How To Become A Man or Woman of Your Word
Bud / 
34 Comments / 
February 16th, 2010 / 
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Of all the potential characteristics a person can have, trustworthiness ranks high on the list of most important. Unfortunately, building and maintaing trust can be a difficult task because it takes time to build and can literally be lost in seconds.
The foundation of your brand and identity is based on your ability to be trusted. Your word is your currency, without it your foundation will crumble. The more trust you have the more people you can potentially influence, however lose that trust and you will take a tremendous step backwards. Today I’d like to share with you some ways that I have built trust in my social life and in the online community.
Don’t Make Excuses
The quickest way to lose trust is to make excuses, because quite honestly excuses stink. While at the time they may appear to be valid, excuses have a tendency to continually show up. Have you ever heard of a person run out of excuses?
A few months ago when I was writing Reality Switch with Glen, I was given some very generous deadlines. However, due to my own lack of preparation and consistent procrastination I rarely met any of them. What did I do? I fed Glen a list of excuses.
“I’m sick man.”
“School has been kicking my ass lately.”
“There was a party I couldn’t miss.”
At the time, those excuses seemed fairly valid to me but in reality I was only showing how trustworthy I really was. It wasn’t until Glen sent me an email that said, “You’re so unreliable” that I really began to examine my ways. After that email I began to buckle down and finish what I started. Despite my other commitments I made sure that I never missed a deadline again, and was pleased with how the product turned out.
Instead of making excuses for your mistakes take full responsibility for the outcome of your actions or (or lack of). No one expects you to be perfect, so if you don’t come through, just apologize and move on. Don’t make it worse by feeding weak excuses to make up for you being human. Odds are if you continually rely on excuses to get you out of trouble you’re not as trustworthy as you may think.
The trusted ones are the people that take responsibility for their behavior no matter what. Excuses and trust don’t mix well.
Never Lie
I realize it’s impossible to never lie, but the idea here is to keep your lying to a minimum. Seriously, do you even realize how much you fib?
For an entire day take notice of how many ‘white lies’ you tell. I promise that you’ll be surprised. Even if you think you can get away with a lie most people can pick up on your insincerity. Lying also includes talking behind people’s backs and putting on a fake front.
I’m not for radical honestly but I do believe you should be honest as often as you can. As you strive to be more honest in your every day activities you will soon find that being trustworthy becomes easier and your communication channels will open up accordingly.
Being honest, especially in situations where you might hurt a loved one, does require courage but it’s certainly a better path than to mask the truth. Don’t waste a moment saying something you don’t truly believe, or that you know is not true.
Those who are up front and don’t hide reality are in the long run much more respected and trusted than those who do.
Consistency Matters
When it comes to becoming a man or woman of your word, consistency matters. Imagine that you’re trying to draft a star athlete for your favorite athletic team. Would you want a player who was a hit or miss? Or would you want someone who was good day in and day out? I’d personally choose the second option.
Don’t throw your trust away by being trustworthy one moment and then unreliable the next. As with anything, building consistency does take effort but your effort pays off in the end.
Following through on your commitments every other time just won’t cut it. Consistently keep your word and your peers will slowly take notice.
When you mess up it’s important not to be too hard on yourself. Realize that it’s OK to come up short. While I know letting someone down isn’t the greatest feeling in the world it’s bound to happen, so don’t get to worked up over it. Use your shortcomings as motivation to do better the next time around.
Everyone falters every now and then, but ‘showing up’ day in and day out is very important in building trust. Strive to be as consistent as you can and you will be rewarded.
Make Commitments You Can Keep
Jumping from commitment to commitment and not keeping your word quickly damages your reputation. Only make a commitment if you’re confident you will be able to follow through. Obviously there will be rare cases in which something comes up, but more often than not, you should be able to do what you say you will.
If you’re not sure that you will be able fulfill your obligations it’s important you voice your uncertainty. Never feel pressured to participate in an activity you know you don’t have the time or energy to do well.
Lately, I’ve been cutting my own commitments to where I can focus on what really matters. Putting my personal blog on a hiatus was a difficult decision, but I knew that for me to deliver insane value at PluginID that’s what I needed to do.
Building Trust
There’s no shortcut to gaining someone’s trust. Consistency and sincerity go a long way in developing relationships with mutual respect. The more trustworthy you become the more opportunities you will have to show your worth. Don’t waste your time deceiving the world and misusing your power.
