Who Are You Protecting?
There is something you should know about yourself.
You are not very impressive.
I realize there were gentler ways to tell you this. Unfortunately, none occurred to me until after I wrote it.
You’re not particularly fast or strong. You can’t fly or breathe underwater. You have no claws, fangs, venom, shell, quills, or armor. Your hearing is ordinary, your sense of smell is embarrassing compared with a dog’s, and you can’t see particularly well in the dark. Even your skin is ridiculously thin. A thorn can open it. Too much sun can damage it. Too much cold can freeze it and take one or two appendages in the process.
Basically, if nature were handing out survival equipment, we appear to have arrived after most of the good stuff was gone.
Strip away everything we’ve invented and drop a naked human alone into the wilderness, and our resume as the dominant species becomes considerably less convincing.
We are essentially the 90-pound weaklings of the animal kingdom.
And that’s when we’re adults. As children, we are even more pathetic.
We arrive here remarkably unfinished. A newborn horse can stand within hours. A human baby can’t even hold up its own head. It can’t find food, escape danger, keep itself warm, or move somewhere safer. For quite some time, our primary contribution to our own survival is screaming until someone more capable arrives.
Leave us alone and we die.
Which means the first survival strategy you ever had wasn’t running, fighting, hiding, or intelligence.
It was connecting with another human being. (Don't ever forget that).
Before you could speak, before you could think, before you even knew there was a you, your survival already depended on a relationship.
Nothing has changed.
We think about relationships as companions, friends, lovers, and colleagues. They can be. But relationships had a job long before they became greeting cards.
They kept us alive.
We Weren't Built to Do This Alone
What has changed is the number of people we now depend on to do it.
Our earliest relationships protected us from dangers we could see. Someone found food. Someone watched for predators. Someone kept the fire burning. Someone cared for the child while someone else hunted.
We became extraordinarily good at this arrangement. So good that we kept expanding it. Families became tribes. Tribes became communities. Communities became cities, institutions, professions, industries, and systems containing millions of people who would never meet one another but whose survival increasingly depended on everyone doing what they were supposed to do.
That is where you woke up this morning.
In a building you didn’t construct. You drank water you didn’t collect or test, ate food you didn’t grow, perhaps swallowed medicine you didn’t invent, got into a car you couldn’t build, and drove across a bridge whose structural integrity you have absolutely no ability to evaluate.
Yet you didn’t worry about any of it. You simply turned on the faucet and assumed hundreds of strangers had once again decided not to poison you.
You are protected all day long by people you will never meet.
Which makes the enduring fascination some people have with rugged individualism especially charming. Apparently, you can be entirely self-reliant as long as several million strangers keep you alive.
(I'm talking to you, Ayn Rand).
There is a surprising amount of your life residing in other people’s hands.
And that is where I think we misunderstand something important about relationships.
Every relationship requires us to put something we value at risk. Our money. Our health. Our reputation. Our livelihood. Our secrets. Our children. Our future. The closer the relationship and the greater the dependence, the more consequential that risk can become.
So when I talk about making someone’s life Safer, I am not talking about making them feel comfortable or cared for. I mean something much more literal.
What happens to the things they value once they place them in your hands?
Do you protect them, or expose them to greater risk?
That is the first calculation a relationship has to survive.
Yet we spend remarkably little time thinking about risk. We obsess over trust instead. Organizations measure it. Leaders try to build it. Brands try to earn it. We want clients to trust us, employees to trust us, and colleagues to trust us.
Trust matters. But risk comes first.
Nobody needs to trust you until they have something to lose.
That distinction changes where I would have you look.
Start With One Relationship
Choose one relationship. Not relationships as a category. One actual person who has made a decision to depend on you. A client. An employee. A colleague. A friend. A partner.
Then forget, for a moment, whether they trust you and make an inventory of what they are risking because they do.
Money may be the easiest thing to identify in some relationships, but it is rarely the only thing. Someone may be putting their reputation in your hands, their livelihood, their health, a secret, a promise they made to someone else, a deadline they cannot miss, an opportunity they may only get once, or a decision they will eventually have to defend.
Be specific. Risk is not binary.
It isn’t enough to write money. How much? It isn’t enough to write reputation. With whom, and what happens if it is damaged? If they are depending on you to meet a deadline, how late can you be before something important changes? If they have told you something private, what would happen if one other person knew? Ten? A thousand?
Think about what happens to that person when you are wrong, late, unavailable, careless, inconsistent, or simply not as good as they expected you to be. Think about what they have to monitor because they aren’t completely certain you will. Think about what they will have to explain if you fail. Think about their vulnerabilities simply because they chose to have a relationship with you.
Write those things down.
That list is far more useful than asking whether someone trusts you. It tells you what the relationship is actually asking you to protect.
And once you know that, the question becomes much more useful than Do they trust me?
What are they risking because they do?