Who to Trust and Why: The Framework for Life, Leadership, and Conflict
The first time you meet someone, you’re not just exchanging names, you’re revealing how you choose to navigate the world. In Wing Tsun, we begin with a fundamental principle: presume positive intent. It means starting from a place of openness and possibility. This is something we practised at LEON restaurants (and wrote about in Winning Not Fighting) and something I’ve tested under pressure in life and in conflict.
However, it’s importance to understand that positivity doesn’t mean blind faith. There is a subtle difference between positivity and naivety—and that subtlety holds immense power. I’ve had people turn up at my door with violent intent—and end up almost friends. Why? Because I saw the human whilst understanding the threat. And that changed everything. To have a chance to stop violence, to prevent conflict and to create a chance at peace—you have to create a possibility of trust.
In this post I share with you my frameworks and skills models on exploring this: how to trust with clarity, what to do when it goes wrong, how to connect without losing yourself, and how to navigate relationships in a way that aligns with who you truly are. This is a deep dive into this area, and by the end my aspiration is it gives you a fresh look on how you see and use trust in your life.
The Three Phases of Trust
The starting point is understanding the process of trust: how it moves, and how we move with it.
Phase 1: Your Starting Position
This is your natural orientation to the world. Do you presume trust? In Wing Tsun, we presume the best while observing, responding, and staying fully present. There is a fundamental reason for this - if you enter every interaction expecting betrayal, it’s very hard to create connection and the best possible outcome. But if you presume goodwill, you give yourself the possibility of bringing out the best in others.
When you enter an interaction with positive intent, you’re offering a form of energetic connection. Your energy meets their energy. That moment of openness gives them a better chance to meet you with their best. It's not magic—it’s behavioural science and human nature. People mirror, people soften and people respond. A negative presumption, on the other hand, is much more likely to lead to conflict, disharmony, and ultimately distrust from both sides.
In human interaction, neutrality, interestingly, is often experienced as coldness. Humans are, at their essence, social creatures. We bond with those who bring energy, not absence. If you want trust and influence, you must bring yourself to the encounter.
Phase 2: Recognition of Yourself and Your Position
Once trust begins to form, you then need know where you stand:
What are your values and how do you approach life?
What are your standards?
What are your thresholds?
What is your vision – where you want to be? And what direction are you going in?
And how does the situation affect all of that?
This is often where confusion can happen. The tendency is to go to extremes - trusting blindly or withdrawing fully. But trust is not all-or-nothing. It’s something to be mapped.
Seeing Clearly and Trust Capacity Model
Trust requires you to ‘see clearly’ – what is there and not what you want to be there. This is similar to the ancient Zen teachings. Once you get to know someone, you begin to understand where you can trust them, how much, and under what pressure. It’s effectively a living map—a multi-dimensional sense of that person’s trust profile. This is what I call my Trust Capacity Model.
1. Breadth of Trust (Contextual)
Trust is always situational. You can trust someone deeply in one context—but not another. You might trust a friend with your emotions, but not your finances. A colleague with your strategy, but not your children. A teacher with your development, but not your team. A person you trust with your life in combat may well not be the same as someone you trust to run your business. The key aspect here is not to expect overlapping areas of trust. They may well have many overlapping areas, but you need to see it rather that presume it.
2. Depth of Trust (Relational)
How deep and aligned is your trust? Do you share the same aspirations as you? Do they actually want you to be successful? Does your success make them feel as a failure and create jealousy or resentment? Can they keep your confidence? Can they disagree with you but still back you? While it often deepens over time, the foundations are there from the beginning.
3. Pressure Tolerance (Stress-Tested)
Trust matters most when situations go wrong. Can they handle stress without blame, collapse, or avoidance? Or do they turn on you or others, lash out, or disappear? Often, you don’t learn this until you’re in difficulty—but it can be observed in micro-moments if you’re paying attention.
Context matters. Depth matters. Stress levels matter.
