What happens when twenty years of trust dissolves in a single phone call — and what it forced me to ask about trust and myself
I Walked Into That Call Excited.
We finally had time to tackle something we had been planning. I had a list. I was prepared. I was looking forward to it.
Within minutes I realized I was in a completely different conversation than I thought I had scheduled.
Numbers being thrown at me that didn’t add up. A direction I hadn’t anticipated. Pressure dressed up as guidance. And me — sitting there — trying to find the thread back to what I thought this call was supposed to be.
I didn’t say much. I got quiet.
I got off the call and just sat there.
What the heck just happened.
I was confused, disoriented, and slightly nauseous. The feeling of someone who has experienced something they cannot yet categorize. My alarm bells were going off — red hot — but I had no words for it yet. Just that uneasy feeling. That physical wrongness sitting in my chest that wouldn’t move.
And Then I Started Going Back Through The Data.
Because that is what I do when something doesn’t add up. I audit. Apply logic and strategy.
And once you start looking — really looking — you start finding things. Small things and quite a few big things. Together forming a picture you didn’t realize you were looking at. A recommendation that in hindsight served a different interest than I had assumed. A pattern I had explained away because I trusted the person, so I trusted the explanation.
I went back further. Found more things that didn’t add up.
The logic I had built around this trusted advisor — the story I had told myself about who they were and what they were doing for me — just exploded. Because once your alarm bells go off, you start asking questions you hadn’t thought to ask before. You had no reason to. And then you do ask because you have many reasons to do so.
My husband asked me — do you think you just saw a version of this person today that you hadn’t seen before?
I don’t know. I don’t know if something changed or if I just saw something I hadn’t let myself see before. I don’t know if this was always there or if I am reading this wrong entirely. And that uncertainty — that not knowing — was almost harder than a clean answer would have been.
What I did know was this. Something had shifted. In me. Twenty years of trust — gone.
I said to my husband: I feel like an idiot. I thought this person had my back. What I am starting to think is that I am just a number in a spreadsheet they are trying to secure.
My Body Knew Before My Brain Did.
The nausea. The alarm bells. The chest tightening before I had a single coherent thought about what was wrong. Aside from the financial implications this has, I had to acknowledge that my body seem to know something that I didn’t. Something was really wrong.
Lucky me for being able to talk to the professionals about this. Meet Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina — two PhDs who have spent 35 years studying trust in organizations and they have a name for this. They call it the somatic experience of trust disruption. Your nervous system registers that something is off before your conscious mind can process it. You feel the break before you understand it.
Which means my gut was telling me something real.
My brain just hadn’t caught up to it yet.
This Is Not Just My Story.
I am sharing this — deliberately vague, and because this is not about them — because I think most of you have had a version of this moment.
Maybe not with the same intensity. Maybe not after twenty years. But that feeling of getting off a call or walking out of a meeting and thinking — wait. Something just happened. That uneasy audit that follows. Going back through conversations. Finding of things that in hindsight look different than they did at the time.
That feeling is your trust radar working exactly as it should.
And right now, in 2026, that radar is being asked to work harder than ever before.
The Edelman Trust Barometer — the largest trust study in the world — just released its annual findings. Trust in institutions, in media, in government, in corporate leadership — at historic lows and still declining. AI deepfakes mean we cannot trust what we see with our own eyes. Social media is performance. Everything that was supposed to be a stable reference point has become something to question.70% of us don’t trust anything or anyone.
And now, we are all doing the feverish audit now. Constantly. On everything.
Which Brought Me To A Question I Couldn’t Shake.
If I — someone who thinks hard about trust, who interviews leaders for a living, who has built a career on reading people and situations — if I can miss something for twenty years with someone I spoke to regularly, what does that mean for every other area in our lives?
Because if you are skeptical of everyone right now — and you have every reason to be — then someone is extending that exact same skepticism to you. To your brand. To your promises. To every piece of content you put out and every claim you make about who you are. This is coming from the highest level of world leaders all the way to your community. People are stuck in their belief systems and won’t allow anyone else or any other idea to infiltrate what they already believe.
You are being audited. Every single day. By people who have been burned before and are not interested in being burned again. But, you lead people. You run a company. You are a community leader, you need to be trusted.
So What Do You Do With That?
Become someone who doesn’t require an audit. Forget being perfect or even trying to have all the answers. But by being so consistently, transparently, uncomplicatedly yourself — in the small moments, the routine interactions, the follow-ups nobody is particularly watching — that there is no gap between who you perform and who you are.
Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina call this the three dimensions of trust. Character — you do what you say, every time, without exception. Communication — you share what you know, admit what you don’t, and tell the truth especially when it is uncomfortable. Capability — you know what you are good at, you own what you are not, and you respect the people around you enough to use their strengths instead of pretending you don’t need them.
None of it is complicated. All of it requires a daily decision to show up the same way whether someone is watching or not.
What I know is that one call cracked the foundation. I will never feel the same way. I am exploring alternatives. This will not happen again.
A Closing Reflection.
Have you ever had a call, a meeting, a moment where your alarm bells went off and you spent days going back through everything trying to figure out what you missed?
What did you find? And what did it change about how you show up?
I’d love to hear where you are in this. Drop a comment or send me a message. This conversation matters.
Let’s grow,
Beate
