It’s been five whole days since I quoted something from Seth Godin, so here’s something: we build trust by keeping our promises.
Well-placed trust makes everything better.
- We feel safe with people we trust.
- So we can relax. We feel better. We do better. We can be better.
- We can be more honest, and we can share more of ourselves.
- We’re far happier spending time and money on proven products from brands we trust.
- And we’re prepared to pay more, because we trust it’s worth it.
- We can spend far less time managing and supervising people we’ve come to trust – and more time directly contributing.
- We can try things out and take risks – potentially wonderful risks – with people we trust.
So how do we get people to trust us? By making and keeping lots of small promises, many of them implicit: that we’ll send that email, show up on time, do the little things we say we’re going to do, be consistent, be engaged and committed when it’s easier not to.
I’m all for not sweating the small stuff… but the keeping of small promises helps all do better.
And as someone trusts you, you get to make (and keep) bigger promises.
Update 11/08/18: Another great post from Seth about promises here.