Skip to main content

Why trust is like a marble jar


 

I have been thinking and talking a lot about trust this year and as 2022 draws to a close I wanted to share Brene Brown’s beautiful trust metaphor.  Something I have found so incredibely helpful both personally and professionally.   

I often work with parents and partners who are battling with trust.  For parents they often desperately want to allow their teenagers more freedom but feel unable to move away from the “I will allow them when I can trust them” And similarly for partners, they will often feel sad about the lack of trust in their relationship but feel powerless to move towards change until there is more trust.

We all identify trust over and over again as something that is fundamentally important to us. And yet our understanding of trust is unsure.

Brene Brown often quotes Charles Feltman who defines trust as “choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else”.  You let someone on your team know that you really struggle with a part of your job, this person now has a choice about how they respond to this both now and in the future.  It is within this response that trust is built.  And this encapsulates the essence of Brown’s understanding of trust -it is not built with grand gestures but in the small every day moments.

Brown uses a marble jar metaphor to explain this concept further.  Our marble jar friends are the friends we have known for years, who know us so well and still show up and love us regardless of what is going on. 

Often, we don’t even stop to consider how we got to this wonderful safe space with these people but this is a question worth considering.  And the answer lies in the thousands of small tiny moments you have spent together.  That time when your mum was sick and she remembered and called you to see how she was doing.  That time she didn’t laugh when you told her about the humiliating work meeting. That time when he showed up to your talk even when it was on a topic, he had no interest in. 

When you build a relationship with someone (a partner, a friend, a work colleague) you are essentially trying to fill up a marble jar for one another.  Every single time you interact with this person you have the opportunity to add a marble to the jar - every time that person shows up for you, supports you, gets you, sees you.  And sometimes, because we are all human, marbles come out of the jar – broken confidence, unkind words.  Sometimes the trust can be rebuilt with small moments and sometimes it can’t and that’s OK too.  

The take away from this blog is that we need to trust in order to build trust.  This does not mean that we need to let our teenage daughter out at night with no curfew but it does mean that we need to allow her some freedom to build this trust.  This does not mean that we need to tell our new work colleague that we really struggle with part of our job but to create opportunities to build trust it might mean letting them know that everything is not easy for us either. 

“Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention and full engagement” Brene Brown

Happy New Year and thank you all so much for taking the time to read these blogs😊  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Parenting: The difference between shame and guilt and why this matters SO much

  Many of us use the terms guilt and shame interchangeably.   We talk about feeling shameful and guilty about something difficult that has happened.     But shame researchers, including Brene Brown, believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt.   Guilt “I did something wrong” Shame “I am wrong” In these two statements there is a subtle difference in language and labelling. But this difference carries a monumental weight.      Guilt is our friend.   Guilt makes us feel uncomfortable about something we have done and this discomfort pushes us to address the situation – going back to the shop with the item we forgot to pay for, saying sorry for being mean, allowing someone else to choose this time.   Feeling bad when we do something wrong might not feel great but it is important.   Otherwise, where would we find the motivation and drive to do better next time or repair the situation this time.   Sha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Parenting: Managing the inevitable bumps in the road

  You have gone away with the kids for a weekend by the sea.   You have some lovely moments – running in the rain on the beach, cycling through a meadow of wild flowers, fish and chips on the pier…. gorgeous and exactly what you were hoping the weekend might bring.   The weekend also brings some very bumpy moments, the flamed tempers over who had the last strawberry, the chain breaking on one of the bikes, the merciless teasing that only siblings can engage in.   In most families these moments are inevitable but while we all acknowledge this inevitability it is often these moments that define the weekend.   Leaving us feeling sad and deflated. If we think about our kids from a developmental perspective there are so many moments when it is healthy and developmentally appropriate for them to push boundaries and make their own choices.   When we see a two-year-old defiantly walking over to see the ducks after being told not to that is developmentally appropr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Understanding the connection between anger and self worth

  I was listening to podcast yesterday with Dr Becky Kennedy, the author of Good Inside, and she said this “Anger is a sign that we have preserved access to our self-worth.”   When we have a high level of self-worth and we do not have access to the things we need we feel angry.   She talked about having a “healthy entitlement” to what you want and need which is intimately connected to feeling worthy. Psychologists often consider anger to be a secondary emotion.   Anger is often what we see when people are feeling any number of other emotions – shame, humiliation, grief.   Anger is often easier to express than shame or humiliation.   It is often easier to say “I’m so livid about what happen” than “I feel really ashamed about what happened”.   Brene Brown in her beautiful book Atlas of the Heart suggests that as many as 20 of the 87 emotions she identifies in the book are likely to present as anger.   How we manage our emotions is influenced b...
Post a Comment
Read more