Coaching practices for Trust Dimensions Sincerity Reliability Competence Care

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Trust Dimensions Sincerity Reliability Competence Care, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

  • I keep everything at work behind a polished, guarded front
  • I do genuinely have their back, but I assume they just know it, so I never actually show it
  • I’m competent and I deliver, but people still hold me at arm’s length
  • Trust with this person has cracked and I just keep apologizing for "not being trustworthy" in this big vague way
  • To smooth things over I say "sounds good," "I’m fine with it," "I understand" when none of it is actually true

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. 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
  3. Demonstrate care through visible acts in the other person’s interest
    Show that your interests and theirs are genuinely aligned — not only when it’s convenient.
    The Trust Triangle
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. Build reliability through small, visible commitments
    Reliability is built not by big promises but by flawlessly keeping small, everyday ones.
    The Trust Equation, Made Practical
  10. Be transparent about your competence limits
    Name what you can do, what you can’t, and what you’ll need to learn — before you are found out.
    The Trust Triangle

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