Your First Question

“If he cries, pick him up.”

Our firstborn was only four days old. I remember thinking it odd our pediatrician thought she needed to tell us that. He was our entire world at that point.

“You’ve probably heard of sleep training,” she continued, “where you let the child cry themselves to sleep. Don’t start anything like that anytime soon…”

That made sense to me, but her next few words have stuck with me ever since:

“…He needs to know he can trust you.”

Maybe I was just a tired new dad, but that statement hit me. Hard. I realized Luke was already trying to figure out what kind of world he’d been born into. I felt tears well up in my eyes.

My goal in every leadership position I’d ever been in was to gain my team’s trust. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed. But here was a brand new, completely helpless human who needed to know he could trust us.

Research by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson confirms that newborn babies start learning trust almost immediately. Each one of us, before we could focus our eyes, control our limbs, or feed ourselves, were trying to answer this one question: Who can I trust?

And we’re still asking it.

The benefits of high-trust environments are clear, not just personally and socially, but professionally as well. According to neuroeconomist Dr. Paul Zak, people working for high-trust companies enjoy 74% less stress, 40% less burnout, and 106% more energy compared to those at low-trust companies.

Each person you interact with today was once a newborn infant. That annoying customer or client. The quiet members of your team. Your busy boss. Every day of their lives they have been trying to figure out who they can trust.

At some point today, stop and look at them. Steer your eyes to see the individual human who is looking for someone to trust.

How does that perspective alter the way you choose to respond?