How To Build Trust & Maintain It – 10 Psychologically Proven Strategies

Why do you want to build trust? Trust is a psychological dimension of relationship building. Whether it is your colleague, boss, friend, family, spouse, customer, supplier, partner, neighbor, or anyone, trust is the only comfort that lands a successful relationship.

Easier to say than to do. Certainly, building trust is tricky in every situation. Especially, when you are trying to build a trust-based relationship with strangers, it becomes even trickier.

No matter how trickier gaining this skill is, 21^st-century professionals regard this skill as one of the most demanding ones. Especially, for sales and customer service professionals, having this skill is a blessing in disguise. Indeed, a confirmed ticket to their career success.

Despite it being a very basic skill required to maintain relationships with good harmony, not everyone can put this into play. Indeed, only a few out of every thousand realize to learn tactics that polish this skill. And if you are reading this post, you are fortunate and one of those few.

Without much ado, I would like to share with you ten key strategies that I know with my personal experience. Undeniably, these are the skills that I found most impactful and trust-winning for me in every conversation.

 

1- Start Conversation Like A Pal – build trust by behaving like an old friend

“They will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel”

__________ Carl W. Buechner

 

Whoever you start talking to, the very first challenge is to win his (or her) inclination towards you. How the other person treats you back depends on how he has taken your first impression. So, if you start friendly, you start it correctly.

Now, a question arises, if you are meeting a person the very first time, how would you be friendly? Certainly, you know nothing (or almost nothing) about him. So, what would you start with? Any incident? Or a habit? A social topic? What???

Well, being friendly means keeping your tone friendly. Without a doubt, you should be positive about the other person. Essentially, you should understand his perspective and talk accordingly. That’s what will make him feel that you have a friendly feeling towards him.

If you don’t know anything about the other person, you even don’t know whether he is suffering pain, or anger, or some kind of frustration. Therefore, being gentle pushes him to build trust in you.

 

2- Avoid Arguments

 

“Arguing isn’t communication, it’s noise”

_____ Tony Gaskins

 

How would you define an argument? I define it as a process of aimlessly yielding negative energies. Consequently, it doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong. This process keeps yielding negative energy. Resultantly, it forms a barrier between you and the other person. On a more accurate note, it is a psychological barrier that lifts other person’s trust from you.

What I recommend, independence is not an applicable policy, especially in trust-building conversations. You should value the inter-dependence. In the end, trust begets trust. Build trust and gain trust.

 

3- Use Empathy To Build Trust

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself”

_____ Mohsin Hamid

 

Empathy says, as the very first impression you should make the other person believe that you feel the same what he feels. What can be better than this to make others build trust in you?

The next level of empathy says, engage with the other person and do whatever it takes to get at the same level of feelings as the other person is at. Cooperate in conversation. And do it by engaging in the notions and sentiments of the other person.

 

4- Be Positive And Never Use Negative Words Or Forget To Build Trust

 

“Being positive won’t guarantee you will succeed. But being negative will guarantee you won’t”

_____ John Gorden

 

Liking or disliking the other person’s comments is a very common instinct. But what should your reply be composed of? Whether you should still be positive to the other person? I would suggest, NEVER REPLY IN NEGATION.

It is important in a conversation to see the content of the conversation from the other person’s perspective. And when you are doing it, you will find either the other person’s comments are more legitimate or less legitimate. Because they are not completely wrong.

“We talk because we know something, or we think we know something. Or, in the workplace, because there is an expectation that we ’should’ know something.” – Esther Jeles, A Corporate Behavioral Specialist.

When you negate someone, you question their judgment. In response, the other person would become defensive or emotional. In both these states, the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thinking is overtaken by the part that is responsible for emotions. Therefore, you will see there is almost none who responds logically in such a situation.

Don’t tell anyone that he is wrong or he will envy you. While you start a conversation or a new topic in the conversation, take off from the ground – zero state. Never make a judgment on the topic until you reach a conclusive point in the conversation.

You might call it diplomacy, but this is the only recourse that works. Want to build trust? And make the other person build trust in you? Then, you have got to do it. So, tighten up the belt to control the flow of conversation before you take off. 

 

5- Control The Flow Of Conversation, Admit Mistakes

“More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them”

_____ Herald J. Smith

 

Is it possible that the other person gets an intrinsic feeling that you are trying to prove him wrong, you are not doing it though? The answer is, Yes. He may. But there is a way to neutralize that intrinsic feeling. Accept that you may be wrong (don’t firmly say you are wrong, just give an idea that someone is wrong, and it may be you).

