At Switched ON Living, we love hearing – and retelling – stories from people who are celebrated as leaders and who teach and challenge us to look at ourselves and our lives in ways that are new and inspiring.
And there’s no better storyteller in the Switched ON Living pantheon than Brené Brown.
Professor Brown is world-renowned for her research about the links between vulnerability courage, shame and empathy. She’s the author of five bestselling books, and as we can sense from her live appearances, Brené has a massive and devoted social media following.
In this podcast from Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Conversations series, Professor Brown talks about trust – the anatomy of trust, its constituent parts, how we build trust and how we loose it, and finally how self-trust and self-respect are prerequisites for others to trust us.
Brene’s journey to understand trusts starts so simply, with her daughter, her daughter’s teacher, and her daughter’s teacher’s marble jar.
But in the hands of a master storyteller, that unspectacular marble jar becomes a profound image, a metaphor for us to understand a concept as complex as trust.
Brené begins by telling us that her deep-dive into the data uncovered a counter-intuitive truth, that contrary to her expectations, trust is built in small moments.
She talks about John Gottman and what he calls ‘sliding doors moments,’ opportunities where we can either build trust with our loved ones or choose not to connect and betray what should be a trusting relationship.
Of all the definitions she found in her research, Professor Brown says she likes best to describe trust comes from Charles Feltman, author of the Thin Book of Trust, “Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.
By contrast, distrust is, “What I have shared with you that’s important to me and is not safe with you.”
Going further, Brené dissected the anatomy of trust and came up with BRAVING, the key constituents of trust – Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, the Vault, Integrity, Non-judgement, Generosity.
By breaking down trust into its elements, we now have the words necessary to be specific when we speak about it.
Finally, Brené tells us that the BRAVING rules apply just as much to ourselves as they do for others. “If you can’t count on yourself, you can’t ask other people to give you what you don’t have.”
Listening to someone talk about trust could easily be tiresome, and we could easily get lost in the tedium of abstraction. But lucky for us, when we have a storyteller with the powers that Brené Brown possesses, dissecting the anatomy of trust is as simple as filling our marble jars.
Additional Resources
How to Build Trust in Your Relationship | Zach Brittle, LMHC | The Gottman Institute
https://www.gottman.com/blog/trust/
