A Call To Leadership

EP251: How to Build Trust with Charles Feltman

• Dr. Nate Salah

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Discover the blueprint for building lasting trust with trust expert Charles Feltman as we delve into the four essential pillars that strengthen relationships and fuel success. In this episode, Charles reveals practical strategies to not only build trust but also restore it when it's broken, helping you create a trust-centered environment in your personal and professional life. Tune in to learn actionable steps that will empower every connection in your life!



 Key Takeaways To Listen For

  • The 4 pillars of trust and how each one plays a crucial role in building and sustaining trust
  • Why reliability is a common hurdle and explore techniques to meet commitments and foster accountability within teams
  • How setting clear expectations and boundaries upfront is key to building lasting, dependable relationships
  • Practical steps for restoring trust when it’s been broken, from assessing actions to initiating honest conversations
  • How our brains process trust and distrust, revealing why a balanced approach helps us thrive in collaborative settings


Resources Mentioned In This Episode



About Charles Feltman
Charles is a seasoned executive coach and trust-building expert who empowers leaders, teams, and organizations to foster authentic, wholehearted work environments that drive success and well-being. With a deep commitment to cultivating trust, Charles is the author of The Thin Book of Trust, a guide praised by Stephen M.R. Covey as essential for today’s leadership. 


Through his signature Trust at Work® methodology, he helps teams enhance performance by building trust, improving collaboration, and increasing accountability. Charles’s work spans executive coaching for leaders aiming to reach new heights, trust-building for teams seeking strong foundations, and leadership team coaching to inspire innovation and peak capacity.



Connect With Charles



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[00:00:00] Dr. Nate Salah
Trust. It is an aspect of our journey as leaders and as followers that is as foundational and fundamental as anything in our journey. It requires us to gain trust, to move forward. When we distrust, we have a threat, and we need to foster trust. We need to build trust. We need to create an environment to where we are. Are trusted. However, sometimes we just don't know where to start or where the building blocks are. We understand it from a 30, 000-foot view, but have we spent the time in learning specific behavior patterns? That cause us to be more trustworthy so we can work together and get things done. I have invited an expert in this area. You're going to love Charles Feltman. He wrote a book called The Thin Book of Trust. You'll be able to find it on all your sources. We'll make sure it's in the show notes. We're going to have a fascinating conversation. You will leave with a better understanding of how to be more trustworthy in your leadership. Can't wait for you to listen in. I'm Dr. Nate Salah, and this is A Call to Leadership. Charles, so good to have you on the program. Thanks for being here. 

[00:01:16] Charles Feltman
Thank you, Nate. Looking forward to chatting with you here. 

[00:01:18] Dr. Nate Salah
Oh my goodness. Yes. Your work that you've done in the area of trust is so essential, so important, so relevant for leadership. And how we bind together for meaningful relationships that can foster great progress for our organizations, for our families, for our lives, it's universal. And there's the concept of trust though. It can be elusive. Because, someone listening is like, okay, yeah, I know it's important, trust is important, but I can't really get my mind around some of these elements, these essential elements of trust, and why they're important, and let's just start there, Charles. Why was it important for you to pursue this work and write this book on trust? 

[00:02:05] Charles Feltman
Like many people went to work in an organization at some point in my life and understood the trust box. You really understood pretty clearly. The trust was important because I was also doing volunteer work as a community mediator and Trust is critical when you're trying to get people to come to some kind of an agreement that really don't trust each other. So I understood the value of trust and the importance of trust. But here I was working with a whole bunch of other people and I knew trust was important to build it, but I didn't really understand how the obvious things, be honest, meet your commitments, those kinds of things were clear to me, they were clear to everybody else too, and we all were trying to do it, and sometimes it worked, a lot of times it worked, but sometimes it missed, and I never could really figure out why I didn't have a, any kind of a map.

[00:03:00] 
It's a territory. And so when I came across this idea of trust being something that wasn't just this big ambiguous idea concept, but rather that you could take trust and break it down into some different elements. And a lot of people have different ways that they do that. There are many different trust frameworks out there, but the one that I started working with by this time, I was actually out of the corporate world and coaching people in the corporate world, and I found that this particular way of breaking trust down into four fundamental assessment domains, I call them really helped my clients understand how to go about building trust, what the behaviors were that built it, what the behaviors were that could damage it. And so this became an essential part of my coaching over the years. 

