In this episode, Kahran and Divya break down feelings of trust and feelings of confidence, and look at where they differ and where the nuance is important, especially thinking about consumer businesses and experiences.
In this episode, Kahran and Divya break down feelings of trust and feelings of confidence, and look at where they differ and where the nuance is important, especially thinking about consumer businesses and experiences.
Trust feels like an emotional thing, but confidence feels like a cognitive thing. Trust is believing in someone; confidence is having reasons to believe they'll perform.
You showed up to the class because your mental game was strong enough. You had trust in yourself to figure it out when thrown in a tough situation, even without knowing the skill.
Hi, I'm Devere. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Hello, welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. Today Kahran and I talk about a very interesting conversation about difference between confidence and trust. And one of the rare things happened where neither of us managed to persuade the other one.
So, we'll give you a very fun episode to record and we'll probably continue this conversation some other time. As an aside, both of us are recovering from cold. Forgive our congestion. So, tell me what was your amazing idea.
Well, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and he was talking to me about the podcast and he was saying that, you know, it feels to me like you are trying to capture where you are at a certain point in time. And I was like, yes, this is exactly true. That when I was excited about starting this podcast with you, I feel like that was a big
part of it where I was like, oh, you know, we're going to be on this journey. It'll be so interesting to see how our thinking evolves as we go through all these different experiences and feeling like it's coming across in that was really exciting to me. So, I was like, yes, that is so cool. So then I was thinking about, well, where am I in this moment in time?
Right? Where I arrived was, I feel like I'm spending a lot of time thinking about building trust in different places, right? So I think there's a whole conversation we're having with one of our clients right now, which is really around like, how do you build enough trust with your users to get them to
invest into your system? Even yesterday, I was speaking with this person that I mentor who runs a company in Peru and some of the problems that they were talking to me about in their team were coming around because people weren't having trust in other people's work. And we don't have trust in other people's, especially your team's work.
You end up redoing the work. And then that just adds a whole layer to be pointing to, you know. Yeah. And also add so much resentment like beyond the productivity loss, there is so much resentment because it's like, oh my God, you are wasting my time and you are trying to be like, okay, I'm not wasting your time.
You are wasting my time. Why are you not trusting, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just like also breeds like really negative feelings in the team as well. Yeah. This thing they were struggling with was a lack of ownership that's coming because there's a lack of trust.
So you've been thinking a lot about trust. You still haven't told me about your amazing idea. No, no, this is my amazing idea, right? Because I think that some of my favorite episodes that we've done have been ones where we really just talked about a topic and we kind of explored it from different angles.
And I feel like the topic that I'm thinking a lot about these days is this one, which is like, what is building trust mean? What is an appropriate expectation of building trust with your customer or with your team? Right. And I think we've done a lot of things to build trust over the last two years. I wonder a little bit about, is that something we could try and package?
Right. Like maybe this is a type of workshop that we could do for people or we start to think about how we do this as like, I don't know, a lecture series feels weird for building trust, but maybe it's possible. So I've been thinking about this from a very different angle recently. And that's more about like having trust in yourself.
Okay. Say more. So yesterday I watched this show and I just binged a show and it was about these trainees who are like, you know, trying to get selected in a girl group. It's by the same label that produced BTS and like, I love BTS. And I know that that label has like some really good work behind it.
And they started as a no-name thing. And like, you know, BTS was their big ticket thing. Like clearly they have taste. They have everything. Of course, they haven't struck magic again.
And it's right to think about them as a music label, right? Like that's an appropriate equivalent outside of. Yeah. I mean, like they bought the music label that used to work with Justin Bieber and all, like they purchased that label.
So yes, they are also a label, but they are more than label. Like in Korea, these labels are also the places which train the people and they're like, they're more like agencies and training camps plus the producers in more ways than one. Interesting. Then he's like, I was watching this thing and a lot of it was, it was very visible.
And maybe that was also the narrative that was told. Like a lot of these people, they had some skill, right? Like they had some potential. But to unlock the potential, they had to believe that they had the potential. And they even had like a psychologist assigned from like, you know, very beginning to the girls
because it was like, okay, this is going to be hard. You need somebody who can talk you through it. And oftentimes, like so much of growth and success is reliant on your mental fortitude, much more than your physical fortitude or like, you know, your skills. It even though school and the culture would try for us to believe that it is more about
your own, you know, your ability to do the work, but it's like that is only 20% your actual skill and 80% is like what mindset you go into it. So I've just been thinking a lot about like, you know, how do you, how do you trust yourself? It's very easy to say, have confidence. Like whether it's in other people or in a system or in a situation or in a process or in yourself,
but it's like, how the hell are you going to have confidence? Like, where does it begin? It's like, when somebody is anxious and you just tell them, just stop worrying. And it's like, bro, I would if it was that easy. It's like, just be confident.
