The TRUST Show

The Trust Premium™ research shows that of all the behaviors that a financial advisor, or a professional in general, demonstrates that can affect the probability that a customer would hire their services or buy from them, the top one was the no-BS component, which received the highest score of 4.01 (on a scale of 1 to 5), and 65% of participants said that they would definitely or much more likely h...

My new ground-breaking survey found that customers are willing to pay 41.0% higher fees when they work with a financial advisor they trust more than a financial advisor they trust less. That’s trust premium. Last week, I received the first results from my first group of panel surveys, which I used to assess the trust premium of financial advisors. I chose financial advisors as the first group simp...

While the Trust Premium™ research project is ongoing, it seemed like a good idea to interview the best salesperson I have ever worked with, which is precisely what this episode is about. Theresa Benson was the account manager for Apple (yes, that Apple) while we both worked at Texas Instruments. From the first time I met her, it struck me how the Apple iPod team trusted her. It wasn’t until this i...

In this episode, I'm excited to introduce a game-changing project: Trust Premium. Traditional sales methods no longer cut it in a world saturated with spam and cookie-cutter sales techniques. Customers now buy from people they trust. Period. My initial research revealed that customers are even willing to pay a premium of nearly 30% for trust. Imagine increasing your prices by this amount without c...

Recently, I was invited many times to deliver keynotes on the topic of ethics, and specifically my take on the relationships between laws, ethics, values, and trust. Season 9, episode 10 covered the issue, but since then, I had an opportunity to continue and evolve my take on this topic enough to warrant an episode revisiting it. In fact, this is a keynote I’m about to give in three days. In this...

I truly believe that the HR department is ideally positioned to build trust in the company. I really do. But the first step for HR to be building trust in the organization is for HR to be trusted by the employees. Unfortunately, they are not. A study showed that 75% of employees don’t trust that their HR leader cares about their needs , and only 9% felt their HR leader would advocate for them, whi...

When I delivered a keynote about building trust in remote and hybrid work scenarios, I said, “if you can’t trust your employees to work from home, unsupervised, you have the wrong employees.” Someone then asked me, “how do you hire trustworthy employees?” When we interview employees, we typically focus on their technical and professional capabilities. Those fall into the “competence” component of...

Do Blue Angels pilots have a death wish when they fly a 30,000-pound jet at 400+ mph and keep 12” from wingtip to canopy? Not really. Are they not afraid? What is the level of trust required to do all of that? Should there be a sign on the wingtip missile rail that says “if you can read this, you are too close?” In this episode, my guest is Scott “Intake” Kartvedt. He flew with the Navy Blue Angel...

Several things happened to me lately that made me focus on one of the branches of that work. At a conference I was speaking at, senior executives approached me and said, “That’s all great, but can we sell more with trust?” To me, the answer was clear, “of course you can! And not only can you sell more with trust, but you can even command higher prices with trust and increase customer loyalty!” Act...

When talking about trust, I typically talk about people trusting people. But in this episode, I’ll talk about trust between people and horses, and not only that, but actually what we can learn from this relationship about trust between people. My guest today is Addison Gagliano. She trains kids to ride and horses to be ridden. She teaches the horse to listen to and trust people. We recorded this e...

Sometimes a candidate would have a gap in their resume. A few years that are accounted for. There could be many reasons for that gap. Should a hiring manager ask about it? It is none of their business? This episode gives advice to both a hiring manager and to a candidate on how to address that resume gap in a way that builds trust, and doesn't kill it. And it uses my relative trust model. 

I applied my relative trust model and trust habit process to many different jobs, roles, and relationships, but somehow I never applied it to my own profession: public speaking. In 2020, I gave a speech at the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) annual conference. When I prepared for that, I found a few interesting things: one, I found a CNBC article that, based on a survey, found that the 6...