[00:03:58] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah, I love it. And we hear that we know that trust is a non negotiable for moving forward. In a way that releases the requirement to constantly be concerned about the intentions and the intentionality, the abilities, the care. And I know you're going to get into this when we go through your framework. You think about it right now, as we're recording this, we're only 16 days away from a U. S. election for president. And so this will air after the presidency. However, that's a big question. Can I trust any type of leadership environment? Can I trust the candidate for the policies to be consistent with my goals, whether they be in business, whether they be in family, culturally, in the community, as a nation, as a whole?

[00:04:42] 
We're looking for some of these, and I don't want to undergird all of what you're working with here in terms of politics because, of course, there's many different aspects of trust. However, In any organization, we must have trust as the central aspect of the strength of the relationship. And anytime someone, and you know this, Charles, anytime someone said, I trust you, my goodness, what an honor to hear that, to hear that phrase because as you've written in your book and as you know from your experience and our listener knows, it takes time to build trust. It takes time, it's like building a house and it's, and by the way, it can also be destroyed so quickly at the same time. So the time it takes and the effort it takes requires these foundational principles. We know it's essential, we know it's important, we know an aspect of honor, but often we sometimes don't really think about, as you said, the framework, the mechanics of it. So let's break that down. What's the first aspect that you focus in on in your assessment of trust? 

[00:05:45] Charles Feltman
Actually, I don't. Find one that I focus in on so much on a regular basis. There are four different elements or assessment domains, if you will. And depending on the context, the situation, the individual leader I'm coaching is in or the team that I'm working with is in, it might be any one of those four that becomes the most important to focus in on. But I'll just start from there. I'll just start and say, okay, here are the four, which we can go from there. Okay. And focus in as appropriate. But the first one is what I call care. People who do research on trust, economists and psychologists and sociologists and neuroscientists call this particular domain benevolence. But I thought about that as the name for this particular assessment domain. And so maybe I'll try something different. So I came up with care. Care is essentially the. Assessment that I trust that you have my well-being in mind, you intend good for me, that you have my interests, you have concern for me, you have my interests in mind, as well as your own, when you make decisions and take action, so that's the domain of care is trusted that the other person has my back, essentially.

[00:07:04] 
It's a pretty important domain because, I think in many ways, that's the underpinning the foundation for psychological safety on teams. For example, the second domain that I can talk about is sincerity. I call it sincerity. Essentially, it's a combination of honesty and integrity is that I can trust you. I believe that what you say I can believe. That you're not going to intentionally mislead me. And in fact, you're going to do some due diligence before you say something. I'm not going to just be talking off the top of your head, or if you are, you're going to tell me that you're going to give me a warning about that. And also that you will walk your talk. If you say something, you're going to follow it up with action that actually actions that support what you say. Your actions won't contradict your words. Okay. So, this idea of integrity, the third domain is reliability. Which is quite simply put, you've, uh, complete the commitments that you make. So if you make a commitment, a specific commitment to have a report on your boss's desk by four o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday, and that it's going to have this information in it and it's going to be formatted in this way, you do it.

[00:08:20] 
And that builds trust or maintains trust in the domain of reliability or. If you make a commitment to do something and then find out that something out of your control is going to keep you from actually performing, then you tell the person that you've made the commitment to as soon as so that you guys can reconfigure and do something different to get where you need to go. And then the fourth domain is competence, which is, I trust that you have the skill, expertise, knowledge, uh, experience. Maybe even resources to do what you say you can do or are going to do, or I'm asking you to do. And if you don't, for some reason, then you'll let me know, you'll tell me, you'll be honest about that. You won't pretend you know something that you don't. 

[00:09:13] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah, those fundamental components. Resonate in different ways, of course, as you mentioned, right? You apply them all at the same time, or they apply of uniformly, they're just aspects of the relationship that demonstrate trustworthiness in different areas. And I believe. You can't have full trust without all of them. In other words, I can care. I can have sincerity. I can have reliability, but if I think I'm incompetent, you're not going to trust me with the particular type of work that's necessary. For example, I own an accounting and advisory firm. If I'm incompetent, my team's incompetent actually preparing and filing your tax return. I can be all three of those other things, but you're gonna say, Nate, I think I'm going to go a different direction because you don't know what you're doing and vice versa. Now, of course, they all have different degrees to where you may, as a leader, you may say they're competent, they're reliable, they're sincere, they don't really seem like they care much, but I'm still going to do business with them.

