Give Trust, Earn Trust

Today’s blog is a little different from our normal format. Today, I’m writing a blog from my point of view.

I’m sure you’re thinking, whose point of view? Who are you? I’m a “who.” Confused? Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

Remember the book Who not How that we’ve talked about so much? Lloyd and I have worked together for several years because while he is full of ideas, writing them down is not his expertise. It is mine, though.

He had so much to say, and so much knowledge and insight to give, but when he tried to write on his own, he procrastinated endlessly. One big reason we procrastinate is when we’re trying to do something that is hard for us, something that isn’t in our realm of genius. When he read Who not How, he realized that he didn’t need to push himself to figure out HOW to get his ideas on paper, he needed to figure out WHO could help.

My first experience working with Lloyd was about five years ago, when he was the CEO of Smart Chemical and I was working with a marketing company helping him redo the content on Smart’s website. About a year or so later, after he stepped down as CEO of Smart, he approached my business partner and I about helping him write a book. Now, he and I meet regularly and I take all of his ideas and turn them into blogs.

What I want to talk about today is my experience helping him write Refined by Failure. 

Writing that book was so much fun, because my previous experience with writing and editing books for CEOs and other leaders involved talking about how smart they were, and how they had absolutely unlocked the secret to life, the universe, and everything. And what they didn’t realize was that all of their books were virtually identical. There was no secret, they were just all writing the same things over and over.

When we first met about Lloyd’s book idea, we got on a zoom call and he said, “I want to write a book about my ten rules of business.” That was absolutely what I was expecting. What I didn’t expect was that he wanted to write about how he broke every single one, and the consequences and lessons that came about as a result.

“That’s bold,” I thought. And I realized then how excited I was to write it. I realized that I finally had an author who was willing to be vulnerable with his readers and tell the real, nitty gritty details of the life of a CEO (which is not so glamorous as some would have you believe).

While he was definitely willing to be vulnerable and write about his failures and lessons learned, I don’t think even he realized how far we were going to take that.

Chapter by chapter, he got more and more comfortable giving more detail about what he thought and how he felt during all the experiences he’d had over the years. We talked about the death of his dad, and then how he got so stressed at one point in his career that Lora thought he was having an affair; about how he had to fire one of his best friends, and how he got fired himself.

It quickly turned from a business book into a hybrid business book/memoir. I firmly believe that humans don’t really absorb much unless it’s tied to a story, and the more honest the story is, the easier it is for them to internalize the information or lesson. That’s why I believe the book has had such an impact.

As vulnerable as he was during the first nine chapters, though, he became really hesitant when we started to wrap up the book with The Trust Rule. My business partner at the time and I were trying to pull stories that would illustrate the rule, like we had with the previous nine rules, and we were hitting a road block.

He gave us a few stories, but they didn’t really pack the same kind of punch as some of the previous stories. They were ok, but they felt very surface-level. After some of the really REAL stories he had shared earlier in the book, it was a stark contrast. Especially in a chapter geared toward trust.

We told him that the beginning and end of a book are very important and that what we really needed was a story that involved giving trust, and was the culmination of all the failures and all the lessons in the book.

He hesitated. He told us he needed to think.

We met again the next week and he said he had a story but he didn’t want to tell it. We of course latched on to that immediately. The golden rule of ghostwriting is if the client is scared to tell it, that’s exactly the story they need to tell. Because if they’re scared to tell it, it involves a level of honesty and vulnerability that most people aren’t willing to give.

Lloyd very slowly started to tell the story of what could have been his greatest failure, and it ended up being the chapter that has impacted the most lives. The reason it strikes a chord is that it deals with a topic so many people have experienced but no one wants to talk about. The chapter begins with Lloyd in a closet, holding a pistol, trying to think of a reason not to pull the trigger.

Obviously he found a reason, and it involved a series of “coincidences” far too amazing to be chance. I still get goosebumps when I re-read that chapter. He didn’t have to share that story. Refined by Failure would have been a very good book without that story—it was still real, and vulnerable, and shared so much great advice for leaders—but that’s the story that demonstrated his trust in his readers.

He gave trust, to earn trust.

His trust in his readers inspired their own trust in him, which is why so many of them have become consulting clients. They figured if he was willing to be that honest with them, they could trust him to help them improve their own companies.

That’s why when he came to me later to ask if I’d help him with the website content for his consulting website, and to help him write a second book, I was 100% onboard.

There are so few people who are willing to put that kind of trust in others, to be that vulnerable. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather write for.