I’m not talking about the trust that a person has in a stranger, but the trust that he or she has in himself.
I think this idea is very important. I’ve had clients ask me if I’ve ever had clients ask me if I trust them. The answer is that I’ve never had a client ask me that question and I’ve never seen anyone ask this question in my thirty years in business.
For a lot of people, this trust is built in childhood: I know that in the next five seconds if you call my mother, she will tell you that she loves you, that she’ll be there for you, and that she’ll always love you. I know this all myself. As a kid I watched my friends and I take turns texting each other, but I also knew that I was the most trustworthy one in the group.
The fact that our parents love us makes us feel like our trustworthiness is built in to our identity. To be honest, it’s not built in to who we are, it’s a quality we have which comes from the people around us. When we are kids, we can trust our friends, our teachers, and our parents with our trust. We can trust them not to tell us lies, even if we tell them one.
As teenagers we can be trusted not to lie, but as we grow up we can easily slip. We tend to rely on the others for that, and when we find out that they are lying, we feel like we are all in trouble. A friend of mine was in the process of telling a lie when his mother found out and he was in for a big time.
We tend to trust our friends and parents with our trust, but we find out a lot of the time that they also know we are lying. Many parents, even in the best of situations, will tell their children to say something that they have not really meant to say. This is the kind of thing that can cause people to trust them less.
The problem is that there are a lot of liars out there that you do not know. A lot of people with high trust may not even be aware that they are liars. Because a lot of people with a lot of trust are willing to put their trust in the wrong people, they end up being lied to. People with high trust may also have high levels of trust, but also low levels of deception.
There’s an old saying that “a lie is just as good as half truth” or something to that effect. In other words, when you put your trust in someone, they may be lying to you about something you may not want to hear.
I remember when I first started using Google Analytics back in the day, I would see an increase in “qualified” trust. This was mostly in the form of people who had a lot of qualified trust, people who were willing to put their trust in other people, but not in the right people.
In our own study, we didn’t notice this increase at all. But it turned out that we were looking at the wrong question. We were looking for qualified trust because people with this level of trust were more likely to spend money with that person. We didn’t have enough data to back up this claim, but we knew that it was there. So we turned the question around and asked about the people who trusted people with the most qualified trust.