Building trust is like lifting weights, the more you work at it the stronger it becomes. Are you as trustworthy as you want to be? The only person who can change that is you.
How do you build trust? How do you become a man or woman of your word? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
If you enjoyed this post, I would appreciate if you share it on Twitter, Facebook or Delicious!
I totally agree with this, in today’s culture trust is key but so often not there. I hold honesty and trustworthiness as the number one characteristics I look for in others and try to emulate myself.
Great post!
Thanks for stopping by Maren!
A great honest post Bud. I find myself making excuses as well sometimes. Definitely something i’ll be changing
Thanks man. Out of curiosity what are some of the steps you’re going to take?
Great one, Bud! With lots of mixed messages about integrity in the media, it’s good to have more voices getting people straight on how integrity helps you in all facets of your life.
And don’t forget that it’s important to be honest with yourself, too – it’s the basis for building confidence.
Funny you mention that man. I was actually going to do a section on being honest with yourself, however I felt I could do an entire blog post on that.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Bud, very nice post and I know I should leave a nice long comment expanding on your ideas and adding my own experiences, but, you know, I have been feeling a bit under the weather lately and I also have to go to that party…
… sorry, could not resist
)
Cheers,
Merlin
Excuses excuses… Well I’ll be waiting for your reply. =P
What – you mean I was making excuses, Bud?
OK, you got me there and I will change my evil ways. I called and canceled the party, crawled out from under the weather, and sharpen my pencil…
Integrity, as brought up by Michael, is, as I believe, the cornerstone to many of the points you brought up in your post, Bud. For there to be any chance of personal integrity, we certainly first have to find out what we really believe, something that is important to us and that we can be passionate about. Once that is accomplished it becomes easier to stick to what we believe – and that is my definition of integrity – no compromise with what is real to us.
There will be those who try to throw us off, but most of those are easy to handle when they oppose us and voice negative opinions about what we thrive for and we shed any dependencies from their opinion easily.
But after that comes the most important and most difficult task – becoming independent of the GOOD opinion of others.
There will come the time where we will have to act against what our best friend expects from us. We are expected by our friends to do A, but we have progressed further and understand now that B needs to be done. Our friends will not understand B even if we try to explain. Do we give into peer pressure and do A?
If we really have personal integrity and are independent of the good opinions of others we will do B.
The further you progress on the path of self improvement the more frequent these incidents will occur. On the other hand the more often they occur the more strength we develop and eventually the reward will be the thing itself. The correct action will become self-evident.
Practice makes perfect
Well at close as we will ever get at least.
I think it could be really interesting to keep a list for a week.
Just write down how many white lies (and big lies) you tell. Not only the lies you tell to others, but also lies you tell yourself. ‘I don’t need to finish this right now’ is also a lie. Keep them for yourself, but just count.
At the end of the week, look at it. I think we will be scared.
Lets do this Bud, are you with me? Maybe a couple of others? Could be an interesting thing to do!
Sounds interesting Stefan. Maybe I’ll try it and share my experiences with the group. Talk about courage.
This was a very valuable post Bud and thanks for sharing your own experiences. I used to say yes to any request that came my way and then would find myself not being able to fulfil all of them. These days I am trying to be much more upfront in the first place if I can’t do something, which I have found invaluable. Taking responsibility is hard sometimes, but you feel better for it in the long run and others also respect you for it more.
You’ve been reading Zen Habits a bunch haven’t you?
Leo is the king of minimalism and and it’s worn off on thousands! Thanks for the comment. Hope all is well!
Hey Bud,
Really fantastic post. “Making Commitments You Can Keep” was the section that really challenged me. I do fail to follow through far too often on the commitments I make. Taking on the challenge of blogging is certainly making me face that nasty habit. Thanks for this reaffirming post. I do need to know my limitations better and commit myself in the right places, and to the right extent.
The section I identified the most with was “Don’t Make Excuses.” I can at least say that when I fail to follow through on a commitment, I am honest about my reasons why. This has been very valuable at my job where, until recently, I was a department manager and this was a great way to leverage a failure of some sort into a chance to earn the trust and respect of the associates that worked for me. I never “threw anyone under the bus,” and that counted for something with my employees.
Hey Carlos. Glad I could help.
Would love to hear how you’re going to move forward and set limitations.
Thanks for stopping by!
