Hello,

I’m often asked what our product is and many are consistently surprised at my answer. I’m often interrogated as to why and how we choose a product so eccentric and esoteric; I hear the murmuring when I shout proudly from the rooftops that our product is Trust.

Yes, Trust.

When we believe earnestly in what we stand for we often pay the common price paid by those who do meaningful, purpose-driven work. Pushed to the outskirts and the fringes.

The too hard basket.

Too confronting.

Like standing in front of a mirror, naked.

To earn and behold someone’s trust is a skill honed with a courageous kind of vulnerability. To have the honour to be trusted with the delicate and sometimes traumatic stories we are told, held with grace and care, is not a burden but an award I’m more than happy to win in a world that does not often celebrate Trust, Grace, Honour and all those other wonderful things that should be celebrated.

A good friend once said to me, 'we don't have time to fuck around.'

No we don't. No time.

Because to be trusted is the fuel for our voice, and our voices are the very thing that can embolden a community to change for the better — and our voices are the fuel for our stories. If only we could find them.

To share our stories is to make a claim on the world. To draw a line in the sand. Our every word and every gesture, can be seen as an act of reaching out into nothingness. Reaching out into the ether for understanding, for validation and belonging.

For something that allows us to hear the voice of others and that quiet voice inside ourselves reflected back to us — "I am here, and I matter."

You are here, and you matter.

Our stories, shared and heard, build trust.

They are the delicate dance between asserting our position and accepting the humanity of others — that they too are as vulnerable and frail as we are. That they too deserve to be heard, free, liberated from oppression, elevated, supported, given the opportunity to tell their own story, in their own way.

Our stories, shared and heard, are a negotiation of a vulnerable kind of power that exists between us and in many ways, a reflection of the distance we place between one another; in the pauses between our sentences, in the unspoken truths.

The truth of how we connect — or fail to connect at all.

Our stories, our words have weight and we must always consider the landing of their footprint, heavy or light, and the residue they leave long after they’ve been said.

How they might sever our bonds as much as bond us together.

It's easy to say we are trusted, not so easy to embed so much into every word we say, into every action we take, that others reflect that trust back to us in ways that honour us so much, it becomes the legacy of our careers.

See you next week,

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Read more about our thoughts on storytelling and trust in Raise Everyone in the Village.