What are the five Trust Questions?
The five questions people quietly answer about you before they decide to rely on you. What each one covers, how they split into delivery and relational trust, and where they came from.
Insights · Knowledge Base
Practical answers for trust work.
Find clear explanations, activity guidance and useful language for the relationship in front of you.
Evergreen answers
Core trust questions, answered clearly.
Each page leads with a direct answer, separates the Trust Leader model from research and links to the next useful question.
What is trust?
Trust is someone's confidence in you with something they care about. See why trust is specific, behavioural and judged by the other person.
How do you repair trust once you've broken it?
Repair trust by working out what the break meant to the other person, correcting what can be corrected, then giving evidence they can check. What repair can and cannot promise.
How do you work on trust between coaching sessions?
The session is where you decide what to change. The weeks in between are where the other person finds out. What to practise, how often, and what to bring back.
What is a Trust Map?
A Trust Map is one person's structured, dated view of a single working relationship: what the other person needs to rely on you for, and where their confidence in you may be thinner than you think.
Which behaviours erode trust?
Twenty patterns that weaken someone's confidence in you, each paired with the behaviour that replaces it. What the research supports, and where it stops.
Which behaviours strengthen trust?
Twenty observable behaviours, grouped by the five Trust Questions. What the research supports, what is our own thinking, and where the evidence stops.
Why does flagging a risk early strengthen trust?
An early warning gives the other person choices. See why silence is not neutral and what a useful risk update needs to contain.
How do you earn trust without authority?
Authority can produce compliance. Trust without authority comes from visible reasoning, small kept commitments, relevance and repeated behaviour.
Why do people resist change?
People rarely resist change in the abstract. They resist what the change threatens, including status, certainty, autonomy, belonging and fairness.
Why does changing your mind sometimes break trust?
Changing your mind does not erode trust on its own. Unexplained change does. Show the reasoning, the stable anchor and the cost to other people.
Does being authentic make people trust you?
Authenticity matters for trust, but it is not enough on its own. People experience your behaviour, not your private intentions.
What are direct, borrowed and system trust?
Direct trust comes from experience, borrowed trust comes from a role or reputation, and system trust comes from confidence in the structures around people.
What is the difference between trust and psychological safety?
Trust and psychological safety are related, but they are not the same. Learn the difference and the behaviours that connect them.
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Start with the question you have.
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Understand trust
Definitions, common misconceptions and the five Trust Questions.
Explore this topicIdentify
Choose a person, answer the questions and interpret the result carefully.
Explore this topicChoose a behaviour
Move from a broad concern to one behaviour that can make a useful difference.
Explore this topicDesign and Facilitate
Use short activities to try something different in the relationship.
Explore this topicReflect
Choose what to share, notice evidence and decide what to do next.
Explore this topicFrequently useful
Answers people return to.
01Why flagging a risk early strengthens delivery trustUse a difficult update to create confidence rather than erode it.→02Is a Trust Map a diagnostic?No. It is one person’s structured view of a relationship.→03What is shared with the practitioner?Activity reflections are shared by default; journal entries are private by default. The client controls the choice.→04How do I choose one focus?Look for the behaviour that could make a useful difference in this relationship.→
Trust Telegraph
Useful thinking beyond the how-to.
Join practitioners exploring how confidence strengthens and erodes in real working relationships.