The Secret of Life is One Thing: How to Be Successful at Love and Work

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

After spending his life helping people, the “father” of modern psychology and psychoanalysis made a simple observation:  “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” Most of us recognize that when things are going well at home and at work our lives are joyful. If our love life or our work life is stressful, we suffer.

I just completed a new book, Stress Relief for Men:  How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well.  I offer men, and those who love them, guidance for reducing stress in their lives.  We know that 80% to 90% of all illness is stress-related.  Everything from rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s to depression and chronic pain.   But even trying to reduce stress in our lives can be stressful.  Doing a Google search for “stress relief” returns 52,900,000 results. In would be nice to have some simple guidance.

In the original City Slickers movie with Billy Crystal, Curly played by Jack Palance, was a tough, no-nonsense, old cowboy who rarely spoke. But underneath that rough exterior, Billy Crystal found a man of wisdom who had learned a lot about life and how it worked.  He didn’t need a lot of words to explain it. “The secret of life,” said Curly, “is one thing.” Billy and his friends waited to hear what would come next. And, of course, were disappointed when he said, “It’s the one thing you’ll have to find for yourself.”

Trust is the One Thing We Can All Use to Improve Our Love and Work Lives

Fortunately we don’t have to check out the nearly fifty-three million web pages or go on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas (or Curly’s dude ranch) in order to find the secret of life. The two leading experts in love and work have found the answer for us. Both of them have been doing their homework for many years and what they’ve discovered is both simple and profound.

Dr. John Gottman may know more about how to have a successful (or unsuccessful) relationship than anyone else in the world.  Gottman has spent decades observing the communication styles, thought patterns, and behaviors of thousands and thousands of couples in his famous “Love Lab.”  In his book, What Makes Love Last:  How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal he puts “trust” at the very center of what makes our love lives successful.

Gottman has found that betrayal kills relationships and trust keeps them alive and well. When we think of betrayal in a relationship we usually think of infidelity. But most betrayals are not recognized.  “Betrayal is the secret that lies at the heart of every failing relationship,” says Gottman.  “It is there even if the couple is unaware of it. If a husband always puts his career ahead of his relationship, that is betrayal. When a wife keeps breaking her promise to start a family, that is also betrayal. Pervasive coldness, selfishness, unfairness, and other destructive behaviors are also evidence of disloyalty and can lead to consequences as equally devastating as adultery.”

“I now know that there is a fundamental principle for making relationships work,” says Gottman, “that serves as an antidote to unfaithfulness. That principle is trust.” At the Gottman Institute you can take advantage of his 40 years of research that can help you learn to trust more deeply and become successful at love and at life.

Three Kinds of Trust:  Blind Trust, Distrust, and Smart Trust

Stephen M. R. Covey is he former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which, under his stewardship, became the largest leadership development company in the world. Covey personally led the strategy that propelled his father’s book, Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to one of the two most influential business books of the 20th Century, according to CEO Magazine.

In their book Smart Trust:  Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World, Covey and co-author Greg Link offer a matrix that can help us better understand how to use trust to become successful at work (and at love).

We’ve all had the experience of opening our hearts in love or in work and trusting someone who later deceived us. We get mad at ourselves for being so gullible. We also know what it’s like to be suspicious of others. It often feels like people can’t be trusted and we have to be on guard. We don’t trust the boss and he/she doesn’t trust the workers. We distrust our customers or clients, sure they will take advantage of us. We sometimes wonder whether anyone can really be trusted.

Covey and Link reflect on the questions that most of us ask ourselves.  “so how do we know who to trust? How can we operate with high trust in a low-trust world without getting burned? And how can we extend trust wisely to people when not everyone can be trusted?” The answer to these questions involves what Covey and Link call “smart trust.”

Smart Trust = High Propensity to Trust + High Level of Analysis

“Smart Trust,” say Covey and Link, “is judgment.  It’s a competency and a process that enables us to minimize risk and maximize possibilities. It optimizes two key factors: (1) a propensity to trust and (2) analysis.  Most of us would like to be more trusting. We know that the more we trust others, the more they extend trust back to us. But, we don’t want to get burned and have others take advantage of us.

Analysis allows us to maximize trust while keeping ourselves safe. It recognizes that most people are trustworthy, but some people are not.  There are three vital variables we need to analyze:

1. Vital Variable #1:  Opportunity

“Assessing an opportunity or situation is simply a matter of clearly identifying what you’re trusting someone with. Are we asking them to edit a chapter in our book or asking them to invest our life’s savings?

2. Vital Variable #2:  Risk

In love, in work, and in life, there is always risk. Some things are riskier than others. If a surgeon is operating on my brain I want to be damn sure I can trust his competence. If I want to know whether to take the 3 mg or the 6 mg dose of melatonin before I go to bed, that’s clearly a lower risk decision. So we ask questions about potential risk.  What are the possible outcomes? What is the likelihood of things turning out well or badly? How important is a good outcome or a bad outcome?

3. Vital Variable #3:  Credibility

“Credibility is the character and competence of the person or people involved,” say Covey and Link. Before we decide on whether to trust someone with a potential opportunity, we want to know about who they are and how they operate in the world. For low risk transactions, we can extend trust without knowing much about the other person. The newspaper vendors assume (rightly) that most people will take only one newspaper when they put in their money.

If we’re deciding on whether to trust someone to be with our children when we are away for the weekend, we will spent a great deal of time being sure they are competent and of the highest character.

Learning to extend trust requires that we suspend our judgments, that we recognize that most people are trustworthy. We take the position that trusting others is generally a risk worth taking. We also learn to be better at analyzing people and situations so we can increasingly feel that those we trust prove worthy.

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” said Henry L. Stimson, former Secretary of State, “is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”  In other words, “what goes around, comes around.”  When we make good judgments and lead with trust, we are rewarded with being judged worthy of other’s trust.  We all can help improve the trust levels at work, at home, and in the world.

Jed Diamond, PhD, MCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.