Greetings from Barcelona☀️
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest.
If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into facilitation, learning, and how to live a creative life. A special welcome to the Virtual Connection Lab members. It’s great to have you here.
In this week’s edition 👉How to establish trust with your groups quickly
Let’s jump right in!
🤔It’s the unspoken question our group members ask themselves at the start of every session.
👉Can I trust the facilitator?
Before you say anything, your group members are already scanning your body language. They are picking up on your facial expressions, posture, and even your clothing. Within the first seven seconds of the meeting, people will have a solid impression of who you are. And it takes a mere 1/10th of a second for others to start determining traits like trustworthiness.
Trust is dynamic and complex.
When Scaling Intimacyfounder Jenny Sauer-Klein invited me to co-facilitate a live session on trust last week, I jumped. Trust is one of those big words that means lots of different things to different people. I wanted to get clearer myself on what trust is so I can better understand how to build it.
You can consciously create and grow trust.
It’s one of the first things that exceptional facilitators do. Creating trust lays the foundation for building psychological safety and connection. And it’s the key that unlocks deeper learning in your groups. Learning ways to establish trust quickly will help you to take your groups further, faster.
🤔What is trust and how do you establish it quickly with your groups?
That’s our Quest for this week 🔎(PS this is a BIG topic and one that we’ll keep exploring!)
👉The difference between trust and psychological safety
👉Understanding two kinds of trust
🔗 The Difference Between Trust and Psychological Safety
An article from the Psychological Safety team in the UK. I found this article when I was preparing for the session with Jenny.
Trust and psychological safety are often confused. I realized that I have used them interchangeably. But trust is just one component of psychological safety.
I liked their definition of trust. It touches on one of the key elements of trust – vulnerability.
Trust can be defined as the extent to which we hold expectations of others in the face of uncertainty about their motives, and yet are willing to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
The main difference between trust and psychological safety comes down to this👇
👉Trust is a personal phenomenon.
👉Psychological safety is a group phenomenon.
Read the full article 👉 here.
🧠❤️Understanding Two Types of Trust
Have you ever been in a workshop where the presenter lists all of their professional qualifications and then dives right into their content? I always feel like there is something missing that prevents me from fully entrusting them with my learning.
I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing until I came across research on two kinds of trust – cognitive and affective. Organizational Behaviour professor Erin Meyer breaks it down like this:
Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills, and reliability. This is trust from the head.
Affective trust arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy, or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart.
I realized that when you lead groups you need to earn both kinds of trust.
Gwyn Wansbrough 🚢How do you earn both types of trust with your groups?
💡Quote of the week
“If people see you as a human being, you’re working on things and you’re not perfect—people relate to that and can build trust.”
Stephen M.R. Covey, Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great leaders Unleash Greatness in Others
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Creatively yours,
