Law 4
Trust Predictability Instead of Hope and Faith
Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.
—ALFRED MONTAPER
As should be apparent by now, the higher path I’m calling significance involves the assumption of risk. It is risky to commit ourselves to obeying higher laws and to persevering day after day. Stretching also involves willingly stepping into risk for the sake of discovering more of who we already are. So, what drives and fortifies us to take risks? Some combination of hope and faith that obedience to a law will bear fruit; hope that our efforts will help us achieve our goals motivates all that we do, from getting dressed in the morning to watering the lawn to going to work. We wouldn’t bother planting a seed if we didn’t have hope or faith that it would grow, nor would we take time to learn anything if we didn’t have hope or faith that our undertaking would benefit us. Hope and faith propel us to give anything a try.
From another perspective, however, hope and faith are relatively empty concepts. Spiritual guides teach us that faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; if we have faith we hope for things which are not seen, which are true. But too many people live their lives hoping to be happy, and because they only hope, they never really are. Too many religionists drop to their knees to pray and pray, forgetting to stand on their feet and do their part in facilitating an answer to that prayer. Hope and faith amount to mere optimism and a positive outlook, without anything substantive to back them up.
Trust, by contrast, is a form of optimism that’s actually grounded in something—a deep and abiding knowledge of the people we’re trusting. No, our knowledge isn’t perfect, and we sometimes wind up with our trust betrayed. But when we trust, whether in ourselves or others, it is because we have become aware, over time, of who we are and because we can take assurance in the predictability and consistency of us. Unlike hope and faith, trust is earned—it means something. Hope and faith allow us to speculate on the possibilities; trust founded on real knowledge allows us to calculate the probabilities. Hope is blind and oftentimes a reckless risk; trust is a calculated risk. To walk the path of significance, we must transcend mere hope and faith and embrace trust—in ourselves, in our colleagues, in our relationships, in our world. One of my mentors, Dick Grace, celebrates the advanced, highest Law of Trust by observing, “To risk is to momentarily lose your footing. Not to risk is to permanently lose your self. To regain your footing and balance, trust yourself.”
Getting Real with Ourselves
Trusting begins with unconditional love and nonjudgmental acceptance, which is how we put faith and hope into action. Learning to trust ourselves means becoming brutally honest in acknowledging who we are, even the parts of ourselves we might not like. We must know and accept the absolute truth regarding our origin, place, and relationship with the universe, staring our failures and shortcomings in the face. And we must dispense with many of the common myths we fall back on to hide and explain away our shortcomings when the going gets tough.
Chief among these myths are what psychologists call the Four Myths of Feeling: “I can make you feel good; I can make you feel bad; you can make me feel good; you can make me feel bad.” No. Nobody can make us feel any way other than the way we choose to feel. The only thing we are not in charge of is whether or not we are in charge. We have the power to feel unless we decide to relinquish this power to someone else. And when we don’t feel happy or satisfied, we need to reflect on what we are doing to make ourselves feel as we do. We need to understand and accept our own tendencies in the act of taking responsibility for them.
If you’re angry at your boss, ask yourself: What have you done to become angry? Why are you letting your boss’s actions get to you? What are your patterns and trigger points? If your boss is angry at you, what is he doing to himself in the moment to bring about that emotion? And shouldn’t you stop playing the role of the pleaser, thinking you need to mollify your boss at every turn, when, in fact, he needs to accept responsibility for his own feelings?
When we relinquish our power, our helplessness tends to escalate, incorporating still other excuses that obscure self-understanding. We all, I’m sure, will recognize elements of what I call the Five Theories of Action:
And finally . . .
My response to all of this is: Are you serious? Some people actually believe that a Creator or Supreme Being orchestrated two hundred people from thirty-five different states and five foreign countries to board TWA flight 800 from New York to Paris on the same day. And when the plane blows up and kills everybody—it was meant to be? And when a businesswoman got in an argument with her husband that day, which caused her to miss this flight, these unkind words were also meant to be?
Drivers can drink, pilots can err, planes can malfunction, air traffic controllers can screw up, teenagers can get confused, the female reproductive system can be traumatized or an abnormal chromosome can produce birth defects, we can all get sick, earthquakes can cause tsunamis and devastation in Thailand, Haiti, Chile, and Japan, but none of these circumstances or events were caused by divine intervention or orchestrated by a mystical influence. If these calamities and tragedies were meant to be, it is because the universe was organized by a set of laws, and when any one of the laws is not obeyed or collides with another corresponding or noncorresponding law, some unexpected bad things can happen to good people.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, officially called the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, was an undersea megathrust quake caused by subduction, the sideways and downward movement of the edge of a plate of the earth’s crust into the mantle beneath another plate. With a magnitude of 9.3, this was the third largest quake ever recorded, and the one with the longest duration. It caused the entire planet to vibrate as much as one centimeter, triggering other earthquakes as far away as Alaska, inundating coastal communities with waves up to ninety-eight feet high, and killing over 230,000 people in fourteen countries. The tsunami wasn’t “meant to be”; it occurred, ultimately, because of the basic laws of physics governing the movement of tectonic plates and oceans.
