Trust emerges when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain.
Trust is a topic all of us are concerned about, as you can see on The Huffington Post when you search "How To Trust." I always try to remind my kids that life is a mirror. What you give, you receive. Even on our website we use an Apple, Inc. quote, "From one gift come many." So you really do need to be comfortable with yourself before you can trust others.
“As soon as you trust yourself,” wrote Goethe, “you will know how to live.” To discern between people who might save your life and those who might ruin it, you must be reliable, honest — in a word, trustworthy — toward yourself. And we do this far less often than most people realize. There is a reason we "second guess" ourselves so frequently.
We often sit around our conference table talking about how to make it easier to earn our participant's trust. Or how can we more quickly earn a participant's trust so we can begin to have the conversations about sustainability in our programs and start talking about how crucial it is for them to have the experience we have put together. But what I've found over the years is we need to be granted someone's trust. We can jump through all the hoops people put in front of us, but until they make the decision to grant us their trust, the hoops are just that ... hoops. It is ultimately up to you to grant GeoVisions your trust (or not) and then continue to trust us (or not).
I wrote earlier in this post that life is a mirror. In other words, we almost always get what we expect in life. If we expect people to be there for us, if we expect an organization to do things and put into practice that we consider trust-worthy, and to have our backs and our best interests in mind, we will not be easily disappointed. As with just about everything else in life, trust is a choice.