[00:10:12] 
However, and the reason is, I believe all things being equal, when you find a relationship, whether it's you're doing business as an independent third party, that you're outsourcing a service or whether it's internal, once you find someone who has that fourth dimension, that fourth component, that caring, All things being equal, you're going to opt to do business with that person. You're going to opt to put them on the project. You're going to opt to be a team member or follow them because that caring, that genuine concern indicates that when my being Is a concern of yours, you will approach your work that we do together with a certain level of diligence, with a certain level of protection, and that gives me comfort, it gives me comfort to know that you're looking out for me, like you said, and as the old saying, nobody cares what you know until they know what you know. But you care, and it still holds true. And I wonder, as far as those four components, what might be, and I don't know if you've found this in your research or not, are there some that are less negotiable, some that are more negotiable? Is it situational? What have you seen in terms of, hey, you really need to focus on this.

[00:11:25] Charles Feltman
Absolutely. Often when I work with teams, one of the areas that they struggle with most is reliability. People are because for a whole host of reasons, one of which is that everybody's moving at lightning speed all the time, that often they fail to meet specific commitments they make to each other or to their external stakeholders. So that's an area that I do a lot of work with teams around, helping them first identify that's the case for them. And often it's pretty obvious, but sometimes they don't quite get it. Once they do, then we can figure out how to help them change that, so that they become much tighter around their, uh, deliveries of, uh, commitments. Thanks for watching! And more accountable as well. So that's one. It also depends on the circumstances. If I'm an employee and I report to a leader, for me, knowing that the leader has my interests in mind and has demonstrated that I'm going to trust them, even if I may not always find reason to trust them, or they may fall short, say, in the area of reliability.

[00:12:38]
 They make commitments to me about getting something to me at a particular time. Sometimes fail, just knowing, feeling that I can trust them in the domain of care is really important to me, more important than others. On the other hand, if I'm the leader and I've got people working for me, I want to know that I can trust their competence and I can trust their reliability and their sincerity that are going to be honest with me. I'm not going to be quite so concerned about whether they have my interests in mind. As long as they don't go way the other way and undermine my interests. Interesting. 

[00:13:17] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah. I suspect that even talking through them, the higher on a scale of, say, one to 10, that each one of these is in the area, the greater trust building is happening. In any context, whether it be personal, family, think about with your 17 year old. There's a certain level of competence that the social media world has assumed for parents today. And hey, I don't need to ask mom or dad. I could just go online and do the search myself. However, there are other areas that your competence comes in that social media can't as a parent. In other words, you're competent and understanding your own individual child. In a way that chat GPT or any algorithm or any website can't do, because this is the relationship you've had for the last 17 years with this child that's grown, no one is as competent, no one on the planet should be as long as of course, you've engaged with your child in that way and the high level of competence creates a certain kind of trust, even though you might not be able to answer a question here or there that social media can, and you want to be careful about that, but information can not be always.

[00:14:22] 
Reliable, right? You can't always trust the reliability of that information that, I guess I'm saying this to say. That competence, we have to identify as leaders, where that competence is most needed and how to make sure that we communicate that in a sincere, caring, and reliable way. Uh, especially in this, and I mentioned that from a parenting perspective if someone's listening, yeah, okay, I get it. But it's so important to, to understand that each one of these domains has multi layers of domains within it. So even the competence domain and the caring domain, the reliability and the sincerity, each of them have different ways that we express that in different contexts with our different types of followers. And of course, us as leaders as well. And I love that you brought up this, the, the, the struggle, if you will, with reliability because today in today's day and age, whether it's a parent, whether it's a team member, whether it's an organization or community commitment, we have so much coming at us. We have so much that we are committing to, and we give ourselves very little margin today, more than ever, I think, as human beings.