We humans believe in the Four Myths of Feeling and the Five Theories of Action for one reason: We’re afraid. These excuses serve to eliminate the stress that comes with taking responsibility for our lives and dealing with tragedy, disappointment, discouragement, real depression, and failure. Yet stress elimination comes at a cost. The more we fall back on excuses, the less we actually know ourselves in all our ambiguity and complexity, and the less able we are to trust ourselves. When we’re afraid of others, we can’t meet them with trust, either; and when we’re afraid of life, there’s nothing left to trust.
Everybody’s Born with a Conscience
Now, you might ask: If we peel away the layers of subterfuge and really confront ourselves, will what we find inspire our trust? Yes, and I’ll tell you why: Trust is based one hundred percent on predictability, and predictability is always linked to consistency. As we learned in Law 1, “The Law of Obedience,” every person on this planet carries an innate sense of right and wrong, a natural ability to decipher between good and evil. Conscience, as we call this gut instinct, is that little voice in our heads that whispers, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do.” Conscience is the reason we experience a natural attraction to ethical codes of conduct and instinctively live by moral-based core values, both in business and in life.
We can feel secure that our conscience will never fail us. True, our desire to follow our conscience can waver; it decreases as we continue to do the wrong thing, because error desensitizes our awareness and quarantines us in a place past the point of feeling. It’s like walking into a room that stinks so bad you want to retch, but if you stay there long enough, you become accustomed to the smell, and it doesn’t bother you anymore. Still, our conscience itself remains true. As far as we may stray, we can always reconnect to it if and when we’re willing to do the work.
As evidence of our intrinsic ability to know what is good and bad, right and wrong, and our ability to truthfully judge when and if we decide to, we need only speak with teenagers, and ask them one question, “If you had you for a child, would you be nervous?” Most cringe and laugh, “Whoa, I wouldn’t even let me go out! I would have grounded myself as a baby!” Voilà! A kid’s conscience exposed and constantly at work for all to see.
Because we all possess consciences, we can take comfort in the notion that life’s most important answers already lie inside of each of us. We can affirm that there are no mistakes in life, only lessons, and that a lesson is repeated, sometimes presented in various forms, until we learn it. If we don’t learn easy lessons, they get harder. Life has no meaning except the meaning we give it—precisely why it’s important to associate with the appropriate conscience-following individuals whom you can trust to help you figure it all out.
Trust Others as if Life Depends on It—Because It Does!
That brings me to relationships. Trust is the most important ingredient in every relationship. It’s the most difficult leadership and friendship element to develop, the easiest to lose, and clearly the toughest to ever regain. Trust is also the critical first step to building a winning team and launching and sustaining a profitable business. Without trust, every relationship is shallow and fleeting. Because we are interdependent as human beings living in a global society, trust is our most important connector.
Just as our ability to trust ourselves originates in a perception of consistency and predictability, so, too, does our ability to trust other people. You can trust people who are so consistent that you can actually predict what they will think and do and how they will react in every situation. We trust our spouses and significant others to be in mixed company out of our presence and feel no jealousy because we know exactly how our trusted one has behaved in the past. We trust coworkers because they keep their promises by getting to work on time, sticking to their ten-minute breaks and forty-five-minute lunches, coming in early and staying late to help the team get the job done on time. When fellow employees and teammates are consistently honest, loyal, and helpful, they are predictably positive, productive, and worthy of our full, unconditional trust.
In no other work environment have I encountered such constant and intense trust than in the U.S. Military, especially the U.S. Air Force. As pilots from all aircrafts have repeatedly told me, “We meticulously fly by trust in teamwork. Teamwork begins and ends with cooperation and coordination, which can only come through complete and total trust.”
Formation flying constitutes an especially startling display of trust in motion. In my ride in a T-38 jet trainer at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, we took off in formation with another aircraft and flew in formation for sixty minutes in acrobatic air show maneuvers only three feet apart from wing to wing. When we landed, flight instructor Lieutenant Colonel Ben Stagg explained to me that formation flying is done entirely by sight, called triangulation. You keep your eyes fixed on the lead airplane next to you, forming a triangle between the wing tip, the thickness of the wing, and the stub aileron at the back of the tail. The goal is to keep the triangle always the same in relation to the distance and position of your aircraft to the other. The pilot in the lead plane determines everything you do and everywhere you go. Altitude, speed, direction—you do not question; you only follow.
