It is very important to know who you can trust. Trusting someone you should trust is the best. Not trusting someone you shouldn’t trust is, well a waste of time. Not trusting someone you should trust is causing damage to you, to them, and to the organization. But trusting someone you shouldn’t trust is, well, right down dangerous and could have devastating consequences.

So, how do you decide if you can trust someone or not? This is the first of a four-episode mini-series. In this series I will break down the process of determining just that. I’m going to give you a science-based, pragmatic, intentional, and very prescriptive way to tell if you can trust someone, in what, and how much. Because trust is relative. I will use the 8 laws of trust and the 6 components of my relative trust model.

I will show you how to determine the level of trust you should have in another person based on who they are, and what they do. And if you think that your gut has nothing to do with it—you’re wrong. It is, and I’ll show you how to train your gut to tell you if you can trust someone or not.

The first episode of the series covers why you care about trusting someone else, and several considerations about trust.