Trust

A little girl and her father were crossing a bridge. The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter: "Sweetheart, please hold my hand so that you don't fall into the river." The little girl said:"No, Dad. You hold my hand." "What's the difference?" Asked the puzzled father. "There's a big difference," replied the little girl. "If I hold your hand and something happens to me, chances are that I may let your hand go. But if you hold my hand, I know for sure that no matter what happens, you will never let my hand go."

 

This is a lovely story and tells us how trust can go a long way in a relationship. I like a quote from an Unknown Author who says that "Trust is letting go of needing to know all the details before you open your heart." People who can do this are really gifted because they are able to trust others very easily. However, what I have noticed with people who can do this is that they lose trust as soon as something goes wrong and it takes very long to build the trust again. Most of the times, the trust is lost for ever.

 

Many a time, we take a long time to build relationships and trust in those relationships. We struggle with the question whether or not we can trust the person.  As Ernest Hemingway said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”  I have always been struck by these pre-nuptial contracts that people sign up before they get married. This, in my opinion (and I can be completely wrong in this), shows absolute lack of trust. Marriage is probably the biggest commitment we make in life. If this commitment to a relationship starts with a lack of trust, then, I am not sure how we can make that relationship work. I understand that pre-nuptial contracts are like insurance policies. What beats me is that we decide to get married but before that we sign a contract as to how our wealth will be split, if we get divorced.

 

As in personal relationships, we need to nurture relationships at work too. These get built over time and becomes difficult if people live across countries and don't see each other regularly. Stephen Covey says in his book The Speed of Trust, "The one thing that changes everything is trust." Trust increases speed of doing business, cuts costs and improves profitability significantly. This is more so in large multinational corporations that cut across 100s of countries. These large corporations need a very high level of trust and collaboration (apart from controls, process and technologies) to succeed. In my experience, trust goes a long way at work. It breaks bureaucracy, brings lot of freedom in to work, gets better outcomes and helps corporations win in the market place.

 

Lastly, I do want to mention trust and faith that we place on professionals, especially doctors. When faced with life threatening situations, we put complete trust on the doctor. God comes in the form of this doctor. Our life depends on this doctor and we decide to do that. When I was chatting with a friend on this topic of trusting the doctor, he said, "This is like surrendering to God." When I heard this, I was reminded of a quote of Corrie ten Boom who said, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”

 

Adversity - The God and the Devil

As I watched the unfolding of nature's fury in Uttarakhand in India with the flooding and the landslides that swept away homes and buried small villages under 9 to 10 feet of earth, I noticed that the incident brought the best and the worst in humans.  The stories that were telecast and printed in newspapers showed how humans behave and the contrast was so stark that it left me wondering how and why there are massive differences in human beings that live on this earth.

 

On the one side we saw the army, volunteers from across the country and donors from across the country helping out and doing everything they could to save 80,000+ people who were stranded in these areas.  I saw a photograph of army men who had formed a human bridge so that the stranded people could crawl or walk over them to reach to safety. I saw volunteers from local villages and townships go across to the areas and help people reach safer places. Saw the army helicopters evacuate these 80,000+ people despite some of the worst weather conditions. In fact, there was a copter crash and few of the army men died in this attempt. Saw thousands of people from across India donate generously towards the rescue effort.

 

As we heard such fantastic stories, we also heard some of the worst stories. A roti (piece of bread) being sold at Indian Rupees (INR) 300 as food stalls tried to make money out of this disaster. Some transporters asked for INR 60,000 to take people to safety. Few politicians toured the areas for photo opportunities (elections are nearing in India). Corruption ran high in the State Machinery as relief material, food and clothing did not reach the people suffering but ended up in the hands of middlemen who sold them.

 

An adversity brings out the best and the worst in mankind and this incident in Uttarakhand is no exception. I saw similar deeds take place in many countries across the world in the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean. This absolute contrast is what I call diversity.  It takes all of us to make this world. If we don't see and experience the worst, we will never appreciate the best. Each one of us is made up of this diversity - the absolutely good (that we call God) and the absolutely unimaginable (that we call the Devil). We don't need to search for God or the Devil - they both reside in us. How much of the Devil we are able to suppress and how much of the God we are able to bring forth decides how we behave in a given situation. That is probably why we see people react differently to a given situation and the difference in behavior could be significant. 

 

Such adversity sometimes crush the human spirit. But, they also bring out the resilience in us. According to life coach Eleanor Chin, writing in "Positive Psychology News," "Character strengths such as creativity, courage, kindness, persistence, optimism, gratitude, humor and spirituality are exactly the personal resources needed in times of adversity to solve problems or just to stay afloat." Maybe, this is the "God" inside each of us that we need to summon as we go through difficult times.