You are influenced only by people you trust, and you can influence only people who trust you. When you don’t try to build trust, you will not be able to influence. Or be influenced. This episode discusses the link between trust and influence. It will explain why the political divide we have today prevents us from reaching win-win compromises and how to bridge it using the components of the relativ...

Are you a procrastinator? If you are, wasn’t your first reaction to be defensive? Procrastination has a bad reputation. You can find countless articles about how NOT to be a procrastinator. How to eliminate procrastination. Even how to cure it. As if procrastination is a disease.  I’m a procrastinator and will wear that as a badge of honor. And not because I feel the need to be politically correct...

What percentage of calls or emails you get are spam? Don’t bother checking. As of January 2023, the US received the highest number of spam emails, at 8.6 billion daily. Spam accounts for 71% of all emails. A typical American gets 28.4 spam calls monthly. I must be getting more than that. These numbers are continuously increasing. Since the level of trust I have in people trying to sell me somethin...

If there is one shift in how we work that resulted from the COVID pandemic, it’s that we embraced the possibility of working remotely or hybrid, where some work is done remotely and some at the office. I visited that topic in season 8, episode 5 of this podcast , but it has been 6 months since then, and I learned and thought more about it. Obviously, the first question that comes to mind is what r...

Body language, or non-verbal communication, plays a major role in building trust. That’s why the component of intimacy accelerates positivity. As long as our body language is consistent with the words we use, people trust us. On the opposite side, as Albert Mehrabian said in his 1971 book Silent Messages, “When our words contradict the silent messages contained within them, others mistrust what we...

My framework for Trust Habits® includes the 8 laws of trust and the 6-component relative trust model. But from them, there are 7 insights about trust, which are shared in some detail here in this episode. Those are: (1) Trust turns a group of creative and productive individuals into a creative and productive team. (2) Trust is Relative. The same behavior that would cause one person to trust you co...

Do you want to be trusted by everyone? Do you think you CAN be trusted by everyone? If so, I’ve got some bad news for you. You won’t. Trust is relative. The same behaviors that would cause one person to trust you could cause another person to distrust you. In one of my surveys, I found that one of the biggest correlations to the level of trust others have in you is with the level to which you shar...

You may know that I was (still am) a serial entrepreneur. You may not know that I was one of the founding members of the North Texas Angel (investor) Network, and made investments in startup companies. Startup companies heavily depend on investments from Angel investors. But investing in a company in such an early stage is a high-risk proposition. You may lose your entire investment. Trust plays a...

Building trust will transform organizations and relationships. But to build trust, you must first change behaviors. Changing behaviors requires you to form new habits. But forming new habits is hard. Very hard. It takes significant effort, and to do that, you must have enough, and the right kind of motivation. My work on trust resides in the intersection of the science of trust and the science of...

Are you thinking about delivering a TEDx talk? You may know that I delivered my 3rd TEDx talk a few weeks ago at TEDxJCU at John Carroll University in Cleveland. After delivering it, a few friends asked me for advice about how I found those events, how I got selected, and more. Instead of repeating the same information over and over again with every friend, I decided to hold a live webinar, which...

One of the HR functions is to care for the employee's welfare, and some would say that it's the most critical function. Given the impact of engaged employees on the organization's success, you couldn't argue with that. However, a 2022 Crucial Learning survey showed that 75% of employees don't trust that their HR leader cares about their needs. Only 9% felt that their HR leader would advocate for t...

This is the fourth and last episode of this series under the title how you can tell if you can (or should) trust another person. In the previous episodes, I gave you tools, based on what you know about the other person before you ever meet and interact with them, and based on your firsthand impression while interacting with them. Now, based on all that, you need to decide whether you can trust the...

This is the third of a four-episode series addressing how you can tell if you can, and should, trust someone, in whatever relationship you are with them. In the first episode, I explained that you need first to decide what you need to trust them with, and how much you need to trust them, because trust is contextual and continuous. In the second episode, I explained how you could tell if you can tr...