How Do You Know If You Can Trust Someone?
You don’t buy me, borrow me, or steal me,
I’m handed over freely at first.
Break me once, and I change forever, and I am challenging to repair.
Keep me well, and I multiply.
What am I?
Trust.
Some people just come off as more trustworthy than others. It's hard to put it into words, but with certain people, you might find yourself spilling your guts upon first meeting, feeling a sense of safety and comfort that puts you at ease and lets you relax.
Others might put you on guard in a visceral way—you don't know exactly what it is, but something about them makes your nervous system vigilant, and you start to second-guess what you tell them or how close you let them get. It often seems like your body knows before your mind does who you can trust. Call it intuition, or call it “when we think without thinking, [when] we know without knowing why" (Gladwell, 2005).
Malcom Gladwell's classic book Blink........
