CAN'T GET OUT WHAT YOU DON'T PUT IN

What is:

Essential for effective communications?

A cornerstone of healthy relationships?

Dispensed slowly?

Yanked quickly?

Desired in our daughters' boyfriends?

Vital to all organizations?

Missing in most organizations?

An ingredient in high performance teams?

Abundant in our God?

Lacking in our politicians?


The answer: trust.

Trust is a belief and confidence in something or someone. You either have it or you don't.

Whether trust is in your personal bag of virtues or not doesn't stop you from being asked to display it. How often and in how many ways in your work and personal lives are people asking you to trust them? Occasionally it's easy because you do trust them, and you will gladly and confidently do what they ask. Sometime it's easy because you don't trust them and would never do what they ask even under the threat of having to spend time alone with a mime.

The challenge comes when you're asked to do something you feel you should do that requires a level of trust you don't have. Friends may ask you to play the "Trust Me" game without historically having produced any legitimate reason for you to do so.

In life you can find yourself backed in a person or professional corner frantically searching for trust from people whom you have never given a reason to trust you. If you didn't have people's trust before you needed it, you'll never have their trust when you do need it.

Lesson: Deposit often in the trust bank. You never can tell when you'll need a withdrawal.

CATS, BIRDS, AND WORMS

One beautiful, Southwestern morning, I was in the shed filling up a bucket of birdseed to feed and nourish all the winged species we have here in the mountains.

As I took the bucket-o-seeds around to the back bird feeders, I saw something which gave me pause for thought -- our cat, Sydney, in a brazen example of nature's inescapable food chain, was eating a bird.

I was struck by the irony. I'm feeding the birds; my cat's eating the birds.

Sticking with warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered vertebrates, it's often said, "The early bird gets the worm." Then doesn't it also follow that the early worm gets eaten?

You get the promotion, somebody else doesn't, Somebody else wins the turkey raffle, you don't. The good die young, the bad live on.

In life you don't always win and often you're darn lucky to come out even. Life is going to do to you what life does to you. Why is there a tendency in us humans to feel unfairly treated when we don't get what we want? In nature what's fair for the cat is sure not fair for the bird. What's fair for the bird is a real bummer for the worm.

Lesson: Fairness is a non-issue. Some days you're the cat, some days you're the bird.