Being Trustworthy

Recently we’ve been looking at how to encourage emotional intimacy to develop and how trust is a major component. Perhaps the easiest, most effective way to build trust in a relationship is to be trustworthy. Author Stephen Covey’s six actions for strengthening relationships and enhancing trust are a great framework. Let’s look at the first three in the context of a dating relationship and some possible actions we could take that align with our steps for achieving emotional intimacy.

Covey’s first action is to understand the other person. We could strive for this by listening with compassion, withholding judgment, and imagining how the person might be feeling. The use of gentle probing questions can also help us better understand as can restating in our own words what we heard the other person say. His second suggestion, clarify your expectations, can be facilitated by our gaining greater self-knowledge, holding realistic expectations of our partner and our relationship, and being forthcoming about what we need. Let’s avoid assuming people know what we mean or what we need and just simply state these things instead. Keep your commitments is Covey’s third action for strengthening relationships. Here we’ll want to keep our word, be on time, and only make promises we know we can keep. I remember how good Roger was at keeping his commitments. He called when he said he would and he didn’t just talk about things we would do – he arranged for us to do them!

Being trustworthy by actually demonstrating we can be trusted is so much more effective than just verbalizing it. Next week we’ll look at Covey’s final three actions and how they can help us achieve greater emotional intimacy.