Trust Survey: Before your week begins, picture the close colleagues (or customers) you work with. For each, rate your level of trust that the relationship will be creative, collaborative and productive this week. Your Trust Index is the percentage of all close colleagues that you hold as high-trust and high-productivity. What's your score?

At our recent Inspired Hour, Janice, a VP in healthcare, put it this way:

"My score is too low. Once a colleague lets me down, I lose trust. Then I get upset with myself that I don't believe what they say. Often I avoid and work around them."

Trust is a vital quality at our inner spiritual core essential to successful leadership. It bursts out through the look on our face, the words we speak, and our actions. We are programmed to detect it in each other. And with all the competition and complex relationships in today's workplace, it comes under fire like never before.

What happens at Janice's inner core when someone fails to deliver to her expectation? She shuts off the path to future collaboration due to the pain of being let down and her fear of it happening again. It's about her inner core, not about the other person. 

When you think of your own Trust Index, try seeing it as a reflection of your own inner core in some small way.

The solution lies in unblocking the pathways. How? Through the inner core strengthening work of forgiveness and truthful, respectful, dialog.

"This inner core work is unfamiliar and can be hard to choose," admitted Janice. "But when I do choose and actually do it, the result is always more calm, improved relationships and better performance."

Will your Trust Index be higher, the same, or lower by next Monday? Your choice.

Next ANE Event: Thursday, September 26, Breakfast Seminar, 7:00 a.m., The Homewood Suites, Newtown, PA. You may register here. $40 per person.