The story

I made a decision and trusted the wrong person, but instead of losing faith in people, I learned to pay closer attention to the important role trust plays in living a happy life.

I’ll tell you my story through The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey.

The idea is simple:

When trust goes up, life moves faster and becomes a more enjoyable ride.

When trust goes down, everything gets heavier.

In the book, he describes the 5 waves as a framework to creating trust.

Here’s how I’m riding those waves right now:

1. Self-trust

This is personal credibility, self-confidence and acting with integrity.

It took a while, but I had to rebuild trust in myself. When you’re duped by someone like I was, you start to doubt your judgment. How did I miss the signs?

When you don’t trust yourself, you can feel it. You’re off balance, always adjusting. I grew up a pretty confident kid, so it was uncomfortable for me.

The tuning point was realizing the other person lacked confidence and needed to lie, not me.

I can’t fault myself for the decisions I made with the little information i had.

Integrity is when your actions match your words. I hold my head high.

I want to continue to be trusting, and it starts with myself.

2. Relationship trust

This is the trust between people, built through honesty and consistency, by doing what you say you’re going to do.

After I was duped, this wave of trust crashed. I got consistent lies and actions that went contrary to what was agreed.

Sadly, it affected how I see others, not just myself.

For me, this showed up most clearly at home: with my wife and kids. That’s the trust that matters most for me.

My lack of trust in myself and others led me to act in ways that didn’t show them the best on some days.

With strong family trust, everything else feels manageable; when it’s not, nothing else really makes up for it.

But when I put the focus back on myself, back on my wife, my kids, my family, everything else fell back in place. I started to show up again with a smile on my face. All my relationships started to get better.

3. Organizational trust

This is where trust becomes practical, inside teams, companies, and organizations. When you earn trust at this level, you can also earn money.

Our relationship was a business one, and the broken trust did not just affect me; it also negatively impacted others, including employees, clients, and partners.

I decided to take a break from working for others and start working for myself instead.

As a fractional sales leader, I don’t have the luxury of time. There’s no getting-to-know-you luncheon, all-hands meeting introductions, 3 months of 1:1s, onboarding, and probation.

I need to build trust quickly because, without it, nothing moves, and I’m accountable.

If I pay attention to trust, trust will pay me back in opportunities.

Lately, I’ve also been turning a friendship into a business partnership and, I learned my lessons, I know how those can end.

When that trust is there, things feel simple. When it’s not, work becomes more work.

4. Market trust

This is your reputation, it’s what people think of you when you’re not in the room, what gets said behind your back.

I don’t spend too much time thinking about this, sometimes to a fault. LinkedIn, for me, is often more of a place to say what I think than to manage other peoples’ perception of me, which probably doesn’t always help my reputation.

But there’s a tradeoff.

If you optimize too much for how you’re perceived, you start to lose alignment with yourself, and that brings you back to level one.

And I’d rather trust myself than have others trust a version of me that isn’t real.

Trust in the market matters, but your real value is your self-worth. #KnowYourWorth

5. Societal trust

This is about creating collective value for everyone and ensuring that we have a society that trusts us to contribute in meaningful ways.

This is the hardest one for me right now. Not just because of what I have been dealing with, but you see it everywhere: friends losing jobs, escalating global conflicts, and societal systems that don’t always feel like they’re working the way they should.

It feels unstable, and when trust at this level drops, not only does it affect everything beneath it, but it also puts things into perspective, because it’s out of your control.

And maybe that’s where happiness actually lives.

Not in trying to fix everything, but in keeping your own foundation intact and focusing on what you can control: myself and how I show up to the relationships and organizations that matter.

As I continue to work through challenges that I cannot avoid, instead of running away from my problems and letting them weigh me down, I will run towards them with the speed of trust.

The pebble

Me trusting my own judgment again after one bad decision

The challenge

This week, rebuild one wave of trust. Pick the wave that feels shakiest right now — self, relationship, organizational, market, or societal — and take one small action to strengthen it. Trust yourself enough to try.