Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

Trust is a must - in life and work

Hey team, welcome to a new week of opportunities to strengthen our connection with others through trust.

Relationships without trust are like cakes without baking powder. They flop. 
I love trusted relationships almost as much as I love baking, and trust is a key ingredient for both!

Research shows that higher levels of trust lead to more satisfying lives and higher performance workplaces. 

So if trust makes good things happen, how can we mix some more into all of our relationships?

What words come to mind when you think of trust? Write them down

Consider: what does trust mean to you?

Practice: identifying how you decide to trust others.

Decide to: become more aware of how your own reactions and behaviours can help trust to grow.

Leading the way with trust

According to authors and leadership development experts, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, there are three elements required for elevating the level of trust others feel towards you as a leader:

1. Positive relationships
2. Good judgement and expertise
3. Consistency

Out of all three elements, their research found that it was relationships that had the most substantial impact on trust levels. 

In her new book Partnering, Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, explores how we can incorporate trust into our most important relationships, whether they're personal or professional.

Jean writes "in all circumstances, we should try to design our partnerships to default to trust" and we can do this through 7 guiding principles: Assume good intentions; Create a safe, honest space for trust to grow; Be transparent and clear; Make hard conversations the norm; Allow mistakes to build trust; Watch your body language; Trust yourself.

The beautiful thing is that as you strive to better your awareness and practice of trust, the more you will see and inspire others who are simply trying to be their best selves too.

Trust is so much more than a gut feeling, it's actions and behaviours we can develop and grow to become better leaders and role models.

Yes, building and earning trust takes time, but we have to start somewhere. Why not with you? Why not today?

Have a great week friends!

Love your Mondays.