[00:15:34]
 Think about it, like 200 years ago, things were simpler. Things were simpler back then, Charles. We didn't live in that time. You didn't have, just now, you get a text message, and someone expects you to respond right away, right? Oh my goodness, I didn't hear from you for a day. You know how long it would have taken a letter to get back and forth? You remember pen pals. Yeah, so that reliability, it's constrained. And I think that when you talk about reliability on consistently doing what you promise, I think that is important to take a step and identify. First of all, what expectations can I commit to? Because it's up to us as leaders to say yes to what we can commit to and say no to what we can't. No to what we cannot, and it's okay to say no as well, because that creates a greater consistency in our reliability and independability. 


[00:16:18] Charles Feltman
If you can't say no, I really can't. If you don't believe that you can say no to me, I really can't believe your yes. 

[00:16:25] Dr. Nate Salah
That's good. 

[00:16:27] Charles Feltman
So, that's, I think, a starting point. And that's exactly what you're pointing to. Yes, and the other option besides yes and no is, and this is where I do a lot of work with clients, is a counteroffer. You come to me with a request to do something, and it has all the information I need to really understand what you're asking me for, including the time frame you're asking me to do it in. I evaluated it, and I go, no way, I can't do that in that timeframe. I can always counter offer say, look, Nate, I can do this much of it by the date that you want it. Or I can do all of it by X date or some combination around that you and I can have a conversation about it, a negotiation And come up with something that I can Make a trustworthy promise to do, and we're good, we go forward.

[00:17:19] Dr. Nate Salah
And I think that speaks to what you're talking about in terms of it increases trust when someone is that's back to your sincerity component, right? Because I'm being honest and transparent, my communication with you and making sure that we've identified the potential roadblocks to my being consistently able to. Produce whatever it is that we're committing to together that speaks volumes. It speaks volumes because I care, uh, I'm concerned because your well-being will suffer if we made a commitment that I've not been able to honor, and I care about your well-being. So then I'm considering the impact of my actions on you and others for this project by being completely transparent on what is possible and what is not possible and where we can find some ground to make this work.

[00:18:14] Charles Feltman
I love the way you said that. That's absolutely a big part of this is making the, what I call the conditions of satisfaction clear and complete. And this is, again, not only is it that people who are making commitments in a context where everything's moving really fast and oh, I got to say yes or I got to say no or whatever, but the people who are Making the requests in the first place are also moving really fast and may forget, unless they're really conscientious about it, may forget to fill in certain pieces of the picture of what done to my satisfaction looks like. Because again, it's not they're, they're being malicious. Or, they're not upholding sincerity, not being sincere. It's just that they're moving so fast that they forget about that. 

[00:19:04] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah. And sometimes, we have to make an assessment in our own journey before we make any commitments to what our own abilities are, our competence level is in a certain area, and be honest in that and say, hey, you know what, I'd love to say yes to you because I care and I want to knock another part for you, but this isn't in my wheelhouse. It's not my area of expertise, and the best I think I can do is be sincere, be honest, be transparent and communicating with you and say that I can see if I can help you and perhaps someone else or even if it's a team issue and someone wants you to step up to the plate and you say, Hey, you know what? I've got a year in this area and I can do so much, but I need to bring some more team members in to support this project because it's going to need that additional support for it to be successful for the terms of satisfaction. 

[00:19:54] Charles Feltman
Yeah, and I love to that. You've pointed to how all four of these areas are interconnected in terms of building trust over time in the whole person that you are or that I am. Other people are looking at us and using those same four. Four dimensions to assess our own trustworthiness, and they are all interrelated. And so just like you said, if I make a promise or a commitment to do something, I'm doing it hopefully because that other person can trust that I care, they can trust that I'm competent to do it, and that I'm being honest with them about my ability to do it.

[00:20:34] Dr. Nate Salah
Absolutely. And there's going to be circumstances where perhaps my reliability is compromised because of an extenuating circumstance. And they happen, right? There's an illness or death or something like that. These are beyond control. Hurricane. Any type of situation that may be beyond our control. That's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about these types of issues that arise. Those are understandable and they're acceptable. However, we're talking about when we make commitments based on our own assessment of a situation and what is possible. And it's so important for us to just hang here for just a few minutes, because as we're starting to uncover, trust is very dynamic.