We are not static beings—and neither is trust. It flexes based on risk, relationship, and relevance. We often assume trust is a fixed trait, rather than a living dynamic between two people at a specific point in time. The Trust Capacity Model helps you map this out.
This Trust Capacity Model has a further use; it brings you into discernment and away from unrealistic expectations. Emotionally it also helps you avoid judgement and resentments – allow you to create a healthier environment for both you and others. In martial arts you can see this for students and master alike as it helps avoid some cognitive biases - the guru fallacy (expecting the master to be great at everything in every situation) and halo fallacy (being good at one thing, makes you believe they would be trusted in another different situation).
Phase 3: Decision-Making When Trust Shifts
As you have seen above, trust is not static—it evolves. There will be moments when trust dips. The question then becomes:
Is this temporary or permanent?
Was it a deeper behaviour you hadn’t seen before or was it caused by situation timing and pressure?
Do you move your resources—time, energy, money—somewhere else?
Can you have a conversation to repair the trust?
Or do you end the relationship?
The deeper truth here is that all of this begins with a single act—honesty and acceptance. You must be willing to see the situation as it is, not as you wish it to be. Understandably, that’s where most people falter. They hold on out of attachment, or project idealised versions of others based on hope, fear, or history.
But real trust requires clear seeing. It requires acceptance. As in Wing Tsun, if you resist reality, you lose your balance. If you meet it clearly, you can respond, engage and flow in a meaningful way.
There is an important balance here. If its reparable you can give people the opportunity to grow and develop – but don’t expect people to change to something they are not.
The Seven Principles of Trust-Building
Once you understand the 3 phases, it is then about building the skills. These seven principles form the practical tools that make trust not just possible—but powerful.
1. High Observation
Trust without observation is wishful thinking. In Wing Tsun, we learn to feel pressure, to sense intent before it becomes action. In life, this means watching body language, noticing tone, and catching the tiny shifts in behaviour that reveal the deeper picture.
2. Strong Boundaries
You must know your lines. What’s acceptable? What’s not? Boundaries are not about keeping people out—they’re about creating the space where trust can grow without resentment or confusion.
3. Fast Response Time
When trust is crossed, you must respond quickly and clearly. Not with overreaction, but with confidence. In Wing Tsun we don’t hesitate, we adapt. You need to be able to move fast in the moment, not weeks later.
4. Risk Awareness
You cannot trust everyone with everything. There’s a world of difference between asking someone to water your plants and trusting them with your child. Understanding the level of risk, the likelihood of it happening and your tolerance of should worst happen allows you to scale your trust intelligently.
5. Inquiry & Listening
This is a skill most people underestimate. Ask better questions. Listen not just to what’s said, but to what’s not said. Does it align? Is it coherent? Is there something off? Are you hearing what they are acting telling you about themselves – or what you want it to be? True listening is an act of observation in itself—and a form of quiet power.
This also includes listening to your own filters and biases. People don’t always act they way they did six months ago—or even six days ago. Being present enough to track those shifts is a discipline in itself.
6. Mutual Bridge-Building
This is the essence of Chum Kiu—the second form of Wing Tsun: seeking the bridge. Trust can’t happen without connection. And connection requires a degree of sharing. To give an example of this - one of the worst CEOs I ever worked with was entirely closed off. He didn’t trust anyone, didn’t share anything of himself, and had no interest in others. He was later fired—in part at least because his role required him to get the best out of others. If you want people’s truth, you need their goodwill—and goodwill comes from human connecting and looking for the points that connect you.
7. Intuition
Finally, trust your intuition. We all have a powerful intuition that guides us. Where it comes from is a matter of hot debate – from the nature of conscious to the neurons in the gut – what matters is the ability to tune into it and act from it. This is a skill trained deeply in Wing Tsun – and gives you the indication to move very quickly when something’s off. Trusting intuition more than just the your analytical skills can be one of the most powerful and life-saving skills you can ever have. People show you who they are. But you must be clear enough to see.
