The Thing You Can See and Still Can’t Do
A client told me about something that had been bothering her. She has a colleague who interrupts her. The colleague
Is the “trust recession” really what we think it is?
There’s a conversation going around the coaching and practitioner world right now about why people have gotten warier about who they work with, slower to trust and slower to buy. They’re calling it a trust recession.
The idea is that people have been burned by programs that overpromised, so the usual ways of earning trust have stopped working.
I think that’s real. And it’s also incomplete.
What we’re calling a trust problem is partly a discernment problem.
Is this person good, or good for you?
When we choose who to work with, we usually assess whether the person is good at what they do. We look at their results, their experience, and who vouches for them. We check whether their expertise matches the result we’re after.
That part we do well.
What’s less common is asking a different question. Not “is this person good?” but “is this person good for ME?”
That can include whether you agree on what you’re actually trying to achieve, whether the way they work suits how you think, and whether there’s enough trust between you to be open and honest.
Those are two different categories of questions, and most of us lean almost entirely on the first.
Why the second question gets skipped
There are a few reasons the second one gets skipped.
The obvious one is that nobody told us it was a category we needed to assess. So we don’t ask. You can’t assess something you don’t know is on the table.
And even if you know to assess it, a few things can keep you from seeing the answer clearly.
For one, admiration makes it harder to see a mismatch.
When you’ve respected someone for a long time, or followed their work for years, the good feeling you already have about them gets in the way of even asking whether they fit you. You’re not asking whether they suit you, because you already feel sure about them.
That’s why a bad fit can come as a shock. Someone can sit through a session that goes badly with a mentor they’ve admired for years and be stunned. The signs were probably there. The admiration kept them from seeing the signs clearly.
When something feels off
The other factor shows up when something does feel off.
When the person is a respected expert and something feels like it isn’t sitting right, it’s easy to assume you’re the one who needs to adjust. They clearly know what they’re doing. So you push the “something’s off” feeling to the side and keep going.
And when the work doesn’t deliver and fit still doesn’t occur to you as the reason, the hamster wheel of doubt kicks in. Maybe you didn’t try hard enough. Maybe you’re just too much. Maybe you’re not doing it right.
Usually, none of that is true. And believing otherwise is what costs you.
You stay longer than you should, because you can’t name what’s off, only that something is. Months go by while you pretzel yourself around a method that was never built for you.
There’s the time you lose, and sometimes a fair amount of money. And slowly, you trust your own judgement less.
You’ve probably seen this from the other side too, as the practitioner. Someone hires you who looks right on paper, has the budget, has the exact problem you work on, and still doesn’t move the way you know they should. The qualifications were all there. The fit wasn’t.
Fit matters more for some people
We see this in the research too. In psychotherapy, the relationship between practitioner and client is one of the strongest and most reliable predictors of outcome.
Some researchers think fit matters even more than the method. The method still matters, of course.
To be clear, therapy isn’t coaching. But I doubt the relationship stops mattering just because the work goes by a different name.
Fit matters for everyone. And it matters more for some people than others.
Some people can work with almost anyone and get a decent result. If you tend to pick up on more than the people around you, the mood in a room before anyone speaks, the sense that something’s off well before there’s proof of it, then fit matters more for you than it does for most.
The same wiring that makes the wrong fit so expensive for you is what makes the right one so good. Researchers have a name for this. They call it vantage sensitivity.
And it’s that same wiring that let you feel the mismatch before you had any proof of it. The discomfort you’ve talked yourself out of more than once was probably right. You weren’t being picky or difficult. You were asking the second question, the one most people skip.
Discernment you can develop
This doesn’t mean you have to hold out for one perfect fit. You can work with someone who’s excellent and leave the parts that were built for a different kind of person.
The key is discernment. So when something doesn’t fit, you know it’s about fit, not you.
I’m still practicing this myself. I don’t always catch a mismatch as early as I’d like, and I’ve talked myself out of what I was sensing more than once. But the more I treat fit as its own question to ask, the better I get at it.
So maybe the trust recession isn’t only about trusting other people.
Part of it is trusting your own judgement about whether someone fits you. That’s the part you can build.
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