Like I would if it was that easy. See, this is the amalgamation you've drawn, which I don't know if I fully agree with, which is like, you're saying trust and confidence are hand in hand. I think that like, yeah, confidence is about like, you know, knowing what kind of results can you expect when you put a certain system, a person on a thing in a particular situation
and trust is also. Well, I was just going to add to that. So my, I've been doing cut like the past three weeks, right? And Retina, the who who has been teaching our class, she spoke of confidence in the exact same way as you.
That's like, right? Where she was like, if you are nervous when you're walking up here, you're not having confidence in yourself. And she's like, that means you have not done enough practice, right? Practice will beat nerves every time because when you practice enough, you'll be
confident and you may be shaking, but you will still be confident in being able to do what you need to do. I think it's not completely untrue. A part of it is also the mental works the same way. So like you need to have mental confidence that like, oh, even when put in hard
situations, I would be able to conquer it and you get that by practicing in hard situations. Like, okay, the same thing. What made you have the trust or the confidence? And yes, they are very adjacent concept and not the same, but like the adjacent
concept for me to go and start a Kathak class when you have never really professionally trained in Indian classical dance. I don't even know if you've trained in dance at all, but like, I know that you have definitely you haven't trained in dance either. Right.
I've never trained in dance at all. Which is why then I recently found out so I have one friend who's also new to Kathak who I've been doing it with. And I found out his minor in college was dance. And I was like, what the hell?
So everyone has done dance. Yeah. Right. But like, and like how many people do you know in their thirties? Forget about like, you know, in their late thirties.
Yeah. Hell, even late twenties, who are you? You know, sort of picking up completely new things that do give you a sense of like, this is where your competence level is. Here's the thing.
You showed up to the class because your mental game was strong enough, right? Like you had mental trust on yourself. But I will figure it out when thrown in a tough situation or like, you know, I know how to pick up new skills, even though you didn't know this skill. So like just picking up new skills is also a skill and you just have so much
practice that you have confidence. Just makes sense. That's funny because I think that is a very new thing for me, right? I didn't pick up new things for a long time. Well, she's the person who trained as a professional chef and then like, you know,
shifted from product marketing to running a company and then like, oh, what else can I do? I guess I'll start angel investing. Like, yeah, sure. These are the things that I know of. Okay.
Okay. Oh, and I forgot about the poetry workshop in the poetry MFA that you're going to do. I'm sorry. What actually we started yesterday.
Monday was the first day of classes. Oh my God. Yeah. Did all my readings last night. It was it's fun.
I'll tell you about it sometime. My dear listeners. I can see what you're saying. And I think maybe I've come around a bit to the notion because I do think having practice in doing things.
Right. For me, it's like, there's almost nothing that could be two or three weeks long that I feel like I couldn't figure out how to do. You know, I've done a lot of things that have been short term gap. Now, if it was something that like was a year's long commitment, that's a little
bit harder for me to walk in and just, you know, make that commitment up front. But that's also just because years long commitments are a lot in time, you know, and there's a lot going on in our lives these days. And also like you haven't done that many of those. Like you just have lesser experience with those, right?
And so the ROI becomes like a lot more risky. Yeah. And I think it's hard to have too much experience with those, right? For most things in life. I mean, that's I guess maybe maybe not true, right?
If you are someone who has had like kind of consistent hobbies for an extended period, that is things that you have done. I guess that makes sense. I had not connected that previously, but I think that's what makes it somewhat easy for me to pick up a new thing and be like, OK, sure, I'll add it
somewhere in my professional repertoire. Like I know that when I'm learning new things, I know I'm going to eventually use it professionally, even if I don't know how, even if I don't know when, I know eventually I'm going to use it. And it's just because like, yeah, last 15 years, that's what I've been doing.
I just like pick up something and I'm like, I'll chew on you new skill. Don't worry about it. I feel medium about this like place. We like, I feel like if we could try and like go more towards the like the difference between trust and confidence, I feel like I might be more.
How do you feel? OK, so like, let's say that there is even if I say that trust and confidence are adjacent things, it feels like you still not convinced about their overlap as much as I am. And what feels different to you there?
