How to become Trustworthy

If you have a big dream that others would help bring into reality, then inevitably you must have to delegate responsibility and it is not going to be easy if you don’t have trust in people, it is risky to trust but suicidal not to at all. So my advice is; learn the principles of trust and apply the wisdom in your everyday life

1. Become Trustworthy. We are hardwired to seek out trust- worthy people, and to test others to see whom we can trust. But the first step is to become trustworthy ourselves. Like attracts like, and if you invest in becoming a person others can trust people whom you can trust will be attracted to you.

2. Keep Your Promises. The surest mark of a trustworthy person is one who keeps his promises. Keep small or even trivial promises because others will gauge your reliability on the big things from how you handle the little ones, even if they are not consciously aware of it.

3. Keep Promises to Yourself. It is an unfortunate human failing that we insist on virtues in others that we don't develop in ourselves. Keeping promises to yourself is closely correlated with willpower and self-control, and these virtues are essential to being trustworthy

4. Under Commit and Over Deliver. Make sure that you only make promises that you know you can keep. We over commit because we want people to love and respect us, yet the quickest way to lose love and respect is to fail to keep our promises.

5. Be Willing to Make Promises. One of the stratagems that notoriously unreliable people use is refusing to make promises in the first place. This fallacious line of reasoning argues that if you don't make any promises, you don't have to worry about breaking them. People quickly see through this strategy, and even more quickly you will get the reputation not only for unreliability but for being indecisive as well. Remember that a refusal to make a decision is just another kind of decision.

6. Eradicate Ambiguity. Nothing undermines trust faster than ambiguity. We default to phrases like "I'll try" in order to furnish plausible deniability when we fail to deliver. Many of the "he said, she said" controversies that produce so much friction in business are caused by ambiguous attempts by everyone involved to stay off the hook. Almost every time I run down one of these disagreements I find that the real culprit is a failure by the parties involved to be clear and specific in the first place about who is promising what to whom by when.

7. Never Make People Ask. If you make people hound you about a promise, you have already lost half of your credibility. If one of your people is up for review and must ask you for it, you usually end up giving a bigger raise while receiving little goodwill in return. Nothing builds trust better than anticipating your obligations and delivering on them without being asked.

8. Communicate. No one can keep all their promises, but there is no excuse for a failure to communicate that we may be unable to deliver. We often avoid communicating from embarrassment or the fear of admitting failure, but this only leads others to assume that you had no intention of keeping your promise and were hoping that they would fail to notice.

11. Aim Past the Target. It is impossible to be trustworthy in business if you are unreliable in the rest of your life. Conversely, if you value trust for its selfish utility value alone, you will most likely fail in your efforts.