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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😊  

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