This issue of trust is huge.

We Americans may not recognize it because we live in a high trust culture. We are taught to respect the value of a handshake and the rule of law. But travel to the parts of West Africa that are known for their scams and you'll see how rare that trust is.

I'm by nature a person who is prone to risk-taking. I take risks by trusting people far more quickly than is natural for others. I'm not sure why this is; you'd have to peer far down into my psyche (the final frontier is not outer space, it's the infinitely complex human mind and spirit).

Perhaps it's because my parents were always quick to trust me - they trusted me to travel the world as a young person. They were big on learning to take responsibility. Perhaps that's one reason why. Perhaps it's because I never had to suffer some great, enduring pain that could have rendered me gun-shy as a child. Perhaps it's because I am very intuitive and read people quickly.

Whatever the explanation, I've found that trusting people quickly is a double-edged sword. People want to be trusted and they tend to like you when you trust them, but they can also let you down because they didn't merit your trust.

People don't just want to be trusted; if you look deeper, you'll see that they are looking for someone to believe in them. Most people don't really believe in themselves. Rarely has anyone trusted them in the way they were longing to be trusted.

The problem is that all of us live in this "no man's land" between our idealized view of ourselves - who we feel we should be - and who we are now at this point in time. And we have considerably more upside than we may realize.

When someone comes along and takes a chance on that upside by trusting us when perhaps we don't deserve the trust, we begin to open ourselves up to the possibility of change.

Trusting someone with a task on the job is one thing, but trusting them with a secret or with a part of your life that is painful to discuss, is quite another. We need to take more risks, choosing to trust people with our pain when we're not entirely sure that they are trustworthy.