Clarify Your Capabilities: Building Trust Through Competence

Did you know that trust isn’t just about what you can do, but also about how honest you are about your limits? 

This week, we’ll share a simple practice to help you build trust through clarity, confidence, and communication.

In this episode of Practicing Connection, Jessica and Coral explore how competence, one of the four key distinctions of trust, lays the groundwork for strong, reliable relationships. 

Drawing from Charles Feltman’s The Thin Book of Trust, Coral introduces the “Clarify Your Current Capabilities” practice, a quick but powerful reflection to help you honestly assess your strengths and limits before taking on a new task or commitment.

You’ll learn step-by-step how to name what you can do well, where you might need support, and how to communicate this with your team or supervisor. This practice not only helps you deliver on your promises, but also normalizes asking for help as a sign of competence - not weakness. 

Whether you’re leading a project, joining a new team, or just want to strengthen your reliability, this episode will help you build trust by showing up with clarity and confidence.

Links and resources from this episode:

The Thin Book of Trust (Third edition), by Charles Feltman

Transcript

JESSICA BECKENDORF: [00:00:00] Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I'm Jessica, my co-host, Coral is here as well. Today we're going to be talking about building trust through competence. This is the third in our series of Practicasts about trust, and Coral's gonna be sharing a practice with us. Hi Coral. How are you?

CORAL OWEN: Hey, Jessica. I'm great, thanks so much. We have just been kicking off summer break here in Florida, and my 3-year-old son, Kai, he just finished up his first school year. So we've been spending some slower mornings together and having some local adventures we wouldn't necessarily do on a more compressed weekend schedule.

So after today's post office adventure was a bit of a flop on the three-year-old, uh, you know, approval rating, we're gonna add like the lemonade train downtown, and there's also a bird hike at the preserve near our house that just opened that we haven't stopped into yet. So yeah, just doing some different fun micro adventures around Tampa Bay.[00:01:00]

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I feel like you tried really hard to reframe the post office as an adventure.

CORAL OWEN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we brought Dinos and it was an adventure and we were gonna go talk about, you know, the postals. He was not impressed.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Well, I really love the idea of a slow morning. I like, you know, kind of like the slow food movement. I don't know if you remember that. 

CORAL OWEN:Oh, for sure. 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, we should really have a slow morning movement. Like, I mean, for me, slow is the only way I move in the mornings anyway, so I feel like it would be really easy for me. But if everyone, if the entire society would embrace this idea of slow mornings, and when I say slow mornings, I'm not talking about having to wake up at 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM just so that you can have a slow morning. I'm talking like waking up when you need to wake up, and being able to have a slow morning. 

I know that that's a pipe dream, but that's where I'm at.

CORAL OWEN: I love that. Yeah, I'm a really like ritualistic morning person. I mean [00:02:00] not, you know, the biohacks or anything, but just, you know, enjoying some coffee, playing with Dinos on the couch and just yeah, enjoying leaning into just presence of life a little bit more in the morning.

So, yeah, I love the slow morning movement idea. Let's get it started.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: All right, I'm on it. Well, we'd love to hear what's inspiring our listeners, so please drop us a line at Practicing connection@oneop.org. We see and respond to every message, and we can't wait to hear from you.

- break -

Let's learn more about building trust through competence. Coral, can you tell us a little more about the practice you'll be sharing and why you chose it?

CORAL OWEN: Absolutely. So as Jessica already mentioned, this is our third episode touching on the series of the four Domains of Trust outlined by Charles Feldman in The Thin Book of Trust.

And today's domain is competence, and it's defined in that [00:03:00] book as “The assessment that you have the ability to do what you are being trusted to do.” Competence is built when we're clear about what we can do well right now. But also, and I think perhaps this is a little bit more of a missed piece of this, it's also recognizing where our limits are and without judgment, right?

And so sometimes people lose trust, not because they lack ability, but because they also fail to recognize or communicate the limits to their competence. And so today, the practice is simply called “Clarify your current capabilities,” and it's a simple, powerful reflection that can help you show up in a way that supports trust in the competence domain.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I cannot wait to hear more about this. I think I would put myself in the camp of not always knowing what my limits are. Like my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to projects. I think sometimes, I mean, I've done a lot of work to try to adapt that, but I'm very excited about that. So let's get started. Please walk [00:04:00] us through the practice.

