Openness as Trust

I'm writing this short blog post with one particular thought in mind - how do people see me?  


Its an interesting question because I suppose it depends on who the other person is.  If they're a student, they see me as a teacher.  If they're a family member, maybe I'm seen as a brother, nephew, cousin.  Others might see me as a colleague, an employer or a friend.  But today something happened, someone said something simple and it really made me think.  They said, "Thank you for opening up and sharing."  

The context that this was said doesn't really matter, but what challenged me was that I had always considered myself quite an open and honest person.  But this challenged me because I realised that I do keep parts of myself back.  There are things that I don't talk about that perhaps I should.  There are aspects of my life that I don't let everyone see.  Maybe that's a reflection of the fact that up until 2020 there has been a clear separation between my personal and my professional life.  But this year it has been far more difficult to maintain that distinction and I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way.

In one of my previous blog posts I referred to the fact that when we are homeworking, our personal life can and does impact on our co-workers, and up until today I had always thought of that as a bad thing.  The idea that my crazy home life would be in some way a burden on others was frankly embarrassing.  But today I was reminded of an article that I read by Hoy and Tschannen-Moran (1999) where they posit openness as a facet of trust.  However they go further and they highlight openness, honesty, benevolence, reliability and competence as their five facets of trust.

("Trust" by Pro-Zak is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)

Have you ever had one of those light bulb moments where you realised that what was unfolding in front of you was exactly the theoretical concept you had been reading about.  One moment of openness and honesty between two competent, respectful and reliable colleagues brought about an atmosphere of benevolence in a situation that could have otherwise been quite tense.  

Don't get me wrong I am not an advocate for oversharing.  There are details of the people's lives I don't need to know.  #TMI.  But for the first time I realised how guarded I could be with regard to my personal life and how it impacted my work.  Moreover I realised that in being so guarded I was actually doing damage to my own sense of personal wellbeing.  I was pushing people away, pretending things were fine when they simply weren't.  I was also reminded of the kindness and benevolence of others, something I had almost forgotten in the chaos that 2020 has brought.

Any of this sound familiar to people out there?  

Trusting others isn't always a bad thing.  Openness isn't just a facet of trust, its a catalyst!

References

Hoy, W. and Tschannen-Moran, M. (1999) ‘The five faces of trust: an empirical confirmation in urban elementary schools’, Journal of School Leadership, vol. 9, pp. 184–208.

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