I am often accused of being too trusting. Many people seem to think that you shouldn’t trust anyone. After all, “you can’t be too careful these days!”.
But is that really true?
I don’t doubt that there are many people in this world that have less than the best intentions and that you need to keep your eyes open but most people are fundamentally good at heart. In our paranoia of what might go wrong in our lives, we have forgotten the value of trust itself.
Whether you like it or not, to some extent you have no choice but to trust everyone around you. You trust them to obey traffic laws, to pay your salary, to look after your children, not to give you food poisoning, not to steal your bicycle, to honour contracts, to supply with electricity and so much more. We have no choice but to trust everyone around us in order for our lives to function. Trust is the basic foundation of any relationship or society. Without trust, we are nothing but lone bandits afraid of all other creatures, and I certainly don’t want to become one of those.
I have a wonderful marriage and a successful business, both of which are founded on an enormous amount of trust.
Whatever you consider good in your life, it has trust at its core. Without trust, there is no goodness and there is no happiness.
This naturally means that we all need more trust, not less. It is only by trusting others that we help create a culture of caring, which cures hostility and protects us from the things that we are afraid of. When we trust others, we earn their trust and they become more trusting towards others, but when we distrust others the opposite occurs. We need to embrace trust as the antidote to the things we fear, not the cause of them.
Everyone will get hurt from time to time and we should always have our eyes wide open to what is going on around us so that we can make good decisions in life and avoid dangerous situations, but distrust is not the solution.
Next time you accuse someone of being too trusting, ask yourself whether it is in fact you who are not trusting enough.
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