How senior leaders rapidly build trust

When you begin an important meeting, people form conclusions quickly.

Not just about your competence, but about whether they trust you to have their best interests at heart. Whether you understand them. Whether you are someone worth engaging with.

This happens before you have explained anything and comes largely from your state of mind: rippling out into your tone of voice and body language.

If your attention is scattered, caught up in how you are coming across or angling for a particular outcome, it creates distance. If you are calm and focused on the people in front of you, it creates the conditions for deep trust.

This can be shaped deliberately, in the minutes beforehand.

Step 1: Relax your body

Sit comfortably and take a deep breath in and a slow breath out, letting your body settle into the chair.

Notice how your breath is moving in your belly. Imagine filling it like a balloon as you breathe in, releasing tension as you breathe out.

Imagine you are bathed in warm sunlight. It enters your body as you breathe in and relaxes you even more as you breathe out.

Let your muscles soften with each exhale.

Say hello to your heart. How is it doing today? What does it need to hear?

Step 2: Bring one real person to mind

Bring to mind one real person who will be in the meeting.

Imagine them as vividly as possible.

What’s their name?

What might they have just been doing?

What are they dealing with that you cannot see?

Imagine they are also bathed in warm sunlight, relaxing them and filling them with hope, courage and confidence.

Step 3: Clarify what you want for them not from them

How do you hope they will feel, think and act differently after the meeting? And how do you hope this will have a positive impact on their life, in a way that matters to them.

Now find a way to wish them well.

A traditional method we use in the Buddhist loving-kindness (metta-bhavana) practice is:

"May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering."

Step 4: Begin from that state

Let them fade from your imagination.

Pause for a few moments.

Then begin the meeting.

Why this works

People register very quickly whether your attention is on yourself, the "thing" you're trying to get them to do, or genuinely on them and their best interests.

When your attention is steady, and your intention to help is genuine and clear, trust forms more easily.