It is not about admitting your mistake, but about controlling the direction of the discussion. Accordingly, another rational move is to build trust.

The idea is to control where the conversation is leading. Hence, you have to come up with the responsibility to take over everything that happens during a conversation. If something during the conversation has changed the circumstances, it is you who did it. So, take responsibility, and change the circumstances back. Moreover, it is your empathy that plays as a guide to the emotions during the whole conversation. Use it wisely!

 

6- Establish Relationship To Maintain Trust

“We can improve our relationships with others by leaps and bounds if we become encouragers instead of critics”

_____ Joyce Meyer

 

Being engaged in conversation, or engaging someone else in a conversation doesn’t do it all. It does build trust but the peak point is somewhere you can establish a relationship. Because relationships work like connecting threads as in a spider’s web. As you make a relationship with someone, you get access to others who are in a relationship with that particular person. As a result, your network grows.

This is very important, especially, when you are doing business, or doing some job which requires access to many people, just like if you are a sales professional, a purchaser, merchandiser or so.

Consider a situation, where a sales professional has to make sales. According to you, what would be the most time taking task in the sales process? The answer is, accessing the people and then finding the right people to sell that thing to. If you have the capability of good conversation, and you can turn an engaging conversation into a relationship, you are then able to develop a network of hundreds or thousands of people. Therefore, with a network of hundreds or thousands of people, a sales professional would have the ultimate access to the required audience. Indeed, the audience to which the sales can be made. The same is the process for the purchaser.

 

7- Centralize Your Personality Around Noble Motives

“It is not about how much you do, but how much love you put into what you do that counts”

_____ Mother Teressa

 

The quality of our life depends on two factors:

1. How our relationships are going. Whether they are improving, declining, or at still state?
2. What is the trajectory of our occupational productivity is?

Certainly, the success of both these factors requires strong and beneficial relationships. The key to maintaining relationships is to build trust and then give the relationships some reason to grow.

What I have learned from my life, relationships grow more efficiently when we associate some noble motives with them. Let’s assume if you show some noble motives to your existing relationships, what impact would you get in return? The answer is, people will be moved. Ultimately, you will become an influential personality amongst all your relations.

Is it necessary that people also centralize themselves around the motives you are following? Your motives are yours, not theirs.

I would say yes. First of all, respect the inherent qualities of people. Because this is something giving you a base to establish a strong relationship. On this base, create a spectrum of noble motives around. If your motives are noble, people will admire them. Similarly, you must respect the noble motives of people in a relationship with you. Concludingly, this will keep the relationship going with strong ties.

 

8- Share Your Experience With People To Build Trust

 

“Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing”

_____ Steve Jobs

 

Remember, the ties demand common objectives to move together.

How do you create your objectives? You don’t actually. Contrarily, it is your past that does. The journey you have been traveling through reflects what your actual motives are.

While you are building an effective relationship, your past would play a crucial role in letting it establish. Therefore, fetch your experience out of your past and share it with the people. Consider, the junction of your personal life and occupational life is the driving force that is yielding objectives-oriented thoughts. Once you share your experience with the people around you, they become moved, influenced, and more believing in you.

Your personal life experiences give you and your companions a thrust to take relationships ahead.

 

9- Never Run In The Race Of Taking Credits

“The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them”

_____ Benjamin Jowett

 

With all our efforts for doing anything, we always want credit. Because, being a man, it is our nature. But there is no offense in wanting so. However, be careful when you are going to build trust in relationships. Since taking credit loses friends. Likewise, it kills the influence you have created and makes you unreliable in your future moves.

In the end, people remember only open-mindedness and nobility. Only a few cares who did something, whose idea it was, who took the risk, and who was the one to speak this all thing first becomes nothing then. So, focus on what affects your personality and shatters your noble character. Accordingly, avoid all those acts.

 

10- Encounter To Inspire

 

“The best view comes after the hardest climb”

_____ Anonymous

 

Encounter for anything that yields inspiring and worth remembering results. Contrarily, the encounters that dishearten and weaken are different than the constructive encounters for boost and inspiration. So, don’t confuse constructive encounters with destructive ones.

This is the only recourse that brings your best out of you. Similarly, it helps you get the best out of others. So, challenge yourself and your relations to be influential and noble for each other. First of all, build trust, be empathetic, surrender credit, establish noble motives and move on.

This may seem to discomfort your life once. But its results are even lasting and more fruitful. On the other hand, life with no challenge of moving ahead or no betterment is not a life indeed.