Trust - The importance of first and second hand information
When it comes to relationships we generally tend to make our opinions of somethings based on what people said. However, we all know from experience that second-hand information can be distorted and usually convoluted by the person who is conveying it.
Trust can be handled if you know how
When I was young maybe 10 years of age, our English teacher played a fun game with us kids. She had all the kids about 20 of them lined up and would whisper into the ears of one of the kids at the end. That kid needed to whisper the same thing that the teacher had said to the kid next to him/her. Once the message got to the last kid in the line he had to say loudly what he heard. We would all burst out laughing when the teacher would actually tell us the short sentence that she whispered to the first kid. It was amazing to see how the original message go so distorted. Occasionally the first kid would even pick up the message incorrectly from the teacher, it was not that she was trying to make it sound inaudible or anything.
The example above just goes to show that messages get distorted when passed from one person to another. The motto of this example is that you can never know the complete truth until you have first hand experience of it. Have you noticed how people convey information about a movie they have just watched and when you get to see it, you feel that the person had left the most important information out of it? The same is true of when people come to you and talk about anything, it is always colored with their personality and event factual statements may be distorted. This is where witnesses in courts always seem to be in loggerheads in discussing about the events they witnessed.
Take another real example. A person entrusts family members around her to give information related to some assets held in another country. So the person becomes completely and entirely dependant on the individual for the information related to their assets. It would be very easy for the individual if they so wished, to somehow ‘manipulate’ the information that is passed onto the family member. In reality the person who is receiving this information may never get the truth to the information that is being handed down to them because it is being ‘controlled’ by the person who is delivering it. These kind of miscommunication or mistrust often results in dissolution of businesses, breakup in relationships, mistrust in people and much cause for conflicts between people.
One of the endearing quality that some of us have, is that we tend to make the assumption that everyone else tends to think or behave in the same way we do. Many folks go through disillusionments and eventually wake up to the realization that people are just different to them. Trust is such an important quality for all of us to work together in pursuit of greater goals in life. There are people amongst us who take trust to their advantage like the example given previously but one can also lay some blame to the person who completely entrusted the person for that information. In life one has to be aware of good and bad and this can be easily blinded by faith and trust in others that bring about so much frustrations, headaches and often heartbreaks in our lives.
Is there are simple solution that people can follow that will enable them to detect the good from the bad or the bad from the good? Unfortunately, every issue/event that comes across in our lives are different and the way we handle it can develop trust or resentment in others. One cannot be on ‘guard’ all their lives otherwise the whole living thing becomes a ‘chore’ rather than something to look forward to. Next time you become critical of someone that you have crossed paths with, ask yourself how this could have been avoided. This could be a good starting point in maintaining your sanity with people around you and learning how to deal with them and making yourself even better prepared to take on the world.
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Jumpdates ThinkTank Labs
Tags: dealing with trust, first hand info, miscommunication, second hand info, trust
