Trust your Instinct!

When I consider the word ‘trust’ I immediately think of my children or money i.e. who would I trust to look after my children and who would I entrust management of my money to? When you are considering the personal arena of trust it is so much easier to articulate and describe what it means to you as you can truly feel it in with your gut instinct. Personal trust has lifelong impact and meaning.

• The dictionary has a myriad of descriptions for the word ‘trust’:
• To have or place confidence in; depend on.
• To expect with assurance; assume: I trust that you will be on time.
• To believe: I trust what you say.
• To place in the care of another; entrust. custody
• To grant discretion to confidently: Can I trust them with ……?

On a professional basis, trust is just as important but with a far greater emphasis on areas of reliance, confidence and confidentiality. Without trust you cannot do business with others you cannot delegate to employees, you could never leave your till in a shop. Without trust your life and your business would come to a grinding halt – at some point you have to trust others.

So at what point do we make the leap between establishing trust from long term relationship building, experience and knowledge to that of purely following your instinct. In recent times I have worked with an organisation that was a long way from my normal environment, I knew right from the start that it was not going to be a long term business relationship there was a reason for us working together and once that time had passed the relationship would move on. Which it now has – my instinct was right.

Throughout my life I have been guilty of being both too trusting of others and also of writing some people off too early who have turned out to be far more powerful and supportive in the long run. The reason I believe why I have trusted people too easily in the past is because they have appeared on face value to have similar values and drivers to me – unfortunately in many of these instances I have placed them in a higher place than they actually deserve.

A classic example of this is in the arena of property investing. Working as an independent for the best part of ten years I researched a number of property investments as a means to build my pension. I investigated various environments, communities and networks and jumped in with both feet. What I failed to do was to fully investigate the partners I was going to be working with to check that they actually had all the necessary knowledge to achieve ‘my goals’. What happened in the end was that they learned through my disasters and situations rather than helping to prevent me from making erroneous decisions. I am still trying to dig my way out of these situations – so if you know anyone who wants to buy a two bedroom apartment in Cyprus, please get in touch!

I so wanted the people I was working with to be the real experts that I confused trust with the hunger to succeed and failed to do enough due diligence on these partners until it was too late. I allowed my instinct to be overridden by my desire to build an attractive property empire that would make me financially independent and allow my family and I to live the life of Reilly.

Being a naturally positive person I tend to look for the good in people and ‘assume’ they are genuine and truly understand what they are doing. There are situations where my instinct or gut feel tells me something doesn’t quite add up and I have now learned (the hard way) that how you respond to these internal alarm bells can save or make you a fortune. Trust your instinct – it is right most of the time.