So one feels easier than the other, right? Trust definitely feels easier to build confidence in my mind. And trust, I think, comes from knowing that something will reliably produce what you expect it will. Correct.
What is confidence then? And. And confidence, I think, comes from a predictability in chaotic or uncertain situations. Wait, that's reliability is also that right?
Like trust is. Yeah. But I would say that I think I could build trust in more. Do you feel like confidence has a skill component that you just feel like trust doesn't?
In part, right? So I was trying to think of some examples. And I think that, you know, if I took some storefront examples in my life, there is a bakery down the street that I would say I have like trust in their ability to deliver to me what I would be looking for on most given mornings,
right, that I went there, right? They would not be out of stock. They would have consistency in their product enough that I would I built trust over many visits, right? Now, would I approach them for special ordering something?
Not necessarily, right? Because there's been some moments where things haven't been quite right. Or where I've tried something. I've been like, Oh, this is okay. Right.
So the confidence would come that I would think that they would be able to deliver something that maybe not in their direct bill of goods every single day. Then I would be like, Oh, you know, you're a master of the craft. I can have confidence in your ability to deliver. Interesting.
But trust doesn't have that confidence. For you, confidence is associated with mastery. Trust is just associated with for the lack of a better term, completion or reliability. Yeah. Okay.
The task is going to get done. Checkmarked. That brings trust, but confidence is about being able to do it to a close to perfect level. Because those are my standards generally. So if I'm going to trust you to do something, I need to know that you're going to do it
at a level that I would find acceptable. High standards for those kinds of things. Oftentimes. No, but then that means that you are saying that's confidence. I'm saying for me to have confidence in you to deliver something.
I'm going to use the word trust there. So that's what's interesting, right? Because we're doing this to work. Just now before you switched it out for confidence, because like that's the interesting part. Right.
So in your brain, they are two different concepts and you can feel confident in something. But okay, is trust always a predecessor to confidence? No, I don't think so. And I thought of an example where there's a bar that I've invested in Williamsburg and the person who's going to be the proprietor.
I met in a certain context. We talked through her plans. I met some of her current colleagues. And then I also asked her to meet with some of my people who are more financially inclined than I am who kind of went through the projections with her.
And I think across all of those metrics, we all reach similar conclusions. And that gave me a lot of confidence in her ability to kind of navigate what I think will be the twists and turns of actually opening a bar in Williamsburg. Right. Now, do I trust in any of her hard skills necessarily?
Not necessarily, not today. What I've trust in is her ability to figure out what may come. But really that to me is more of like believing in someone and having confidence in their ability to perform. Right.
To me, it's a stretch of it to say that that's, you know, trust in your ability to navigate is like kind of a weird usage of trust. I would more say, like, you know, I have trust in your skills of something. Trust feels to me more of like a hard skill, sort of associated thing. Maybe a little bit of soft skills, but not those kind of like second order or third
order things. I am more confused than I was before. So to me, it feels like trust is an emotional thing, but confidence is a cognitive thing. Like that's what I'm picking up. But you're like, if I could give reasons for XYZ in terms of like the quality of execution,
then I would say confidence. But then if I'm saying that, like, you know, because I was trying to go through all of the different models that I have, and I was like, okay, are you using one as a ceiling function and one as a floor function? Doesn't seem like it.
Like there are some traces of it. Like trust feels more like a floor thing, but only in certain areas in certain areas. Like that's why I asked you, like is trust always a. predecessor to confidence and you're like, no, not necessarily. So it almost feels like trust is like this emotional space that a thing, a person, a
situation, a process has achieved with you. Well, confidence is like, okay, here are the numbers. Look at the numbers. And so like even going back to your bakery example, the fact. I don't know, but go on.
I have some thoughts. But you were saying with the bakery example. I just feel like the fact that you've gone there multiple times and you're like, oh, okay, I think that like, you know, you're going to be here. I can rely on you for that.
That feels like I just built the habit to emotionally trust this thing. But like, because you don't feel like you have reasons or like you haven't tested the reason limit for it. You're like, I can't say I'm confident in it. While the lady who's trying to open a bar, you're like, I have the numbers.
I have reasons, but I have no emotional like, okay. So like that's my current interpretation. I understand what you're saying. And I think, uh, I don't know, like would I have confidence in my father to handle very difficult, like kind of uncertain chaotic situations?
