Can trust be bad for you?

On my recent trip to Russia to begin to establish Entente Foundation’s pilot Trust Program in schools there, I was confronted with an interesting comment from a Russian school student.

One of the teachers who attended my presentation in Russia last year had already begun posing the question of trust in her class, asking students to define trust and to discuss it amongst themselves and at home.

She presented to me (in Russian, translated by an interpreter in English for me!) some of the discussion points and comments from her students.

While there was a general consensus that they felt that they needed trust, they also agreed that it as not something they or their parents had spent much time considering.

What disturbed me was that one student was quoted as saying ‘I think trust is a bad thing, because when you trust people they let you down and it hurts.’

When I say it disturbed me, what bothered me was that I think this is a commonly held view, certainly from what I see with all the Google Alerts I receive about trust issues around the world. But there is an essence of truth in what this student said. Yes, people let us down when we trust them. It happens to all of us, and we all actually do it to others. That is one of the core truths about trust. The real issue is that we are blindly unaware of this, and do not have the skills to determine who we can trust and when, and how to make sense of when trust has been broken.

That is exactly what I am all about – bringing a new awareness to the power and fragile nature of trust, and taking that into schools, communities, homes and businesses, so that we can change this attitude and recognize that trust is a good thing, but it needs to be handled with care.