An analogy for trust our five-year old picked up recently is cooking.  I love to cook and have taken it on as my chore for our household.  The family has grown to like my food.  My wife’s family has grown to like the food as well.  At least that’s what they tell me.  When talking to our son about trust, we explained it like this.

Father: You know how I cook for you everyday?
Son: Yeah.
Father: You’ve gotten so you like my cooking right?
Son: Yeah.
Father: What if I started cooking meals that you didn’t like?  Would you expect good food from me?
Son: No, I guess not.
Father:  That’s what trust is like.  You build it up with every action you say you will do.  People begin to trust you when you say what you do and do what you say. When you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, people don’t trust you like they used to.  Does that make sense?
Son: Yeah

It must have sunk in as he talked about it after the conversation a couple of times.  According Stephen R. Covey, trust is a bank account we deposit into. This is another good analogy for adults, but a five-year old doesn’t even know what a bank account is yet.  Trust when considered action to action is the building block of integrity.  From the perspective of the Biz of You, saying what you plan on doing and doing it is managing the quality system of your own life.

Time will tell if our son truly gets the idea and does what he says he will.  Of course he, like all of us, are highly influenced by his peers.  If his friends don’t back up that kind of behavior, the nurturing we do may simply move to the background hopefully picked up somewhere in the path of his life.