A hundred percent, right? But would I trust him to remember the details of what he's supposed to do? Like in those situations, there was like a checklist he was supposed to execute. Absolutely not. Right.
But like neither of those are universal, right? I could also say that like, you don't have confidence that he would fulfill a checklist while you have confidence that he would handle difficult chaotic situations. Or you could also say, I don't have trust that he will follow through a checklist, but I have trust that he will.
That's what I'm saying. So for me, having confidence in someone is a thing where it's like you're having confidence in someone's ability to perform. Right. Like I'm using it in that broader level.
Yeah. But like following a checklist is also performance. Well, no, following a checklist is not the issue. He would could follow a checklist. I was saying more like, you know, if there is something like feel like we're
supposed to keep track of a bunch of things and that we're not necessarily written down. I mean, this is I think like that's how you feel about yourself also. You don't trust yourself to not forget stuff, but you trust yourself to like, you know, like if you're traveling, you're like, oh, I might forget my wallet or might forget my keys somewhere, but you also trust yourself to manage a very complicated
travel situation with no hassles. Right. Like it would be no load for you. You can manage like, you know, five people traveling to five different places over the course of a month.
You'd be happy to do that and you trust your ability to do it. But also from the day to day, you might be like, yeah, I might forget my keys at the hotel or I might forget my t-shirt at the hotel. Right. But like they are both trust things.
Like, so what I'm trying to see is like, to me, it still feels like there is no difference in the two. It's just that like some places you emotionally feel better using the word confidence. So I'm going to keep grilling you on this.
No, no, no, I will give you a better example. If I tried to sum it up in a few words, it would be confidence is something you have in a person, right? Confidence is a bigger thing, right? And then trust is about hard skills.
Like the conversation I was having with my mentee on Monday, we were talking about someone whose ability to calculate numbers was consistently wrong. Right. And so he was saying that he doesn't have trust in the numbers that this person presents.
So I was giving them some things where I was saying, okay, you know, one way to handle this is drill into the calculation together. Right. So step back through line by line. How did the person arrive at those numbers?
Right. But what that really is is about building trust together in the fact that we're following the same process. Right. Because this has been a place where there's been an erosion of trust.
Now you may still have confidence in this person and their ability to perform the fact that they're going to be ethical, that they understand their job. Right. But that's not the case. They're going to be ethical, that they understand their job.
Right. But you've lost trust in their numbers presenting. Right. So now you can do a process to rebuild that trust. But I think the confidence thing is a bigger thing.
It's taking into all these different factors. You know, you may have trust in these five different abilities of theirs. You may also have trust in their values or, you know, feel compatibility with their values. Right.
There's like all of those things go into feeling confident in a person. To me, I guess confidence is almost like, if I'm confident in you, I'm I would be willing a lot of times to say that I would assign to you the decision making responsibility that I would otherwise keep for myself. And I think a trust situation is I might delegate to you a work item, but I
would keep supervisory role over it. But if I have confidence in your ability to take it, I wouldn't feel like I need to keep that supervision or supervisor role over the piece of work item. So would you have trust or confidence in our ability as a team to record every time we turn on the mics?
I have confidence in our ability to put together a good podcast recording. Right. So I think the process we have designed, the way we approach all of that together has designed to give me confidence in our ability to do this thing. Now, do I have trust in that every moment, every time that we put on the mic,
we're going to actually say things that are useful? No, but I do have confidence that we will get there and that the process that we have will help us make sure that we have a great podcast recording that comes out of it. Interesting.
Like, I don't think that like there is that gap in my mind between those two concepts. Like, I think that like, if there is a slight difference, it might be either on the moral lines where like, you know, trust might have slightly more trust. Trust is in the skill. Correct.
Correct. I'm agreeing with your definition. I'm just defining my definition. Okay. Okay.
Oh my God. I just thought we were still we're not there. I was like, go down. I agree with what you are believing. Now I'm on the agree to disagree part.
I think like I find it easier or like simpler to do certain things or I don't. And trust and confidence are interchangeable. I think sometimes trust also has a component of courage for me. Where it's like, ah, it'll happen, like courage, faith, whatever you want to call that.
Sometimes it might have that like, you know, just to trust to take a leap of faith, that kind of thing. Confidence generally tends to be slightly more concrete, but very honestly, like at least the way my brain works, you know, how I said, like you could enter the class because you had confidence in your skill to go and pick up a new.
