Trust is accumulated slowly, like drops of water in a bucket. I imagine a tin one-gallon bucket from Tractor Supply. In the beginning, every drop of earned trust sounds like a ringing bell, obvious and sometimes alarming. I find myself cautious and skeptical. If the drops keep coming, the sound becomes a thud and then eventually a plop. Soon, those accumulated moments make you feel that the person genuinely deserves your vulnerability. You start to trust them more.

Now, the deposits they make do not even make a sound. It is a part of your relationship, these mutual buckets of trust full nearly to the brim allow you to be honest and candid. This newly unlocked candor is where this friend, family member, or business partner can have a big impact on your life and hopefully you on theirs. You can ask this person what your blind spots are. You can ask them what they would do differently. You can ask them to poke holes in your ideas, identity, and principles. Only because of the trust that you have built up with them, slowly, can you truly respect and ruminate on the answers they give you.

In my experience, some people get to start with a larger balance than others. If someone on the corner of the street downtown asks you to give them $100 you may be hesitant, even more so if under the pretense of repayment. This man has never done anything to build up trust with you, and you are hesitant even to trust him with a trifle that is money. Now imagine that you are looking for a job, you have a family and bills to pay, money is extremely tight. Through your dad, or another person you have high trust accumulated with, you are introduced to a potential employer and told that this person is trustworthy. Now, this complete stranger, a potential new employer, with ideas, ambitions, and principles unknown to you starts with some inherited trust. This person who you had never met before today might tell you to completely change careers and take a pay cut to do so. What you do in this scenario will be determined by the balance your dad had to transfer.

In my case, the highest trust people in my life are: my dad, mom, and grandpa. The aforementioned job change happened to me. My dad introduced me to Mike. Mike, the potential new employer, did offer me a job which lowered my pay and changed my career. I accepted that job because my dad has so much built up trust in his bucket that his balance can cover a complete stranger's balance requirement.

Much like the down payment or equity requirement for a loan, this trust can be transferred to another, at the risk of the cosigner. Today, I am blessed to call Mike a friend, mentor, and business partner. My dad's balance is fuller than ever, improved in part because Mike has turned out to be one of the best new relationships I have made in adulthood.

My dad and Mike have also given me a gift that many young men have never experienced. Because they have a high balance with me, read: "I trust them", I can be honest and candid with them about my ideas and dreams. The gift they are able to give me is constructive criticism. They can, and have, confronted me with hard questions about who I am or why I think the way that I do. Because these two men sit with high balances, these criticisms act to build strength in my mind about why I believe what I believe.

Criticism, delivered without the reinforcement of accumulated trust, cannot expectedly be received as constructive.

People in your life will always have criticisms of you. Criticisms about your views on politics, the car you drive, the home you have, or the way you parent, where you go to church, if you go to church, what job you have, and on and on. Even deeper still, people will criticize who you are: what and why you think and do the things you do. If there is no one in your life who has a high balance of trust with you and everyone's opinions are in equal regard, you have two options:

1. Ignore everyone, think that you are the only one with the insight enough into your life and who you are to make a judgement. This saves you from the turmoil, but you will never grow like you could if you had help judging yourself.
2. Listen to everyone, think that you don't know how flawed you are and everyone else can see who you truly are. Their judgments must be sound. This casts you deep into turmoil, you will never grow because life becomes helpless.

There is another option, as all the better options are, it is hard. Do the hard work to build trust with someone. Find someone and give them the opportunity to build up a balance with you and you with them. Start opening yourself up slowly to the people who already have a balance with you, be honest, candid, and vulnerable. At first, it will be slow and loud to your soul when you trust, maybe even alarming. You might hear a ringing in your ear reminding you of how many times you have been betrayed by those you trusted. Eventually the balance will build enough to soften that ringing to a thud. Soon, if you are blessed, you will no longer hear anything when you are open with this person. Now, you have a third way to deal with the constant criticisms that come your way:

3. Listen to the people you trust. When they criticize, it will build you up. When a friend says something to you that before would have cast you into turmoil and despair at the thought "what if they are right", turn to this person you have built up this trust with and ask them to help you wade through those waters. This path allows you to deal with life's inevitable challenges and your inevitable flaws in a way that turns them into reinforcements for who you are.

The other truth you must know in this endeavor is that everyone is flawed. This means that no matter how much trust you build up with someone, they will someday do something that withdraws from the balance they have built up with you. This will come as what feels like a slosh, or pour over the edge of this bucket. You might feel like years of trust have been cast away over betrayal. I would encourage you to be steadfast and show this person the grace they will inevitably have to show you one day. You may look back and see that what felt like betrayal at the moment was either a truth you were not ready to hear or a misunderstanding, both of these realizations will allow that trust to be built back more rapidly than it was built in the first place.

Trust is accumulated slowly like drops in a bucket and depleted quickly through either misunderstanding or betrayal.

I would love to talk more about this. So, leave a comment, or reply, or shoot me an email or a text if you can.

p.s. — If you can find someone to marry and build this trust with, you will have gained one of the most precious of blessings the Lord provides us this side of eternity. Do not allow yourself to be deluded by the ecstasy you feel when you hold their hand, life will still have the same challenges and those flaws you have will be amplified to this person who has their whole life to endure them. Succeed, and you will have gained a life partner and you will build with trust with them deeper than you could imagine right now.