[00:21:16] 
We must be mindful of our actions. And because they directly impact other's perceptions, right? Trustworthiness. And sometimes, trust is broken. This is, it's a reality. And we have to talk about perhaps steps to mend it because it's not the end, it's not the end of the road if it's broken. Not always. There's ways to perhaps mend it. So, we built trust. So, we've gone through these steps, and we've created an atmosphere of our own ethos where we care. We generally have this concern where we're, we're sincere in our honesty and our transparency. I always tell my son. Be honest at all times, and he says, dad, not everyone is honest. You can be completely honest at all times. And what that means is that you don't have to be thinking about what you're honest and dishonest about. It takes more work, by the way, I think, to be dishonest than it does to be honest because you have to remember, where was I dishonest? 

[00:22:13] Charles Feltman
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And in the context of workplace, like a team, for example, these are places where teams can have conversations about the extent of transparency in the work world. It may not be appropriate or even possible because of rules or whatever. To be 100 percent transparent about everything, but you can have the conversation about it. So everybody understands what to expect so that they're not. So I'm not thinking I'm going to trust you only if you are 100 percent transparent. And then the first time I find out that you haven't been 100 percent transparent, suddenly the trust is damaged. 

[00:22:57] Dr. Nate Salah
It's an important distinction you make because honesty and transparency, you can be always honest. Yet your transparency level is based on the situation and the requirements. In other words, there's a certain things I can't tell you. For example, I have a fiduciary responsibility. I have client confidentiality. I can be honest in telling you and say, Nate, tell me how much this person makes. I can't do that, Charles, because I have client confidentiality. And I can't be completely transparent and just tell you about all, and you wouldn't expect that, but the honesty is in that, hey, I can't do that. Thanks for asking. So that, that's important because I was honest, 100 percent honest. It's something I'd breach my, I'd breach my agreement and I can't do that ethically or legally for that matter. And that also undergirds, by the way, trust. Because, wow, you know what, I could really trust this guy because of the lack of transparency, by the way. Because they weren't fully transparent because they know that transparent would be a breach of trust. And so they honor and they, they hold that dear. And the same thing with interpersonal relationships. To be a trusted, to be a trusted confidant. If you tell me something that's personal to you and you say, Nate, I really want you to hold this close to the vest.

[00:24:07] 
It's just, it's something that, unless, and I always tell clients this too, and this isn't, obviously, this isn't, It's really personal, but I say unless, hey, don't tell me anything that you can't, that I can't say in a deposition because if I have to, if I'm subpoenaed and I'm required to say it, but everything else holds. And the same thing in a, in a confidential relationship. If there's something that you want to share, I want to be honest enough to tell you whether or not I can hold that in confidence. That's important. 

[00:24:33] Charles Feltman
I do that with my coaching clients. I may have been brought in as a coach to coach this individual by HR, and so I make it clear to my client that the relationship I have is with them, not with human resources. There may be certain things I will share, for example, with HR. Yes, my client is engaged. They're making the coaching sessions, they're showing up, and they're engaged in the coaching. That's it. That's it. That's as much as I will share with human resources. So it's very clear what it is that they can trust about what I'm going to share with them. I will also share information if I believe that you are in some way potentially going to harm yourself or others. And I have yet to have a client where I had that assessment, so I haven't had to deal with that one. 

[00:25:23] Dr. Nate Salah
I'm glad for that. We're talking about the words that come out of our mouth that we stand by based on our integrity, wholeness, and an ability. What I really want to spend a moment on with what you just said is laying out the expectation on what people can expect based on our sincerity, reliability. Competence and care. And I think when we lay it out in advance and explain, Hey, these are the boundaries of parameters I work in. I can share this. I can't share that. This is confidential. This isn't confidential. This is what I'll do if there's a situation. My friend comes up and says, I gotta tell you something. If you tell me you murdered someone, I'm sorry. I can't be an accomplice. We're gonna have to turn you in. But guess what I'm doing. You can trust me. You can trust me to do exactly what I say I'm gonna do. Right? Because I've outlined and identified, it's so important for us as leaders, and as followers to take the time to assess, to think through what we're capable of, what we will stand by, what our promises are, and not make promises we can't keep under circumstances that are within our control. And a lot of it is our reputation, Charles. This is really what we're building here. We're building a reputation based on all these factors. 

