#1 Ingredient to Success in Life and Business

It is easy to get puffed up about the superiority of your product or service. The hitch is that this is only in your own mind and is how your ego is tripping up your success. Without fail, every contractor that came on the job site immediately sought to show me ways someone else needed to do their job better. Each one looked for flaws in someone else’s work rather than focusing on their own. Each one made an attempt to bash or tear down the quality of another in order to build themselves up. This isn’t effective. It also isn’t professional.

Whenever you point a finger at someone else, you are pointing four other fingers right back at yourself. Be very careful about spending your time criticizing others and their work. It doesn’t build the trust you think it does.

What builds trust is simple, powerful and lasting:

1. Being reliable and dependable.
2. Completing the task, job, or project you start in the time frame specified and agreed upon.
3. Being professional at all times and focused on your work.
4. Maintaining clear communication with your client or customer throughout.
5. Notifying your client or customer of any challenges as soon as they occur whether you created the issue or it is simply your responsibility to solve.
6. Following up after completion to ensure continued satisfaction (this applies whether you are a coach, a designer, a sales person, an executive, or anyone else in any business at all.)

What destroys trust is simple, powerful and lasting:

1. Be unreliable and independable.
2. Failing to complete the task, job, or project you start in the time frame specified and agreed upon.
3. Focusing on other people’s work, shortcomings, mistakes and not your own.
4. Avoiding communication with your client or customer for any reason at all.
5. Forgetting to notify your client or customer of challenges, delays, and issues.
6. Disappearing at the close of a project, job, or task without any follow up to ensure satisfaction.

Be honest with yourself. Take the assessment above and answer honestly about the current clients and projects or customers and products that you are working with. Have you made EVERY effort to build trust or do you have room for improvement? Once you have breached trust, it is very difficult to repair and rebuild. It is far better to avoid a breach in the first place by taking care of the steps shown above.

Share your best trust builder story or trust broken tale.