Understanding your Bias and level of Self Trust
Once you have the 7 Principles of Trust-Building you can then go deeper in the principle of knowing yourself. We again write about this in Winning not Fighting – but the key principle here is to understand that humans have a tendency to like familiarity - we tend to trust people who are like us. We seek resonance, familiarity, ease. “Birds of a feather flock together” is not just a saying—for many it’s a nervous system reality.
In the martial arts, I’ve seen this time and again. Under pressure, people connect not by race, background, or ideology—but by how they think. The same Enneagram type. The same energy pattern. The same internal compass. That’s powerful—but also dangerous. If you don’t know your own cognitive and emotional preferences, you can end up:
Only trusting those who reflect your own traits
Or over-glorifying those who are unlike you in search of difference or approval
Both distortions damage discernment. This is why tools like the Enneagram, Insights Discovery, MBTI, and honest self-inquiry are so important. They help you see where your comfort lies—and where your blind spots live. If you don’t know yourself clearly, it’s very hard to see others clearly. And trust—true trust—starts not with them, but with you.
Distraction: The Quiet Opposite of Trust
People often say the opposite of trust is betrayal. But betrayal is just the visible result. The real opposite might be distraction.
Because when you’re distracted, you’re not aligned. You’re not listening. You’re not watching. You’re not asking the right questions. You’re not noticing what’s actually going on. And so you trust blindly—or not at all. In almost every case I’ve seen where trust was broken, the signs were there. There just wasn’t enough attention being given. We were too busy. Too stressed. Too attached to what we wanted to be true.
And so, when trust breaks, one of the most honest and powerful questions you can ask is:
What part of me was distracted? And why?
This is not to blame. But to learn. To notice. To see more clearly next time. Because trust—real trust—only grows when you are present enough to notice what is real.
Institutions are a different matter.
Wing Tsun comes with a warning when it comes to institutions. You need to have a higher threshold and tolerance and awareness for your boundary’s, standards and trust levels. While you can presume trust of the people and individuals involved, the scale, complexity and culture of an institutions means that you are at more risk of negative trust outcomes.
This is not for nay nefarious reasons – it’s simply an honest understanding that an institutions responsibility is normally to perpetuate itself. Where this is the case there is almost an inevitability of a trade-off with individual level of trust. The normal mechanisms that humans have in the way they moderate behaviour in personal interactions are often bypassed – particular with how easy it is to incentivise negative behaviours (consciously or as unexpected consequences). People can become depersonalised and dehumanised at scale. You don’t have to look much further than the Soviet Union to see the devastation that was done ‘for the good of the people’ – and the saying attributed to Stalin “When 100 people die it’s a tragedy. When a million people die it’s a statistic” sums it up perfectly. Now this is an extreme example, but it is easy for this to happen pretty fast.
So to expect an institution to act with your wellbeing at its heart is not just idealistic—it’s structurally flawed.
But that doesn’t mean you act negatively or cynically. You treat the individuals within the institution with presence, respect, and positivity. You simply don’t confuse a system with a soul. When you accept that, you don’t waste energy wishing the system were different. You become empowered to navigate it clearly, to get the best out of it without becoming dependent on it.
This warning, however, also comes with an opportunity for institutions to look how you can facilitate a structure and culture where trust is built, alignment is created and where the right incentives are used to bring the best out of human dynamics. There are enlightened institutions where the structures are set out in a way that brings out the best of them. One great example of this is the Shaolin Temple, that lasted 1500 years on the understanding of the balance between the individual needs and the needs of the organisation.
Reflection Tool: Where Are You?
We’ve covered a lot in this deep drive into trust. To take this from the theoretical to the practical here’s a few tools that us use to reflect on trust in your life:
What is your natural trust orientation? Do you start from openness or suspicion?
What are your non-negotiables—your standards and thresholds?
How do you respond when trust is damaged?
Which of the seven principles do you practise well? Which ones need development?
Where might you be distracted right now in a relationship that matters?
Sifu