6 Rules for Screening Out the Bad Guys / Gals

Save yourself from unreliable people without becoming one yourself.

“Thanks so much for that book. I wish I had read it before now. I wouldn’t have been a victim of so many past betrayals.” Those were the words echoed by a friend with whom I shared Professor Linda Stroh’s – Trust Rules.

Have you ever suffered betrayals from loved ones, or been double-crossed by friends, or business partners. You might have been left high and cold by a supposed mentor?

This book is for you. No, you can’t recover all your lost grounds, but you will be better equipped to hone your skills at screening out untrustworthy associates from your inner cycle.

This book also teaches how you too can become a more trustworthy person of character in the process.

How do you protect yourself from injurious, slippery and unreliable people? Don’t just snigger, “Who even wants to be a good guy in a world of alternative truths where good is pronounced evil and evil good?”

Trust matters so much, because the world runs on trust.

For obvious reasons, even unrepentant criminals and robber-barons are looking for people they can trust.

People and organizations as well as the systems they build, run and thrive on trust. Human relationships and society in general will collapse where there is no trust.

Yes, being trustworthy or having trustworthy people around us will not eliminate all of the world’s ills. However, relationships bereft of trust are like planting tree-crops in the bakery of Sahara desert. No sooner will the seedlings sprout than they will whither away.

As explained by the author, “with trustworthy people around us, even though our problems are not necessarily eliminated, problem-solving certainly becomes much more manageable”.

Going further, she explained how “trusting too much may be just as detrimental to our welfare as not trusting enough”.

How can you identify untrustworthy people from trustworthy ones and what can you do to eliminate the former from your inner cycle even if you cannot entirely avoid relating with them on a day-to-day basis?

Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable — a willingness to take a risk that someone will not harm us. When we place our trust in another person, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, because we have positive expectations of another’s behavior.

At some time in our lives, most of us will be duped by someone we thought we could trust.

6 Guidelines for Recognizing Trustworthy People

1. Trustworthy people demonstrate good values throughout their history and they demonstrate their being good even when the times are tough.

2. Daily demonstrations that behavior, not just words, match values.

3. Trustworthy people admit and learn from their mistakes. They have a self-awareness of the ways their behaviors affect others.

4. Trustworthy people treat all people the same, regardless of level in the hierarchy and they demonstrate consistent good behaviors.

5. Those who are untrustworthy will only interact with you when there is something in it for them.

6. Trustworthy people have positive qualities other than just good looks, a good education, and wealth.

Trustworthy people are those people you can have confidence in that “they will always try to do the right thing.”

Trustworthy people will put their personal interests aside for the general benefit of the group, team, or organization as the need arises.

With experience and training, some people are more adept at recognizing untrustworthy people and also knowing how to put them at bay. But, for the rest of us, mere mortals, the insights distilled in this book will serve as compass as we navigate the landscape of close human relationships and the inevitable pitfalls of trusting too much and too soon.

Other invaluable reminders from the author include the following:

• Supposedly unconditional trust relationships are sometimes the easiest to violate. Why? Because most of us don’t want to doubt that those we trust the most would violate our trust, in any way.

• If you are a trusting person, you are highly vulnerable to untrustworthy persons using their charm, charisma, and influence to win you over and then dupe you.

• How to watch our backs against the untrustworthy person without becoming one ourselves. The key is doing everything without malicious intent.

• Even though we aspire to be 100% trustworthy, we understand that we are imperfect in our human relationships. However, on the trust continuum, each one of us must decide the level one is comfortable with.

• Knowing when to give another person a second chance. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you now trust someone who has betrayed you, or that you are willing to reconcile. It merely means you are letting go of your anger and resentment. Bad guys don’t forgive and they don’t forget.

• Occasionally even good guys make mistakes and act like bad guys. Few good guys, however, exhibit bad behaviors over a long period of time — the good guy’s conscience wouldn’t let that happen.
  
  My brief preview cannot exhaustively do justice to this excellent work. My conclusion in the words of the author, “I want to be known as a kind, fair person. I also know that if I am not kind and fair to people I’ve identified as bad guys, how can I really be a good guy? Conceivably, it doesn’t mean we will be unkind or thoughtless to those bad guys. We just don’t want them in our inner circle!”

Now, the ball is now in your court. Over to you.

SOURCE:
©Linda K. Stroh, Trust Rules – How to Tell the Good Guys from the Bad in Work and Life, Praeger, 2007

This article was originally published by the author on Medium

---