To earn my trust

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I enjoy when clients or friends trust me and wear their trust like a badge of honor. I’m fortunate to have as my profession one that is generally held in high regard by the general public and clients. I realize that the trust my clients have of me is the result of doing the hard work to earn it. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it should be.

I also enjoy extending trust to others. Naturally, someone has got to earn my trust but – in general – I tend to be “trigger happy” in extending trust to others. It’s served me well with the gains received far exceeding the failures incurred.

Several years ago at my former gym, I purchased a three dollar sport recovery drink after a hard early morning workout. I handed a twenty dollar bill to the gym owner who was at the counter. I’d been a member of this gym for a couple years and knew the owner well enough to trust him. After taking my money, he apologized that he would have to give me change in one dollar bills as that was all he had in the cash register. He carefully and quickly counted the one dollar bills to make sure there were seventeen and handed them to me along with a warning that I better check that he had given me the correct amount.

“That’s not necessary because I trust you” was my reply, an answer that was not acceptable to him. So he proceeded to count the one dollar bills again, this time making sure that I was watching him while he uttered “one, two, three . . . fifteen, sixteen and seventeen”. He had just proven what I was comfortable with in the trust I had extended to him – that he had given me the correct change.

The lesson I learned that morning was that for him – like many others - being on the receiving end of the trust I had extended to him was more difficult than what he had to do to earn my trust.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum