Trust Cannot Be Built. It Can Only Grow.

What You Cannot Control

I want to challenge something most of us have been told our entire careers. We talk about "building trust" as if trust were a bookshelf you could assemble with the right tools and a Saturday afternoon.

It is not.

"You cannot build trust. It doesn't have parts you can assemble. You cannot grow trust. But trust can grow. Trust has its own agenda. It's controlled by the trust giver, not by the person seeking it."

"You can plant a tomato plant in rich soil, you can nurture it and water it, but you can't make it produce tomatoes. It'll produce the tomatoes in its own time. Same thing's true with trust."

That changes the question, doesn't it? If you cannot force trust into existence, then what can you do? You can tend the soil. You can manage the conditions. And the single most important condition is tension.

Two Kinds of Tension

Every relationship you have carries tension. That is not a problem. It is a fact, like gravity. The question is what kind of tension, and how much.

The first kind is task tension. If there is a heavy rock on your foot, all your attention centers on removing that rock. Once it is gone, the tension disappears. Task tension is specific and solvable. Most people understand this one.

"The other tension, and the one that a lot of people don't think about as much, is relationship tension. And there's tension in every relationship."

Relationship tension is the gap between you and another person. It rises and falls depending on familiarity, comfort, and perceived safety. When you are with a close friend, the gap is small. When a group of strangers approaches you on a dark street carrying weapons, that gap is enormous. You feel it in your chest before you can name it.

Most people spend their energy managing task tension. They solve the problem, deliver the product, hit the deadline. But the relational gap between them and the other person stays wide open. And that gap is where trust either grows or does not.

The Biker and the Opening Line

My friend, brilliant professional speaker Mark Scharenbroick, wrote a book about an experience that illustrates this perfectly. He pulled up to a building and got out of his car, only to find himself surrounded by a group of threatening-looking outlaw bikers.

His tension was sky-high. Theirs was, too. And in that moment, Mark looked at one of the motorcycles and said two words: "Nice bike."

That was it. The gap collapsed. The conversation opened. The threat dissolved.

"Everybody's interested in something and if you find what they're interested in and share it, even briefly, you reduce the tension, the gap between you and that other person."

Mark did not perform a technique. He noticed what mattered to the person in front of him and acknowledged it. That is a learnable skill, and it works whether you are standing in a parking lot or sitting across from a prospective client.

The Principle Behind the Story

Here is the mechanism, and it is simple enough to write on a napkin.

"When tension is high, trust is low. So if you manage the tension level well, trust has an opening in which to grow."

You do not create trust. You create an opening. You lower the relational tension enough that the other person's natural willingness to trust has room to emerge. The tomato plant does the growing. You just make sure the soil is right.

This means the only lever you actually have is tension management. Not persuasion. Not charm. Not credentials. Those may help, but they are not the lever. The lever is how safe the other person feels in your presence.

What This Means in a Sales Conversation

I have spent decades teaching people how to sell, and the pattern I see most often is this: a salesperson does a fine job connecting with someone, then shifts into pitch mode. The moment they do, everything changes.

"If you turn it into a sales pitch, their tension goes up, so does yours. If instead you keep it as an open dialogue about what they need and what you have to solve that, then the tension is moderate."

A pitch spikes tension for both parties. The buyer feels pressured. The seller feels the weight of performing. Both are now managing anxiety instead of exploring fit.

An open dialogue keeps the tension moderate. You are two people figuring out whether what you have matches what they need. Price comes up naturally. Timing comes up naturally. Concerns surface in the conversation instead of piling up behind a wall of silence.

"You're managing the tension level from the time you anticipate the call all the way through the time you're nurturing the long term account with that client."

This is not a moment. It is a continuum.

Confirming, Not Closing

When you manage tension well throughout the dialogue, something interesting happens at the end. There is nothing left to overcome.

"You don't have to close anything, you don't have to overcome objections because you already handled the things they would have been concerned about in the dialogue."

You simply confirm. You make it easy for them to say yes to a decision they have already been forming throughout the conversation. And after they say yes, you review the decision and its wisdom so their tension stays low. That is not a tactic. That is respect.

What You Can Actually Do

So what is your job, if you cannot make trust happen?

Your job is to tend the soil. Find what the other person cares about and acknowledge it, even briefly. Keep the conversation open instead of turning it into a performance. Address concerns as they arise, not after they harden into objections. Follow through in the days and weeks that follow so the person knows their trust was well placed.

"We can earn, we can deserve, we can be worthy of trust, but we can't make it happen."

That is the honest truth of it. You cannot assemble trust from parts. You cannot will it into existence on your timeline. But you can create conditions where it grows naturally, the way a tomato plant produces fruit when the soil is right and the water is steady and nobody is yanking on the vine.

Do what you can to keep tension low. Demonstrate that you are a person worth trusting. And then give the other person the space to decide.

The tomatoes will come in their own time.

In the spirit of growth,

Jim Cathcart