[00:26:35] Charles Feltman
And one of the other things that is very powerful about these four assessment domains of trust is that they are a great way to have a conversation about just what you're talking about, which is what can we as a team, for example, commit to what are the behaviors that And that's what we're We expect that indicate that we care about each other that the leader cares about us. What are the behaviors, um, in relation to sincerity or competence that we can expect from each other and certainly reliability that we can expect from each other? So having those conversations just by having them. We build trust. And then as we follow through on that, or sometimes when somebody does something that doesn't match, we've all agreed to, then we have an even more powerful conversation for trust building about how to bring that person back into the community.

[00:27:36] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah. Let's talk through when trust is broken. It's inevitable. It's going to happen at some point in our lives as human beings. We've either we are on the end of it to where trust has been broken as a receiver of trust or on the other end where we've been the trust store, and we've, we breached trust. Yeah. What are some steps we take in this situations? 

[00:28:02] Charles Feltman
I would say there, I work with seven steps, actually, that someone can walk through to prepare themselves to even make a choice. So let's say you have determined that you can't trust someone is. 

[00:28:20] Dr. Nate Salah
Let's give an example, like consistently unreliable. The person who says, I'll be there on time, and just can't ever seem to get there. Everybody's got a story around that one, Charles. That's familiar enough. 

[00:28:32] Charles Feltman
Absolutely. So the first thing I have somebody do is identify the domain that they're concerned about. Is it care? Is it sincerity? Oh, it's reliability. Okay, that's obvious. This person is just plain not reliable. And so the next. So step is to consider what is my standard that I'm using for reliability is it they're there exactly when at the appointed time, or is there some little slop around that in different cultures on time means something different? So understanding the cultural context as well is useful, but what is my definition? What standard am I using for on time and then identifying what are the specific? Actions or behaviors on this case, it's pretty clear you could say to the last three or four times that you said you were going to do something, you didn't do it in the time frame that I had asked you to do it, and that you had committed to when you said yes, I took it as a commitment to be there at that certain time or do that by that certain time, and it didn't happen. It was in every one of those instances of a day or two or sometimes three days late. The fourth thing that I, I have people consider is I might be doing to contribute to the problem. And this is where it is really important to be honest with myself, right? So if I'm looking at this, I'm thinking about, okay, what am I doing?

[00:30:03]
 It could be maybe part of the problem is that I haven't actually expressed before my concern about this. So this is three or four times this has happened, and I've blown it off. I haven't been clear with this person. How much this is annoying me, right? So that's part of it that I'm contributing there. But I also might be contributing by not really saying, Hey, my expectation is that when you agree to be here or do this by a certain time, that actually means within 15 minutes either way. The fifth thing that I ask people to think about is what do you want? What behavior change are you going to ask for? So I'm thinking about this for myself. Okay. I want the other person to actually consistently be on time based on my definition of on time. So I have to let them know that. And then I would ask someone, are you actually willing to do this? Considering what's the risk and what's the cost of not having this conversation and then finally you have to ask the other person if they're willing to have a conversation with you, it's not something you can just do spontaneously. Although the opportunity might arise if you're tuned into it, but if it doesn't arise on its own, you have to make the opportunity, and you have to do it in a way that you're not going to scare the other person away. 

[00:31:27] Dr. Nate Salah
Yeah, great steps. And those are all outlined in your book. 

[00:31:30] Charles Feltman
Yes, they are in his book, along with some steps for actually getting into the conversation for starting it out in a way that it gives it the best chance of succeeding. Yeah. So that side of it. And that's a hard one for a lot of people, depending especially on who it is. They have who has damaged trust with them. If it's a coworker or an employee, it's relatively easy. But if it's your boss can be really uncomfortable. Yeah, that conversation, if it's a good friend of yours, then this has been going on for a long time, and you really haven't brought it up with them can be really uncomfortable to think about having a conversation. 

[00:32:11] Dr. Nate Salah
Your spouse or someone who's on the personal side of the conversation. However, this is so important, and I will make sure the book is in the show notes, the thin book of trust, essential primer for building trust at work. Is taking the steps, each one of these seven steps, oftentimes we write it off and say, Oh, so and so is too late, or so and so is not going to have the deadline. Or we just simply dismiss it and, and we dismiss it in a sense that we reduce our trust level at the same time, we still have an expectation. But almost, the way you're describing this, we're almost setting people up for failure. Would you agree? 