I think that like, I just break everything down and I'm like, okay, so this entire thing, if I'm doing something new, it requires 20 skills from me. I know I can do 15 and then it's okay. I think I'll manage the rest as well. And like both of those are like their trust, confidence is interchangeable for me.
I don't know. I feel like if I pushed you on this a little bit, if you don't mind terribly, I think that there might be certain people that you have confidence in their ability to, as I would think about it, kind of perform more uncertain situations. Right.
So for example, I think that you're confident in putting me in front of any of our clients and that, you know, I will be able to handle myself in a way that you would not feel uncomfortable. Right. Now, I think that there's people that you may not have that confidence in, but you
would still trust in their abilities to perform for certain things. Right. Like that's what I'm saying. In my mind, they are interchangeable, but you're saying there's no distinction. No.
So how do you draw a distinction between those two kinds of things? I don't. Like it's just like at what a scale for me, the scale doesn't really matter. The words are rather the words are not denoting any qualities of the scale at which they are operating.
So then when you think about it from like a client point of view, right? So you feel like what we're trying to do is equally help a consumer build confidence in a brand as well as to build trust in their product marketing process. Yeah. And that's what I said.
Like, you know, there is this maybe like slight sort of moral slash emotional textural difference between the two things. So like trust has slightly more, even if I can't put a finger on it, I will trust you kind of a thing. That's where I also said, like, you know, there is maybe some component of faith
or a leap of faith, like, you know, taking, being able to take a leap of faith like that kind of stuff. But broadly, both of them are like, yeah, like to me, it wouldn't be particularly different. The path to help, like, let's say a customer build confidence in a brand
versus build trust in a brand. Trust just sounds like a nicer word, but in my own emotional construct, they are same. See, like if I took it to, you know, even the example in front of us, right? Like I feel to get someone to put their idea into a prompt box, right?
Even to just get them to write it down to push a button to say, you know, try and make this idea better. You have to have trust that that thing is not going to do things that you would find objectable, which maybe is like, it's not going to tweet it on the internet immediately.
It's not going to immediately erase. It's actually going to work. Right. But those are all relatively small things. I don't even have a huge, you know, I don't even have confidence in this
brand. I just need to have trust in this text box. But like that's what I'm saying. Like for you confidence and trust our skill wise, different for me, they're not. So you would still think about that as the same thing.
It doesn't feel like having confidence in this thing working feel different. No, I mean, like you're changing the scale qualifier and then calling it confidence. Right. Like that's how I'm hearing it in my, like, you know, in my construct. It's just like, I'm not saying that, yeah, you have confidence that the brand is
not going to like, you know, breach and like post what you are making somewhere else, or like, you know, it's going to behave in a predictive way. Or like, you know, they're going to hold to whatever things that they're promising you, like it is confidence, trust, same thing. Not same, but like, yeah, it's just like, yeah, that's slight emotional
textural difference. Okay. This one, I think we finally have a real question we want to know from our listeners. Right. Who do you agree with?
I feel there's such clearly different things to me, but I'm very curious if it'll be like an even split, or maybe, you know, maybe this is one where 20% of the world believes one of them and 80% of the world believes the other. I'm very curious. It might also be like completely different in the sense that like, where we
started from the model that you said, Rachna gave you guys, which is like, you know, if you're nervous, it's because you haven't practiced enough and you're not confident enough in your skills, right? Which in your case, you might put it more as like, you don't trust yourself to be able to perform to a certain level.
I'm just using your model that confidence is more broad, but like trust is at the smaller, more like, you know, finite levels. See, yeah, even confidence would be in my ability to stand up on a stage and be able to get somewhere. Right.
Even if I lost it, I would be able to find my way back, which effectively I did. Right. Cause I did lose it when I was doing my individual performance, but at the end, I did reach the final pose correctly. Right.
So I found my way back. So I had confidence in my ability to kind of get myself onto a stage and perform on the stage, but I didn't trust my ability to recite. And in my recitation, I got confused. Yeah, but like those are separate skills, right?
Like I'm just saying that if you break it down, they are separate skills. There are certain things that you think you can reproduce reliably. There are certain things that you have lesser practice on that you can't produce as reliably. I hear you.
I just, I don't know. It means like the confidence is in the deeper things that then let you learn new skills. The confidence is in my ability to be on a stage. So now any kind of skill that requires me to be on a stage feels less scary, even
if I don't have that much trust in my ability to do it initially. Yeah. The music is by Akshay Ramu Halli of BT RPT music and editing is by beatnik.