We know it intuitively: we trust each person we meet to varying degrees. The trust battery is a metaphor that helps you think about and visualise these trust levels.

The concept is from Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify. He explains, for example, that when a new colleague joins your company the trust battery between the two of you may start out at around 50%. Each time the new colleague acts in a way that earns your trust that level increases, and if they let you down the trust battery level goes down. It can be long and slow to fill up the trust battery yet quick to drain. Each time we interact with someone we are subconsciously considering the level of their trust battery and that level affects how we respond to people.

Lütke says at Shopify they found it a useful way to surface and talk about trust in reviews without it feeling too personal.

I learned about it from the excellent It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work.

The trust battery: A handy metaphor to think about trust

You may remember this little trick from school. If you’ve not seen it before, give it a quick try 🙂

The 9 times table on your fingers

There’s something about being out in Nature for 3 days or more that resets us and improves our mood, our wellbeing, and how well our brain is working. Observed by river rafting guide Ken Sanders who used to see a marked change in the groups he led on the 3rd day of being out on the river, it’s known as the 3-day effect. Since then, David Strayer and his group at the University of Utah have conducted studies that measured a real change in our calmness and even our creative problem solving after 3 or more days in Nature.

“I think it takes the first two days and nights to wash away whatever veneer of civilization you have brought with you. The new reality begins on that third day.”

More about the 3 day effect at National Geograhic: This is your brain on Nature and REI: The Nature Fix.

No doubt similar things at work to the magic of forest bathing.

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The 3-day effect