Find the Fear and Swim Upstream to Trust
Fear is the root negative human emotion. Scratch the surface of other negative feelings, and you will find fear at the core.
Fear Drives Behavior
If you accept this description of fear, it means you can roadmap people’s emotions. It also means you can diagnose your own.
Fear is the main driver of dysfunctional human behavior. When you see people being passive aggressive, secretive, avoiding, combative, resentful, backstabbing, gossiping, or otherwise misbehaving, teach yourself to ask, “What are they afraid of?” This drives good consulting and coaching.
Fear is a major driver of organization behavior. A culture that uses negative norms (think “that’s a career limiting move”) to enforce compliance is an organization that is fear-based. Learn to notice negative norms, so you can envision alternatives.
Fear motivates much buying behavior. B2B marketers are taught to “find the pain point.” B2C marketers know the desire to join the in crowd is trumped by the fear of being in the out crowd; “you smell” out-shouts “you can smell nice.”
Fear plays a huge role in politics, as the daily papers demonstrate daily.
In all these cases, fear is the enemy of trust. And trust is the antidote to fear.
Trust Drives Relationship
At root, fear is the fear of a bad relationship—an Other who will hurt us. The effect is to keep us out of relationship.
Trust is the hope of a good relationship. It inclines us to seek relationship with an Other, so that we can gain the benefits of relationship.
You create self-trust by facing and overcoming your own fears. You create trust with Others by trusting them – by being the one willing to first face the fear.
You create interpersonal trust by taking a risk, encouraging the Other to reciprocate. You create organizational trust by creating an environment that encourages emotional risk-taking, dissipating fear.
Trust in politics comes from uniting, not from dividing. Trust in government comes more from principled policies and sharp enforcement than from finely detailed procedures, prohibitions and protocols.
Trust in a culture comes about by ten thousand daily acts of etiquette, courtesy, and generosity, each taken with no calculated return on investment aforethought – and each returned in the same spirit.
Trust in all these relationships rests on an ability to directly confront and speak the truth to each other. Not speaking truth is the functional equivalent of lying; it feeds fear and alienation, and is the first step to trust-rot.
(Thanks to Seth Godin for jogging my brain on this one)