Coaching practices for The Trust Triangle During a Big Change

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For The Trust Triangle During a Big Change, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• With new people I try to fast-forward to being close
• I won’t hand anyone real responsibility until they’ve completely proven themselves first
• I keep everything at work behind a polished, guarded front
• Something’s damaged my trust in them but I can’t bring myself to just say so, so instead I quietly pull back, vent to other people, and let it fester
• Trust with this person has cracked and I just keep apologizing for "not being trustworthy" in this big vague way

Practices that may help

1. The Trust Triangle
   Charles Feltman’s Trust Triangle (from The Thin Book of Trust) identifies four distinct assessments that together constitute trust: sincerity (I mean what I say), reliability (I do what I say), competence (I have the ability to do what I say), and care (I have your interests at heart). Trust breaks down when any one of these assessments fails — and repairing trust requires identifying which assessment was damaged.
2. Earn the right to deepen the relationship in stages
   Trust compounds over time — start with technical credibility and expand into intimacy as it is earned.
   The Trust Equation, Made Practical
3. The Trust Equation, Made Practical
   The Trust Equation (Maister, Green, and Galford) holds that trustworthiness = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) ÷ self-orientation. The model is a practitioner framework rather than a rigorously tested theory, but it usefully names the levers — especially self-orientation, which is the single biggest trust-killer most leaders overlook.
4. Extend trust deliberately to invite it
   Trust others first, in bounded ways, before they have earned every dimension — it is how trust is built.
   The Trust Triangle
5. Lower your guard to raise the intimacy score
   Sharing something real about yourself makes others feel safer sharing something real with you.
   The Trust Equation, Made Practical
6. Have explicit trust conversations when trust is at stake
   Name the trust issue directly rather than managing it indirectly.
   The Trust Triangle
7. Diagnose which trust dimension is broken before trying to repair
   Name the specific trust assessment that failed — then address that one, not trust in general.
   The Trust Triangle
8. Build sincerity by saying only what you mean
   Only make commitments and assertions you actually believe — and retract the ones you don’t.
   The Trust Triangle
9. Build reliability by making smaller, keepable promises
   Under-promise consistently, then exceed rather than over-promise and fall short.
   The Trust Triangle
10. Audit and reduce your self-orientation
    Self-orientation is the denominator: a small increase in it wipes out gains in all three numerator variables.
    The Trust Equation, Made Practical

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