To rebuild trust, start with your imagination

I was co-teaching a NVC Foundations course for a client this week and someone asked an often-asked question, what do you do if you don’t have trust?

The question has haunted my own work history. I have been in many work situations where I didn’t have trust in people I was working with. Work has been a place of real heart break. 

So how can we start to move towards addressing trust issues? It starts with a commitment to repair the relationship. Yes, it is easier said than done and yet, there is no way to restore trust or even explore the question of restoring trust other than to take the courageous step of imagining and bringing into being a different kind of relationship.  

When trust is eroded in work relationships (and personal) we can feel unmoored. We are unsettled in our brains and bodies. We try to soothe that discomfort by engaging in strategies that meet needs for protection, predictability, and security.

Sometimes in our upset, we can try to establish hard and fast rules that give us a sense of control over a person’s behaviour. ‘Because you have done this, I need you to take these next five steps…' The issue with these types of strategies is that they are often done with the other person feeling coerced, perhaps by their own guilt or shame. They can be so exacting, that they generate feelings of constraint, and most importantly, they are rarely co-created. There is a clear wrong-doer that is in the hole and needs to follow the rules to get back on even ground in the relationship.

So what can that real work look like? What does it mean to step towards repairing the relationship? I like to start first by fully understanding my role in the eroded relationship. What are my feelings towards this person, towards their position, towards their work? Which, of the feelings that I have, are related to this person and this situation directly and which of my feelings is related to old hurts, past relationships, or even trauma? This is a point of investigation and curiosity--making an effort to discover as much as possible what is there.

Because I am an NVC practitioner, I have some specific resources available to me. I can do that exploration with the many varieties of needs lists that are available, including ones that are for work and group contexts. I could reach out to a friend to support me in exploring my needs and feelings through discussion (we often get to greater clarity through verbal explorations). This is part of the discovery phase of understanding the erosion of trust. 

With greater clarity, we can begin to imagine a different reality, including how we act differently in the relationship. We can start to imagine how we might approach the person and what we might share with them. We can start to think about sharing our vision for what might be different between us. We can think about what questions and clarity we would like to have from them--getting a sense of what they want to be different moving forward.

Being in this place of imagining and exploration, we can also think about things the other person could say that we might find hard to hear and how we might respond or want to take care of ourselves in those moments.

This is part of check in with ourselves if we are ready to move towards dialogue.  It is also a time to explore how you might check with the other person about if they are ready to engage in further dialogue. 

And as we begin to engage in connecting dialogue, the invitation is to pay careful attention to  how we are doing during the dialogue. Are we connected to our intention of relationship repair and curiosity about what is happening for the other person?

We can meet the challenge of strengthening and repairing trust with care for ourselves and others as we acknowledge the difficulty and awkwardness of such repairs.