I know I will learn from them, fix them if I need to and move on.

Trusting as a way of life is to trust myself.

It means that I trust in my inherent goodness, my flexibility, and my ability to repair when things go wrong. It’s about being responsible — or having the “ability to respond” —  to what happens rather than being taken down by it even — if it takes me a bit to get there.

When I live from trust, the outside world doesn’t get to choose how I feel about myself.

This is non-negotiable. Nobody gets to tell me what’s wrong or right for me. This is my job. And, it’s from this place that resilience grows and so do our relationships.

Trust doesn’t just happen.

The fundamental bedrock for creating loving and fulfilling relationships is an individual who can live in trust and hold that consistently for the people they love. Not perfectly, just often enough to be relied upon. Individuals who embody and operate from high levels of trust rather than fear build courageous, robust and happy connections with others.

Trust takes courage, commitment and a fair bit of practice.

Most people, however, wait until someone proves themselves trustworthy before extending trust; This is natural and many times a good idea, particularly when we don’t know the person or at the beginning of a relationship. But after decades of research, Professor Paul Zak, Claremont University, found that if we give trust to people first, we make it much more likely for them to act in trustworthy ways. This is because when we trust, we activate the production of the love hormone, or oxytocin, in the other.

For our close long-term relationships that we’d like to hold onto, withholding trust doesn’t work because it is too transactional or conditional. If you only trust a person when they act trustworthy, this is basically communicating that your love for them  hinges on something as fleeting as their behaviours or moods. This produces anxiety and unease in people, often in subtle ways, which can be measured by the level of  stress hormone, cortisol, in the bloodstream.

On the other hands, when our bodies produce oxytocin, Zak found, we are more able to behave in critical trusting ways.

Close relationships will only deepen and last if we can give something more unconditional to them: be generous with your trust and give it back when you need to. If you’d like some support trusting yourself more so you can trust in life, get in touch.