I have actually used the Law of Attraction to get a new position at work which gives me a great schedule for blogging. I work at 9am, so I get up at 5am to blog for 2-2.5 hours every day. The part where I need to set limitations is to make sure I can go to bed between 10 & 11 at night so I can use that time well the next day.
I blew through my draft queue pretty quickly and now have catching up to do, so I started a group challenge to build up 2 weeks worth of posts in 1 month. I thought this would be a more effective way to handle the extra work pressure and also get some extra traffic and seo for everyone involved, and even make some friends in the process. Check it out if you’re interested. The last couple posts on my site give the details.
Good post. Learning to say “no” becomes an important skill when trying to keep commitments. Truth and consistency are rarely rewarded. The trick for me, as a parent and teacher, has been to figure out ways to develop in young people, the intrinsic motivation to be a person of your word.
Hey Hans, I’m gonna have to disagree with you. I think truth and consistency ARE rewarded in the end.
Being a person of your word is incredibly important!
Thanks for your refreshing Post, Bud!
It’s hard to think about a sentence that didn’t hit me. It’s not that we don’t know these things but it’s a lack of awareness that contributes to our chaos. To build trust is like weightlifting, nice comparison.
I am reading The Power Of Less of Leo Babauta at least once a year and it helps me periodically to prioritize commitments and build trust.
The hardest trust to build once it’s lost is the trust in yourself, in my opinion.
Best regards,
Andrés
I absolutely love the Power of Less.
“The hardest trust to build once it’s lost is the trust in yourself, in my opinion”
^ Totally agree man. I plan to write an in depth post on that sometime in the future. Thanks for your comment dude.
Trust is key in building relationships. I believe it’s important to be honest with yourself. If you need to “cut” out some activities then do it. You can’t be everything to everyone. It may be time to cut back on volunteering and focus on your business. You may have to cut out going out every weekend to meet deadlines. Be honest, people will find it refreshing.
Hey Bud!
Awesome article, this is the kind of thing that should be tought to everyone in school (compulsory!). Another thing to address is learning to say NO. I have found this difficult but I have realized it’s far better to say no to someone when they ask you for something you are not interested in doing than to please them by lying only to tell them what they want to hear!
Keep it up!
Good work!
Yeah man. Saying NO is something we all need to work on. So often we think that if we say no we will be looked down upon but the reality is that we will be much more respected. Hope all is well my man.
Love your article very much and also love all the great comments here. These are all very inspiring, and I kept nodding my head several times because of how often I can totally with what others said here.
And it really needs to change!
Your article has definitely ‘sharpened’ & re-confirmed to me once again the very importance of being trustworthy, especially in pursuing my dream-career & life path.
And btw, I also like what Andre said above:
“The hardest trust to build once it’s lost is the trust in yourself, in my opinion.”
sooo true, been there done that!
and I will start to CHANGE it, and let others know about the change too! thanks all to this eye-opener piece of writing!
Keep writing & sharing, man!
-Nik-
Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.myspace.com/nikiwonotomusic
(for a calm, sweet, and tranquil journey in music^^)
Bud, you speak with maturity beyond your years. It’s very refreshing in this day and age, where the norm is often selfish pursuit of entertainment.
I especially like your section about consistency. It is one of the greatest challenges in my life, and it’s something I work hard on with my coaching clients.
I know you still have many years before you find your career path, but you might consider becoming the first of a new generation of life coaches/inspirational speakers.
Jacqueline Wales
of The Fearless Factor
One of the things I pride myself on is my honesty and it’s key to keeping my word and building trust imo. Sometimes it backfires (yes your bum does look fat in though jeans) but overall I keep my integrity.
making commitments you can keep is one of the most important advice, i used to give promises that i couldn’t meet out of being nice but i only discovered that in the end people feel bad
“When it comes to becoming a man or woman of your word, consistency matters. Imagine that you’re trying to draft a star athlete for your favorite athletic team. Would you want a player who was a hit or miss?” – ok, ok. I’m going to go exercise now. Thanks for reminding me.
Great post here,and a timely reminder. I always struggle with making commitments I can’t keep. In my experience, people always go back to people who can stick to something they say they’re gonna do. It really matters
Words are so easy. Action is much more difficult. Sometimes we make promises because it’s the most efficient thing to do in the moment. If we can just keep quiet until we know we are committed to doing what we say, then we’d save ourselves a lot of heartache and discomfort. And we’d create a reputation for integrity. I try my hardest to say nothing until I know my words can be backed up by my actions.
Great post!