Trust is one of the most common words in the English language. Although we usually associate it with personal relationships, trust and betrayal are important elements in our professional, as well as in our personal lives.

According to the 2017 Gallup State of the Workplace Report, the lack of trust in the workplace contributes to active disengagement by employees and interferes with the ability of an organization to build a loyal customer base. Companies that have employees who are engaged in their work are 147% more profitable. The bottom line is that lack of trust costs companies a lot of money.

So how can we do better in matters of trust and betrayal? In order to cultivate trust and to know what to do to repair injuries of betrayal it is important to understand what trust really is and why we break it in the first place.

The most practical definition of trust I have come across comes from Dr. Brene Brown, grounded theory researcher and bestselling author of four #1 New York Times best sellers, including Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection.

I am particularly fond of social science grounded-theory research because it involves the construction of theory through methodical gathering and analysis of data. This is in contrast to developing theory by starting off with a hypothesis and trying to find out if the data will support it or not.

Dr. Brown has given us an amazing, measurable framework that demystifies how we can build trust in practical ways in our personal and professional relationships.

She defines trust as “choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.”

She uses the acronym B.R.A.V.I.N.G. to outline the behaviors you and I can do every day to get closer to mastery and away from disaster when it comes to trust. Here is her outline.

B is for Boundaries. We cannot cultivate trust unless we are clear about boundaries and respect one another’s boundaries.

R is Reliability. In this information-overloaded age we are living in, it is hard to keep up with life’s demands. However, if we care to build trust with people, we need to be able to do what we say we are going to do, over and over and over again. If we have a hard time doing that, then we can practice becoming better at saying no to additional demands.

A is for Accountability. We cannot build trust or repair past injuries if we don’t own our mistakes, be accountable for them, and apologize for them.

V is for Vault. We cannot cultivate trust with anybody if we don’t treat others with respect by honoring what they have shared with us. When we do not keep confidentiality as an integral part of the parameters of a relationship, that in and of itself is a corrosive form of betrayal that is very hard to recover from. Even when you share with me something about someone else (aka gossiping), you still disrupt my ability to trust you!

I is for Integrity. We cannot build trust if our actions do not align with our values. We cannot lie about somebody because we are upset with them and then profess that honesty is the cornerstone of our business.

N is for Non-judgment. We cannot trust one another when we come from a place of judgment. It takes courage to ask for help and expose our vulnerability. Judging someone for having the courage to be real with us can pose a significant obstacle to building trust. We need to do better at honoring the courage to be real, and it starts by us doing better in asking for help and not judging ourselves for that.

G is for Generosity. We cannot build trust if we don’t cultivate a model of being with others that leaves some room for mistakes, that does not assume the worst about one another, and that gives each other the benefit of the doubt. If we are all brave in bringing up what is not working and are ready to be accountable for our mistakes, then we can easily recover from betrayals and enjoy positive and wholesome relationships.

When we have so much evidence about the importance of trust in relationships and the great impact it has on the health of individuals and organizations, why would any of us break it?

Research has linked many unhealthy human behaviors to structural changes in our brain that occur as a result of negative early-life experiences. This altered brain structure makes it more difficult for us as adults to process internal negative emotions without perceiving them unconsciously as threats to our survival. This results in our trouble with not being accountable, not having or respecting boundaries, and not holding confidentiality.

We can see this not only at the theoretical level from behavioral science, but also through FMRI imaging techniques that reveal structural differences between people that were raised with positive versus adverse childhood experiences.

When we experience the pain of rejection, (for example, when a client wants to cancel their contract with us) having the ability to process and express our emotions in a healthy way hinges upon our ability to regulate the temporary discomfort we are feeling and not perceive it as a major cue for danger. When we allow an event like the loss of a client to be interpreted as a danger cue, we activate our stress response, which draws our metabolic energy away from our amazing thinking brain to the less evolved parts of our brain.

Losing access to the executive functioning part of our brain means we may slip and slide into the realm of behaving with others in ways that lead to distrust and betrayal.

However, we can train our brain to work with us and not against us by using everyday, simple practices that allow us to improve our ability to make intelligent use of our emotions.

As abstract as this concept may seem, it starts with the single act of being accountable, if and when, we temporarily lose access to our best self and engage in behaviors that are not healthy. I have created five questions to use to easily turn your executive brain back on when stress has overwhelmed it so you can return to being your best self. You can access these questions when you join my online community.http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen

Although we may have to call upon our self-compassion in regard to having a brain that is more prone to seeing danger where it does not exist because of our past experiences, we have the power to change any part of our life that is not working for us as long as we focus on what we can control. This includes the power to reshape our brain to help us build more trust at work and at home!

