Success in any creative endeavor depends on trust. If your colleagues trust you, they will give in ways they didn’t know were possible. If banks and investors trust you, they will finance your projects. In deep personal work, if a client trusts you, he or she will see and release life-long patterns that have held them bound. Without trust nothing much will move.

Many of the people I have coached feel nervous around earning the trust they need from others. We all seem to start out imagining that we have to get everything right in order to be trusted. In fact the reverse is true. Several clients have found helpful the homework of admitting publicly, for a week or two, at least one mistake a day. It is never whether we make mistakes or not. It is what we do with the mistakes that makes the difference.

I have been doing board of directors work recently with three very different companies, which in their own ways have each come through a time of crisis. Such times are tough for executives and for boards. Suddenly blind spots come into view. “Oh my god, I never saw how doing that could bring us to this.” We see how we were missing vital factors that seem so blatantly obvious now. Not only do we have to handle the shock at seeing what we had previously been blind to but also, at the same time, we find ourselves facing the array of interested parties wondering if they can still trust us.

It might be tempting to try to put our best face on it. Yet people can smell cover up a mile away. And no one trusts a blamer. When someone admits his or her mistake, however, it is their way of committing for themselves that it will be done differently from now on. They open a window on the change that has happened inside of them. When people are allowed to look through that window, usually they end up trusting more than they did before. Watching a leader in crisis will tell you a whole lot more about their character than witnessing their success.

In the early stages of a coaching engagement, clients usually find ways to test to see if they can trust me. Albeit indirectly, they are asking whether I am capable of hurting, betraying or abandoning them as may have happened before. I have never found it works to deny I could be that way and to proclaim myself as safe. When a person sees that I know the parts of myself that could cause hurt, they seem to relax.

People may admire your brilliance or your determination. They may like you for your friendliness. Only when they see that you are capable of the same mistakes they are and that you have the guts to do what it takes to set things right, will they actually trust you.

The CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation once acknowledged to me that at his core he didn’t know who he was or what he’s really about. This kind of self-forgetting is surprisingly common. My colleagues and I work with people who have achieved great success by dedicating themselves to giving their employees and customers what they need to flourish. Yet, when asked at the most personal level, they find it difficult to say clearly what they want for themselves.

We forget ourselves by becoming adept at perceiving other people’s points of view. We learn that it is safer or more expedient to give them what they want and need than to take a stand for something we may think or feel. At other times we become engrossed in what we are creating to the point of forgetting why we are doing it. As a client put it recently, “I believed that being true to myself was selfish. I see now this has been a cover for the ways I have been denying the world what is actually mine to bring.”

For many of us, this is a crucial turnaround. You might want to look at what you hold back for fear it would be selfish. Is this how you excuse yourself from speaking or doing what is yours to bring? Freedom comes from exposing this lie. We may still feel fear of failure, rejection or retaliation, but at least we are no longer disguising that fear by pretending we are holding back for the benefit of others. Our reticence denies them our gift.

When you scratch the surface most people are ashamed of who they are. For example, in working with clients, it sometimes comes out that from earliest memory they had made a decision never to be like their father. As a result they are constantly plagued by the parts of themselves that remind them of dad. Others strive to live up to be the remarkable person their dad was in their eyes. Same result: a life plagued by the constant shame of never being quite good enough. We use a process that reconnects people with the lost love of and for their father. In that most tender space, the message often heard from the father is something to the effect: “I want you to be free to do what is yours to do. Honor me by showing up as you.”

What a privilege to see executives make the leap out of people pleasing into radical change. These people are now making bold business moves in their industries and stepping into whole new ways of handling their personal lives.

Turn away from the lie that it is selfish to be true to ourselves. Real giving is when I show up as me and you show up fully as you.