[00:32:46] Charles Feltman
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I'm glad you pointed to that because that's exactly what happens in those situations. And then they continue to fail. 

[00:32:53] Dr. Nate Salah
They fail to pass a test that they have not been given the way to study for, if you will, right? 

[00:33:00] Charles Feltman
Yeah, you have to jump through these, these flaming hoops, but I'm not going to tell you what those hoops are. 

[00:33:06] Dr. Nate Salah
Oh, I'd tell you where they are, how to find them, and we're not gonna have a conversation about any of that. It's eye-opening when you, from a leadership perspective, to take each one of these deliberate steps. In with the goal of trust restoration, and that's one, of course, that's the front. The first goal, and the second goal is the satisfaction that we derive from achievement of our shared purpose. It's the whole point, like, that's the bigger goal.

[00:33:35] Charles Feltman
I often will talk about how, um, our biology, our neurobiology has, there's a trust network and a, you can go into this a lot deeper, but I'm just going to shorthand it by saying there's a, a network that builds trust or that registers trust in our neurobiology and one that registers distrust, and they're both there, they're both there for a reason, the distrust network is there to keep us safe, The trust network is there to allow us to coordinate action with other people so that we can do together what neither of us can do or none of us can do independently.

[00:34:16] Dr. Nate Salah
Wow. So if I were to simplify it, the distrust, at least from a human condition perspective, is for survival. So it's to survive, and the trust is to thrive. And so you have one where I distrust because I need to survive. And then the other side is I need to create trust because we work as a team, as human beings to thrive or to progress. So one is to keep me from losing ground defense, if you will. The other is an offense to, so that we can win. We can score, we can achieve, we can grow, we can do great things together. And that's the part of humanity. That's so brilliant and beautiful. When we have trusting environments. Such as the ones that you're describing.

[00:35:01] Charles Feltman
Absolutely. Trust is the foundation for that. And the real reason for all of that is that we do. Just as you described, we can thrive. Yeah. Together. Yes. 

[00:35:13] Dr. Nate Salah
Charles, this has been so good. I have a question for you. As we close, every so often, I get to ask this, if time allows, so you're on this journey of life. I'm on a journey of life. We've been contributing as we can through, through business and through leadership and life. One day, you'll be on that great summit. You'll be on the end of the journey. You'll be able to see all of the things that Charles has had a wonderful opportunity to impact. Over the years of your life, if you look back and on everything and everyone you've impacted, what is one thing that you would want people to have said about you in memory of that great summit, that great journey?

[00:35:55] Charles Feltman
Wow, that's in a sense. I asked that question about every moment. What is it that I, what is the impact that I want to have on people? And now looking back, putting myself at the end of life, what has that impact been? And I think as much as anything, what I want to have impacted is to increase people's capacity for love and joy in whatever they do, including work, which is not often a place people think about love and joy as being part of it. But I would like people to really experience love and joy in all parts of their life, including their work. 

[00:36:42] Dr. Nate Salah
You, my friend, are on your way. Charles, what a wonderful time together. I'll make, we'll make sure our listener knows how to find you in the show, though. Interestingly, I love the conversation that we have. For that one listener. Of course, we have many listeners. However, that one listener who's intently desiring to grow as a human being in their leadership, and you've impacted that individual and many others today. 

[00:37:09] Charles Feltman
Thank you, Nate. Yes, I've really enjoyed this conversation. And, uh, I'm sure that I love your Contributions to the conversation were really spot on, absolutely great, and I'm sure that there will be a lot of people out there who will take something from this. So, thank you for the opportunity. 

[00:37:28] Dr. Nate Salah
I really appreciate you being here. Such an honor. Well, my friend, we did it again. I'm so glad you joined me on this episode of A Call to Leadership. If you've been with me on the show. listening in, you'll know this, but if you're new, you may not know that I created a free course for you, that you don't need to provide an email address. You don't need to go anywhere but to stay right here in the podcast. I created the very first six episodes of the podcast because I wanted you to have the kind of value that you need to take advantage of to thrive as a leader. So if you haven't done that yet, listen to episodes one through six, and I'll see you on the next episode. I'm Dr. Nate Salah, and this is A Call to Leadership.


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