Business is an amazing teacher. It teaches us some of the most important lessons about life. Some of the lessons are harder than others, and some of the best ones can be what business teaches us about ourselves.

Among the major contributions that our businesses provide us are the following:

1. The Core: Trust
2. The Power of Discernment
3. The Need for Individual Accountability
4. The Importance of Relationship
5. The Leverage of Teamwork

These five dynamics are core to the effectiveness of any business. Without them, any business will eventually flounder. With these five dynamics in place and healthy, your business can soar.

Trust

Trust is a fickle belief. The financial markets of the world are based upon a level of trust that the system works. When people get concerned that the systems don’t work (like in the stock market crash of 1929), trust evaporates, and the stock market plummets. This adversely affects almost every business.

Trust goes far beyond the stock markets. We trust that if we drive on the right side of the road, that others will as well. We travel at incredibly fast and potentially dangerous speeds, based on that one premise. If we didn’t trust that everyone would follow the same rules, then we would get nowhere – in our cars or in our businesses.

All businesses are built on a foundation of trust. You spend a great deal of time trying to decide whether you can trust others or not, and this wastes a great deal of energy.

In a program I took a few years ago called Cliff Jumping ( I highly recommend it by the way …), the instructors suggested a very different idea.

What if there is no such thing as trusting others? While this sounds bizarre at first, it leads to the natural question, “If there’s no such thing as trusting others, where does trust occur?”

What if the only trust that matters is trusting ourselves?

It seems true that trust starts with trusting yourself and your own common sense. For example: You trust someone, let’s say Joe, to pick something up for you. Joe has a bad track record for remembering things and completing errands. If you tell Joe, “I’m going to trust you to do this…” that’s not really trust.

You’re either warning Joe not to forget, or you’re not taking responsibility for the fact that you already know Joe has a poor track record for completing this type of errand. You've built in an excuse in case he doesn’t do what he says.

What real trust starts with is your knowing that Joe can’t relied on to complete this task. Then telling yourself the truth about it and living with the consequence if Joe fails, or else making different arrangements, if you really need that particular item picked up.

What there is to trust is your own gut, or said differently, your own decisions.

How does this apply to business? As an entrepreneur, it is incredibly important to trust your own sense of decision. Many people live somewhere between hope and fear. They let themselves off the hook for their decisions by “trusting” someone else. Even worse, they bring this “trust” thing out and use it as a sword if something doesn’t go as planned, or if someone lets them down.

“I trusted you! How could you let me down?!” This isn’t trust, it’s a guilt trip. I see people who dance between blindly trusting others and becoming completely mistrustful too often in business. Neither alternative is productive.

If you trust yourself, including your own decisions, you’ll find that life works darn well.

• Special Note: We have all made mistakes in life and we have all been surprised by things we didn’t expect. Intellectually, we know that there are things that work and things that don’t work. Yet, when something in life doesn’t work, we get surprised and upset by it.
• Instead of upset, what if these events became learning opportunities, to enhance our own levels of conscious decision making? If that were the case, there would be nothing that didn’t work. There would only be accomplishment, and learning!

In my experience with over a thousand businesses over the past dozen years, the biggest thing that I see that stops people from getting what they want, is themselves. The more you understand how you interact with yourself and others, the better prepared you will be to take on Large Scale Growth within your business.

The Enemy of Trust – Fatigue

When self-care is missing, the first thing to go out the window is trusting yourself. You start to second guess yourself when you are tired. This can have heavy and severe consequences to a business owner. At the very least, it slows things down. Opportunities are lost or missed; threats catch up with you when you lose trust in yourself.

The Cure – Self Care

The cure for this danger is to take care of yourself. Practice getting what you need, whether it is time to work out at the gym, a chance to play with the kids before they go to bed, or some quiet time first thing in the morning.

The biggest single benefit of taking care of yourself is that you have the confidence to trust yourself. This gives you access to all that you know, and you sort through issues, generally much faster than when you are doubting yourself.

By making sure you are adequately taking care of yourself, you will gain renewed access to trusting your decisions. This will allow you to increase your personal effectiveness in growing your business in support of your personal goals and commitments in life.

Here's some other resources on trust…

Trust Quiz - Your Trust Quotient: You may know your IQ (Intelligence Quotient). You have some sense of your EQ (Emotional Intelligence). But what about your TQ — your Trust Quotient?