As soon as someone believes you cannot be trusted, you are stopped dead in your tracks. Whether this perceived loss of trustworthiness is true or false, the perception alone can be damaging.

When we trust someone or something, we place our faith and confidence in their word, reliability, and deeds. Without trust and rapport, a relationship can be cut short before it ever gets started.

Strengthen your first impressions by making the intentional effort to first earn people’s trust, and rapport will naturally follow.

When trust is broken, foundational cracks occur which weaken the entire relationship. As with concrete, no amount of filling and patching you apply with the hope of fortifying the fracture will ever repair the weakness caused by the rift.

Sometimes we break people's trust accidentally. An infraction such as not returning a phone call, missing a deadline, being late for an appointment, divulging a confidence, or speaking out of turn can damage our perceived character and reputation.

Take steps to be humble, sincere, and authentic, and apologize if necessary. If a relationship is valuable to you, it is worth your concern and effort to make it right.

Being grounded in your lifelong culture and your personal perspective, you are comfortable with the way you see things and may believe it is the best and only way.

We will judge others based on their behaviors with little to no understanding or regard for their beliefs or values—standards we may not know, nor typically see. When we do this, things can be taken completely out of context because we are assessing their behavior against our expectations, which are produced from our own personal value system.

4 Steps for Understanding Each Other1. Identify your beliefs and core values; ask how they determine your behaviors and habits. 2. Realize with whom you are interacting and try to identify how their values are explaining their behavior. 3. Assume positive intent. 4. Seek ways to adapt your behavior to help bridge the cultural gap.