GET THE TRUST
Professional Self-Coaching for Leadership People Believe In
Tell the Three Stories That Turn Respect Into Trust, and Compliance Into Ownership
Lead From What Actually Drives You — So People Bring You Their Thinking, Not Just Their Work
You lead well. Your team delivers, your meetings are efficient, your results hold up. People respect you, and they do what you ask. And still, something is missing: when a problem arrives, they wait for you to solve it. They complete what they're given and rarely bring anything of their own. The work gets done and nobody seems to own it but you.
A team that respects you will do what you ask. A team that trusts you will do more than you ask. Respect is earned through effectiveness, and effectiveness keeps people at a professional distance — which is exactly where they stay unless something else is offered. This resource takes you, step by step, from your experience to three prepared professional stories that let people see the thinking and purpose behind how you lead, so they stop waiting to be directed and start navigating the work with you.
Get the Trust distils more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice into a structured method that enables you to coach yourself through one important professional challenge. It captures the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work — and places them in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Who This Is For
Anyone who leads capably and can feel the gap. The manager whose team is polite and productive and never surprising. The director whose people execute flawlessly and rarely offer a view of their own. The new team lead who has the expertise and can't work out why the room stays polite. If you have ever come out of a good meeting knowing it was efficient and knowing something was absent from it, this is for you. Everything in it is designed to be completed by you, in your own space and time. All you need is somewhere to write — paper or screen, whichever is your preferred way of working. You finish able to lead in a way people believe in.
What You'll Learn
- Why leadership built on competence and authority creates followers rather than partners
- How to recognise the failure, success and passion stories within your own experience — and dig past your first answer to the insight underneath
- The difference between directing people through change and helping them navigate it, and why the second creates ownership
- How your three stories combine into one picture of how you think, what you've learnt, and what you're actually leading for
- How to turn the same three questions outward — drawing out other people's stories, which is how you develop the people you lead
- Why the signals of engagement and disconnection are quiet, and what to watch for
How This Self-Coaching Resource Works
Get the Trust is built in three parts, nine steps.
Part One — Recognise Your Three Stories
- Step 1 — Recognise Your Failure Story
- Step 2 — Recognise Your Success Story
- Step 3 — Recognise Your Passion Story
Part Two — Turn Your Stories Into How You Lead
- Step 4 — From Recognition to Leadership
- Step 5 — Connect Your Three Stories
- Step 6 — What a Team Sounds Like When the Stories Are in Circulation
Part Three — Turn It Outward
- Step 7 — Ask the Three Questions That Draw Out Others' Stories
- Step 8 — Read the Signals
- Step 9 — Develop the Leaders Around You
Every step asks the questions that bring clarity, and every step ends in writing — that's what self-coaching means here: you find your own answers, and the work is yours. By the final page you will have three completed professional stories that didn't exist before you began — ready to use wherever you lead.
Throughout, you'll follow Sarah, an operations director who spent eighteen months delivering results nobody could fault. Her team respected her, followed her direction, met every target — and never once brought her their own thinking. Everything changed the day she stood outside a conference room with a prepared script about a restructure, and put it down. What Sarah discovered wasn't a leadership technique. It was a repeatable way of leading that turned a team who complied into a team who owned the work. That method is what follows. At each step, you'll see how Sarah worked through it before you work through it yourself.
Why These Three Stories
Three stories give the people you lead the complete picture:
Your Failure Story reveals what you've learnt — and that you're someone who can say so.
Your Success Story shows what becomes possible when you lead from what actually drives you.
Your Passion Story communicates why you lead the way you do, beyond the results.
Any one alone is a partial picture. Together, they reveal what a set of objectives never can: not just what you want people to do, but how you think, what shaped that thinking, and what you're really leading for. That combination is what turns compliance into ownership.
What You Finish With
- Three completed professional stories — failure, success and passion — each carrying the experience that shaped how you lead
- Your connected three stories — the professional identity that runs through all of them: what you've learnt, what you're capable of, and what drives you
- Your judgement about the moment — knowing when the prepared plan serves the room, and when the room needs something the plan can't provide
- The three questions that draw out anyone else's stories, so you can develop the people you lead rather than only direct them
- Your Trust Page — a single page to carry into the conversations where your leadership needs to reach people, not just inform them
About Professional Self-Coaching
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Each Professional Self-Coaching resource is created for one important professional moment. One purpose. One challenge. One outcome. The thinking, frameworks and practical guidance within each resource are distilled from the School of WorkLife programmes — a body of work developed through twenty years of practice — and focused entirely on helping you prepare for the moment in front of you. Every resource strengthens the three abilities at the heart of School of WorkLife: self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership.
Get the Trust is drawn from The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity — the complete programme exploring how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work: our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
Author's Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly. www.schoolofworklife.com