Trust has many stages of development. At birth, its new and pure. Easy to feel or touch and believe in but small. As a toddler, it grows bigger and stronger, becoming more stable or grounded with every step, yet it’s still not mature. But in its teenage years, it starts to flounder with depth. Still easy to come by, but harder to keep. It’s flighty, frivolous, fast to come and go. And in adulthood, when we are mature in years yet still going through stages of adolescence in our career, it becomes almost fae – elemental and unpredictable, because we’ve finally manifested what trust really means.
Just when you have a firm grasp on trust, it…she slides right through your fingertips, and you’ve lost her momentarily. Sometimes she trips you up, and the fall cuts deep.
She is really small at times, like a teensy fairie dancing around us and tempting us to listen, believe. And when we do, she grows in size, overwhelming us like mother nature, verdant and true. And we sometimes blindly rely on her until we are reminded of her stormy consequences when she’s not tended to.
A male friend and mentor asked me the other day when confronted with female rivalry “why do women care too much at work? Shit just bring it down a notch”. I mentioned this to my dad. And he said to me, “It’s obvious. Insecurity”. Another answer can be found here in a Fast Company Article – why parents become better employees – especially relating to moms.
With insecurity comes drive and will and fierce pride to succeed, and trust in praise, because praise equates to value. With insecurity comes singular focus, ambition and desire to succeed along the corporate ladder, because this type of success feeds pride and suppresses fear. But with insecurity comes the saboteur, our impostor syndrome or fear of failure, and we still second guess ourselves even with constant praise, working two to three times as hard as the next guy.
So the answer to my friend’s question is that we give it our soul, we make it our mission and ambition or “life’s work”, and that’s why we care too much.
How do we not only survive, but thrive in a corporate world where the rules were created by men for men? Where women have only entered the career club during WWII and still aren’t paid equally? Where women are always questioning their value because society questions our earning power, our human rights, and still judges our beauty over our intelligence??
Well, I’m not sure we thrive. But we do survive, sometimes with blinders on. We find our like-minded group of allies.
In high school, it was called a click and sometimes it can be really damaging or unhealthy for the victims of this “group think”.
To break the cycle for the next generation, it’s up to our corporate managers, mentors and leaders to bridge trust. They can start with a mirror, and encourage a more diverse collective of people as mentors, a cross pollination that helps us think critically along the way while being supportive of our unique ways of working, thinking and delivering value.
We can also learn to manage ourselves better, by managing and pacing our expectations for success.
For without our ability to trust ourselves, trust our own ability, how can we trust others? We might lean on some too much, others too little. We might be selecting the wrong group to learn from.
Without visionary mentors or managers to help us bridge our trust with our whole selves — head, heart and intuition — and bridge trust with co-workers, we will always work too hard and care too much.
So I ask this of you: If you were standing on one end of a work problem, and your peer on another, can you be the leader to bridge or repair trust, or do you need your manager to help you to connect to trust?
Without sound decision making in a split second, you might just watch trust slip into the water and swim away.
For she is fae.
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