How do formation pilots do it? Do they rely on hope or faith? No. Faith without works is not faith at all. Stagg was clear that it is not blind faith. You don’t follow the lead pilot because you are blind, but because you see. You see in his abilities hard work, integrity, and excellence. Therefore, flying in formation is about trust. You are holding your control stick, and the other pilot is holding his. Because of preparation and perfect practice, you trust your feel for the control stick. You trust your eye-hand coordination, and out of trust and respect for the other pilot’s commitment to excellence and preparation, you have trust in his feel for flying.
Trustworthy Institutions
Trustworthy individuals give rise to trustworthy institutions. The world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has won the trust of my entire family, and I’d like to tell you why.
In 1984 my dad was diagnosed with malignant carcinoid cancer in his stomach, intestines, and liver, and given only six months to live. He didn’t have the strength to walk and was confined to a wheelchair.
A week later, Dad qualified as one of twenty-five patients to participate in an exclusive experimental treatment program at the Mayo Clinic. From the minute we arrived, Mayo extraordinarily distinguished itself from all other hospitals: There was no wait at admissions, and my dad was made to feel as though he was the single most important person who ever walked through their doors. The nurses carefully wheeled my dad into a large room where we met “Team Mayo,” headed up by world-renowned oncologist Dr. Allan Schutt. The motivational moment for me was when my dad was asked, “Is there a difference between dying of cancer and living with cancer, and what would it be for you?”
Seven days later, my dad walked out of the Mayo Clinic on his own, with renewed physical and emotional strength, stable vital signs, and a real belief that they were all going to help him fight off his horrible disease if he himself would lead the fight.
On a subsequent visit back to Mayo, this time alone, my dad experienced what my family calls the “Mayo Way.” Doctors were going to test him using a special echocardiograph. A tube is inserted into the patient’s esophagus so that the operator can more closely examine the heart than a traditional cardiograph would permit. The echocardiograph machine was new, and other American hospitals had not yet acquired it. In due course, Dad lay on the table with the incredible Dr. A. Jamil Tajik and a nurse hovering over him. Here’s what my dad wrote in his journal:
After preparations got under way, including the spraying of my throat to make it numb and more receptive to the black tube, Dr. Tajik asked me if I had any of my family with me. I told him that I was alone. He said there were some risks in using the machine that he had to advise me of. At the end of the tube was a mirror-like tip through which the action of the heart was relayed to a screen. The good doctor explained that as he attempted to thrust the tube down my throat he might cut the esophagus, or he might even cut the heart. I asked him, “What then?” and he replied that I could die on the table. With a deep breath, I knew I could trust a Mayo doctor and agreed to the procedure. The first try the tube would not go down. He pulled it back up, and the second time he was successful.
Dad concluded:
I presume that the nurse noticed a tear in my eye that dropped and ran down my cheek as we proceeded with the test. She promptly and gently held my hand and began to whisper and assure me that everything would be all right. I had never felt the need for third-party support as strongly as I did at that moment. And in the “Mayo Way,” that dear nurse, whose name I will probably never know, gave me, through her soft, confident voice and compassionate, tender touch, a beautiful fulfillment that I should trust the doctor, trust her that all would be fine. As I lay helpless on that uncomfortable bed a thousand miles from home, she refused to let me feel alone.
Because of the Mayo Clinic’s polished professionalism and compassionate service, we were able to enjoy and continue to learn from my dad for another six and a half years. Every twelve weeks, my dad excitedly traveled cross-country to Mayo for seven days of tests and treatments. He said he fought hard to live because he wanted to give all he could to Mayo and help them advance their specialized treatment for carcinoid cancer. Because of my dad’s successful, long-term care, the FDA approved the drug given to him for regular use in other U.S. hospitals.
My dad loved the Mayo Clinic, and so do all of us in the Clark clan. We have faith in the Mayo Clinic, and we hope for the best for all their patients, but even more than that, we trust them. The consistent kindness and hard work of the doctors and nurses there has earned that trust. We need more organizations like the Mayo Clinic. What can your organization do starting today to provide services that earn similar levels of trust?
The Bottom Line
Successful people subscribe to the preparatory principles of hope and faith. Significant individuals live the advanced, highest Law of Trust. Hope and faith amount to blind, easy optimism, whereas trust is grounded in past experience and actually means something. We trust others (and ourselves) because we have taken time to know them and examine them honestly, thus certifying them as worthy of our trust. As significant people understand, trust is given, received, and fully accepted only when it is earned, when all parties involved do what they should, when they should, giving it everything they’ve got when less would be sufficient, not because others expect superior effort, but because they demand it of themselves—because their consciences demand it. Trust is the backbone and conscience is the spinal cord of every meaningful relationship, even relationships we have with institutions. Without trust and conscience, relationships die.
Four Suggested Action Steps to Learning to Trust