There was a time in my life when trusting others was extremely hard for me. I was very demanding in order to trust someone, and at the first mistake my trust was evaporating. I guess, for me, it was true the expression: trust is hard to earn and easy to break.

Somewhere in my journey I started feeling that I was missing out on something, that I needed to change the way I was living my life. In “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” the 3rd habit is to “Put First Thing First”. And so I did. For me the first thing that I had to do was to understand what brought me to this state. Not long after, I had a sobering moment one morning, as I woke up figuring out that it wasn’t about the others. All this time it was me, I was my own challenge that I had to overcome.

To begin with, I was not believing in myself, hence I could not believe in others. I had no confidence, no self-efficacy, and my low self-esteem made me doubt myself, and of course the others. I was expecting people to disappoint me, eventually, which made me distant, and brought a lot of misery and unhappiness. Little did I know that I was choosing to disappoint myself.

At some point I became aggressive, always ready to put up a fight, as I was trying to protect myself. Well...this is what I thought. I was thinking negatively, and imagining that people were trying to screw me over, keep me down, or whatever. I was feeling threatened, but I didn’t know what was threatening me.

In my quest to overcome this, I found that all my challenges stemmed from the lack of love and understanding for myself. I was not paying attention to my inner child, who was scared and afraid.

As a kid I had to live through some tough situations, exploits, some abuses, so I grew up with extremely low self esteem. I was always preparing myself for the worst, as I did not want to suffer again. Pretty much I was programming myself for failure, and I was really good at achieving "dramatic" self-fulfilling prophecies.

I can not say that I did fully overcome this, as this requires hard work, years of effort and discipline. I am still at times insecure and doubt myself, but my willingness to try out new ways helped me a lot. I feel more comfortable with the unknown, also with being disappointed and hurt from time to time. What I can do today is to offer people trust from day one. I love the concept of opening an emotional bank account for everyone I interact with.

But to return to the story, so...once I understood that I am my own problem, I asked one particular question:

how do I establish trust?

This was probably one of the hardest questions I had asked myself. The reason being the answer I found: vulnerability. This was tough to hear. It meant that I had to start admitting mistakes now, to show “weakness”. The thought of it was sheer craziness to me back then.

This was against everything I've built in the DNA of all my personas. All those years building all those walls and scars, how can I just throw all that away? I never showed weakness, as I would’ve been made redundant by the others, was the song in my head saying. But I had to face this as an Agile Coach, I needed to establish trust with the people I worked with, if I was to be successful at my job. I didn't see that I had any other options.

I started reading about it, I did research, with the hope of finding that I can establish trust, without showing vulnerability. Again, in my head, I thought that if I am showing weakness, people will not believe me that I know what I was doing. Years later I had to learn that in 80% of the cases you actually have no clue what you are doing, it’s just that dose of craziness and guts that is within you, which pushes you forward. Isn’t that funny!?

In the end I failed with my research. Everything was pointing to the very same thing, if you want to build trust, you must become vulnerable, you need to open yourself up first. It is all about being comfortable with sharing your shortcomings and failures, and not being ashamed of it. Rather see them as real opportunities to learn and grow. Admitting mistakes does not come easy to most people I’ve met in my life, as it didn’t to me back then, but once you master this, I can guarantee that you will be free. This will make you feel unloaded and will give you the possibility to see the opportunities around you.

Armed with this knowledge, and shitting my pants, I went ahead and gave it a try. I don’t need to tell you how hard the first time was, but I said to myself: if I fail, I fail, at least I tried. It was the biggest surprise of my life, a surprise that forever changed me. I saw how people started to relate, as they were also opening up after a while. They started sharing more about their shortcomings, their mistakes, their failures and this created a new kind of conversation. An honest one, focused on solutions. I saw people breaking their shackles, as for the first time they could share failure without the fear of later repercussions.

The biggest lesson for me was that most people are capable of self-reflection, you don't need to tell them when they did something wrong, you never need to, they know it already. I had very few cases in which I had to tell people that they did something wrong, and it was generally to those who had a hard time admitting mistakes.

Deep down we all try to figure out the answer to the same challenges. What I've discovered is a simple, yet powerful, tool that makes everything real and easier. It enabled me to believe in others, and in return others made me believe in myself.

As a leader you must show weakness, you must not be afraid, this is only natural to us being human. I am not saying that vulnerability alone will build trust, but it definitely is the foundation for it. No matter how hard your situation is for you right now, in the end you will prevail, but only if you believe in yourself and in the people around you.

Everyone can call themselves a leader, but not everyone can lead.