29 years ago this week, I left a perfectly good airplane mid-flight for the first time. Stepping out of the door, I met pure chaos…3,000 pounds of furious thrust…deafening wind…relentless tumbling…then…

Peace.

I looked up to see a taut parachute canopy. I felt no wind. I heard no sounds. Solitary and serene, I drifted high above the fields and forests below. The tranquility lasted a long 10 to 15 seconds. Then I realized the forests now looked like trees and the fields were full of grass and everything was getting bigger quickly. I will never forget what happened next.

For the past two weeks at the US Army’s Airborne School I had only been doing two things: falling down or waiting to fall down. The parachute landing fall (PLF) was a technique for landing safely that the instructors drilled into us over and over and over.

First we did PLFs on the ground. Then we did PLFs off a 3-foot ledge. Then it was PLFs from a zip-line. My sophisticated 20-year-old self was not impressed with the monotony of the training.

Until I saw the earth racing toward me on my first jump. I felt my legs instinctively reach for the ground—a dangerous temptation my instructors had warned about. That triggered my training. Eyes on the horizon. Feet and knees together, slightly bent. 

I was on the ground and had performed a flawless PLF before I could even process it. In that moment, I realized why they had drilled that maneuver over and over and over. Because hitting the ground at 13 miles per hour, there’s no time for conscious thought, your mind and muscles need to act on autopilot.

I would go on to make four more jumps that week and earn my wings. In the end, The Army could trust me—and I could trust myself—to jump out of a plane and land safely because I had been trained and tested.

Last week we talked about how trusting someone can make them trustworthy. That works for relational trust, but can have disastrous results with rational trust. Can you imagine if an instructor just gave me a parachute on day one, pointed toward the plane and said, “it’s okay, I trust you.”

Before you extend rational trust—trust that requires competency and dependability—people need to be trained and tested, in that order. The result is an individual who trusts herself more and is more trustworthy.

So in matters of authenticity and benevolence: Trust first with great expectations. 

For matters of competency and dependability: Train, Test, then Trust.

For Reflection: What tools, training, and testing do your people need to be trustworthy?

Update: 57,233 words 

I’ve written 57,233 manuscript words out of a goal of 60,000. That puts me about 95% complete with the first draft, which is 6% more than last week.
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With any luck, I anticipate achieving my 60K word goal next week. I find myself really looking forward to editing. I’ve kept that urge at bay for months now, allowing this unwieldy manuscript to grow into a huge, ugly lump of clay. I can’t wait to jump in and start shaping it!