CORAL OWEN: Absolutely. And too, I wanna say also, you know, this practice, this is like funny, but this practice takes practice. And it also takes an element of vulnerability to admit where you may not be as strong. And so I just want to preface this by saying if it feels uncomfortable, that's totally okay.

And this is just perhaps a nudge to start progressively implementing some awareness and vulnerability in whatever spaces you may be showing up in. So this practice again is, clarify your current capabilities, and it can be done at the start of any project, task, or commitment, whether it's big or small, and it only takes a few minutes.

Step one, there's four steps, name the commitment or the task. So what have you been asked to do or what are you planning to take on? And just define it, write it down in a simple sentence. From there, step two is, you're going to ask yourself two questions. The first one being, “What parts of this am I fully confident that I can deliver [00:05:00] well?”

And the second piece of that is, “Where might I need support, resources or extra time to ensure I can meet expectations?” And again, being a little bit vulnerable here with yourself, not being, you know, non-judgmental. Be very honest and specific. And again, this goal is not to judge yourself. It's simply a practice in having some clarity.

So step three, make it visible. So if you know you're working solo, this is a little bit more straightforward. If you are working in a group or in a team or with other folks, you know, share this second piece with your team, your supervisor, anybody that you know has some role in facilitating these things.

And you can say, “Here's what I feel strong in right now.” And then secondly, “Here are some areas that I made need additional input, help or support around.” 

Okay, and then step four is simply adjusting as you go. [00:06:00] So competence is not static. You know, we're not static human beings. As we go, hopefully we are learning along the way.

And so as you gain skills or encounter challenges, you can update your self-assessment and communicate any changes early. And also knowing that sometimes like the scope of a project may change. And so you may need to be proactive in communicating where you might feel a little bit over your head. Or if you have some skill sets that are relevant to an emerging area of work that you're doing, you can also kind of step up there and say, “Hey, I got this too.”

So yeah, that's it. That's the four steps.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I love how this practice invites people to pause and name what's actually true about their current abilities, and it normalizes asking for support as part of being competent. I think where I recognize there being some vulnerability is that there are some things that I think sometimes we're taught about [00:07:00] the way we prefer to work or what gives us energy in our work and what doesn't.

Sometimes the things that don't give us energy, we're almost a little embarrassed about, like maybe what doesn't give us energy is working in spreadsheets, right? But the project we're on requires that work. So we can also ask ourselves like, “What support do I need to give myself? Because I know I'm gonna have to work in this spreadsheet,” right?

And, “I know that I hate working in spreadsheets, so what support can I give myself for that?” Or is it just, sometimes it's enough to be aware that you don't like working in spreadsheets and that you've named it and it can help you get through that. So anyway, that's - I love, I love this exercise.

CORAL OWEN: Awesome. Yeah, and that's a great example too. And I think another key space or scenario that comes to mind is, you know, if you've been working in a particular field and these tasks are something that you touch on a regular basis, and if you move into more of a leadership role, you may feel just prepared to help direct people and guide people and [00:08:00] facilitate their work in that area of expertise. 

But sometimes we need help to build things that are a little bit more kind of emergent, like leadership skills or managing teams or workflows or things like that that you may not realize until you kind of get in those scenarios. And I speak from experience. I was a bank manager at one point and I kind of showed up and went, “Oh no, I need some guidance.” And approaching my direct supervisor at that time was a really key step in helping develop and cultivate those leadership skills. And also admitting to my team that I was working with, I said, you know, “I've got some strong skill set here, and I'm gonna need you to help give me some feedback and help me learn and grow as I grow into these other areas.” And they really appreciated that. 

And it also, it just felt like I didn't have anything to hide. And so being able to show up, you know, in that space more fully and authentically, it just, yeah, you're like, not walking on [00:09:00] eggshells. You can just be yourself and it's good stuff. It's good stuff. So a lot of different areas that this can apply.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Awesome. Well, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app and share it with a friend. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

Until then, keep practicing.

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Off and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.