We are stressed out beyond belief. In fact, there has never been a time when we were this stressed!         And stress is killing us—literally. Science has proven that stress is the direct or indirect cause of more than 90% of today’s diseases. We usually blame external circumstances for how stressed we are: the economy, our parents, our boss, the corporate culture of our organization.

But I have some news for you:

1. Our relationship to stress—how our body responds to demands from our environment—actually originates in the architecture of our nervous system, which begins to form approximately twenty-eight days after our father’s sperm fertilizes our mom’s egg!
2. The plasticity of our brain, called neuroplasticity, means our brain can change based on experience. This offers an amazing opportunity to use our mind to change our brain to better manage any negative symptoms of stress we experience.

Stress almost killed me, and when it happened, it did not make any sense cognitively. At that point in my life, I had checked off most of the status quo expectations. I enjoyed financial security. I had a lovely family, a decent social life, an overall healthy lifestyle, and a career many would die for. Why was I so stressed out, and what was the discord that was making me sick? Like the good scientist that I am, I decided to get to the bottom of this, once and for all, and learn everything I could about this insidious obstacle to my health, happiness, and productivity, known as stress.

Stress is a state. 

Stress is a physiological state, affecting biological functions like our heart rate. It is psychological, affecting our mental and emotional state. And stress is behavioral, because it drives our behavior. The state of stress is triggered by perceived or actual threats to our well-being and survival.

Stress includes all the things our body does to cope with an adverse or unexpected situation. Interestingly, all the changes our body makes to cope with an adverse situation (including arousal, autonomic, and neuroendocrine activation) will be the same whether we are mugged in a New York city back-street alley, or our boss tells us we have to stand up in front of a group and make a presentation and we are terrified of public speaking.

So, one of the best ways we can mitigate the negative effects of stress on our lives is by increasing our awareness as to why we respond to demands from the environment in ways that impede our health, happiness, and performance.

In the beginning there was one cell.

Vulnerability to over-activation of our stress response originates from predisposing factors that are the consequences of our genetic makeup and of the experiences we have had.

The structure, and hence, function of our brain and nervous system is in a constant flow of re-organization based on stimuli from the environment.

 In the moment that a sperm meets an egg two cells called gametes, each containing half the genetic material of each parent, form one cell—a zygote.

The encoded information in the genes we inherited from our parents will be traits that will determine how we are predisposed to respond to things in life, like whether we get agitated in busy, loud places like the mall, or if we feel more anxious than the average person with novelty.

It is, of course, important to note that not all genes we inherit will be expressed, and we now know that genes actually have to become activated. How each cell functions depends on gene activation and expression. This is part of a whole new branch of science called epigenetics.

Additionally, beyond the genes we inherited from our parents, we begin to learn how safe the world is during the time in our mother’s womb by the way our mother returns to baseline after something worries or scares her. Our nervous system follows our mother’s nervous system in utero, establishing a blueprint of how resilient, or able to bounce back to our calm, balanced state we are going to be later on in our life. This will also play a role in how stressed out we will feel later by the ups and downs of life.

Who is to blame for our stress?

As it turns out, our early experiences greatly impact our development, from a biological as well as an emotional development perspective.

However, instead of choosing to blame someone for what took place in the past, we can let go of the past and leverage the ability of our brain to change based on experience, if we want to completely transform our relationship with stress today.

For example, shame forms the core of low self esteem, which is an outcome of not being responded to (or even worse, traumatized) in childhood. On the other hand, shame is based on an inaccurate belief, which is “I am not good enough.”

By redefining the terms of our life, we can identify many obstacles to optimal living regardless of how our nervous system was sculpted in our early development, and we can change the narrative of that story.

What we think, how we feel, how we behave, what matters to us—these are all outcomes of our nervous system’s functioning.

But we can reshape the functioning of our nervous system. “Where attention goes, neural connection grows.” Neurons are the basic cells of our immaculate nervous systems, and when they consume energy they strengthen the circuits of the brain in the areas where we direct our attention and focus.

We have the ability to be a scientist in our own life by paying attention to our mental activity. We can re-wire or induce structural changes of our brain so that it becomes a brain that will work with us and not against us.

You are a scientific marvel and more amazing than you ever realized!

The fact of how incredibly complex you are on the inside may not at first seem like a portal of potential relief from the incredible amount of stress we are living with today.

But the magical part of our brain is that it learns from what we attend to, so if we attend to the positive in our life, our brain constantly re-organizes itself and grows new circuits in brain regions that give us the most positive life experiences.

We have abundant research at our disposal that illuminates the path to building a healthier brain.

I am so excited to research, review, and share with you both the most profound and the most simple ways toward that outcome. You can join my community http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen so you never miss a practice, a thought, or a tip.

In the meantime, I invite you to make a simple choice today—choose your thoughts wisely!