@thesotiris 28 December 2025 more from that month

Why People Don’t Trust You: Your credibility is (mostly) in your hands

If you wish to be trusted by people who matter, then you must project an air of credibility. When you are trustworthy, the right people will respect you and like you, and will want to be your friends. And the bad people will stay away from you because they’ll know you can’t be manipulated, since your firm adherence to principle will help you see through their deceptions. **Accountability** Accountability is trust. You trust people when they are accountable for what they claim. For example, you can’t trust anyone when they claim you’ll go to heaven or hell for two reasons: they have no way of knowing, and most importantly, they won’t be accountable to you after death; and they know it. The same goes for lawyers, accountants, academics, and anyone who puts asterisks and fine print under their declarations, unburdening themselves of responsibility in case their claims prove to be false, or if they can’t deliver, which makes them useless. You can’t trust anyone who can’t be held accountable for their claims, promises, or work. You can trust engineering because what it produces either works or doesn’t, and it is **demonstrable** and **measurable**. Engineering is a more trustworthy discipline than whatever passes for “science” these days, or rather, academic scientism: the unaccountable dogmatic mumbo jumbo by self-announced “experts” making unprovable claims that no one can disprove, or, more importantly, no one can hold them accountable when said claims actually turn out to be false. I won’t go into the whole **COVID charade**, with its totally unfounded claims of “safe and effective” being made with total infuriating audacity and which, in time, were proven completely bogus. And this is why no one in their right mind trusts Big Pharma and its drug dealers. Why do we still use them even if we don’t trust them? Because, unfortunately, medicine, as is all of alleged and loosely defined “science”, is an artificial monopoly of accreditation imposed arbitrarily and violently by the state via licensing, instead of organic free-market mechanisms. We have no other choice. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/what-was-covid This is why absolutely no one (no one sane, that is) trusts a politician. How can you trust someone whose campaign promises are not legally binding or judicially liable, people who aren’t accountable for their promises or their failures, and who also have the gall to claim exclusive credit for things built with taxpayers’ money? Yet, as you probably already know, the vast majority of people will trust the devil himself, because **fools want to be fooled**. **How to show accountability in your daily interactions** In your professional life, it’s easy to be accountable because you pay the consequences of what you do. You miss deadlines, you accumulate reprimands, you miss bonuses and promotion opportunities, and you get fired. Or, if you’re self-employed, you get bad reviews, bad word-of-mouth, reputation damage, and loss of business. That’s all well and good, but how do you show you’re accountable and, most importantly, principled in your daily interactions, enough so to inspire trust? **To be trustworthy, you must be an individual of integrity, an individual who holds to their principles even against adversity, even when holding principles is against your immediate interests**. And you can demonstrate this with extremely small interactions, which make an impact on people’s subconscious, on how they assess you. We all assess people subconsciously by everything they do: how they behave, how they react, what they represent… all these speak volumes about their — our — character. **Punctuality** A simple way to show you’re trustworthy is punctuality. Observe your promises to be on time religiously. Being exactly on time is the easiest promise to keep. You’re not “relaxed” and “cool” if you’re late. You’re not James Bond or a diva. You might think you’re showing dominance and nonchalance when you’re fashionably late, but this also shows you can’t be trusted when people need someone reliable, someone they can count on. Sure, you can be the “queen” pretending to be superior by not valuing people’s time, but that won’t get you far, at least nowhere meaningful, with anyone who matters. Be punctual to the second. People appreciate it when you respect their time. **Consistency** Another indicator of trustworthiness is faithful adherence to your professed principles. Think about it: If you claim to hold certain values, and then dishonour them by betraying them whenever the chips are down, you show hypocrisy, and therefore, total untrustworthiness. People notice hypocrisy. For example, if you claim to be a Christian, yet live a lifestyle that is not Christ-like, then no one will trust you, whether they are Christian or not. I am areligious, yet I know of two people who actually embody what they profess to believe in: one a Christian, one a Muslim, both extremely humble, loving, and charitable — truly, and especially when it comes at a cost to them. You might say that they cherry-pick values from their religions’ contradicting passages (fair enough), but they are faithful to the passages they consciously chose. And the fact that they chose the good parts of their respective religions and ignored the bad shows who they are, unlike other Christians and Muslims who focus on the bad (like “*spare the rod, spoil the child*” or “*kill them wherever you find them*”). If you say one thing and do another, then you convey a lack of consistency, and therefore, people will not be able to know where you stand. If they don’t know your true position on certain areas, it means they can’t predict your behaviour. If you are unpredictable, then you are untrustworthy. And this is what it all boils down to: predictability through consistency. People recognise patterns of behaviour. If your behaviour is consistent, and it your words match your actions, then you are predictable, and thus trustworthy. If you complain about things that you do yourself, it means you don’t even trust yourself. So why would anyone else trust you, seeing that you know yourself better than they know you? If, for example, you claim to be an anarchist, yet work for the government or live on government handouts, then you are a hypocrite, and no one trustworthy will trust you. Being inconsistent might get some naive trust from people who aren’t trustworthy themselves — shallow people without principle, people who only trust you because they see their untrustworthiness in you, and thus relate to you. But interacting with untrustworthy people won’t help you in life. They’ll backstab you soon enough. Being consistent doesn’t only mean adhering to your principles alone. It also applies to your values. If, for example, you claim you value music but, in your free time, instead of playing, you party and take drugs, then it’s not the music you love — it’s the perverted version of the rockstar’s lifestyle. Again, this is hypocrisy. Consistency also expands to details like how you speak, how you behave, how you dress, and even how you write. It’s being true to your personal “brand”. If people see you going out for drinks one day dressed as a James Bond wannabe and the next like a hobo, with no apparent change in the general dress code, then you’ll feel a bit off to them. They won’t be able to “place” you in their mind, and you’ll cause unease due to the unpredictability you project. If people are to trust you, then you must be reliable in how you act and how you present yourself: They must know how you’d react to every single situation, which gives them peace of mind. This makes them feel comfortable and pleasant around you, and thus, they will like being with you. **Keep your promises** Just like punctuality is keeping a promise, keeping your word in general is important. Even the slightest “promise” is still a promise, no matter how tongue-in-cheek or unimportant you thought it was. Say that you’ll call someone? Do it. Suggest meeting and catching up? Take the initiative and organise a get-together. It’s the smallest promises that make the difference, the ones that aren’t bound by a contract, because you prove you follow through and make good on your word without having to be forced to. **Avoid gossip** If you expose the vulnerabilities of others to someone when those others aren’t present, you’re engaging in gossip. Anyone hearing you gossip will naturally assume (rightly so) that you will likely gossip about them as well. They will not trust you. Even worse, when you badmouth person A to person B, and then, when the accused is present, you pretend to be friends with the accused, then you have lost all credibility. Not only are you pretentious and untrustworthy, but you prove you have no principle or even common sense. No one will ever find you reliable. If you can’t say something about someone in front of that someone, then don’t say it to anyone, unless they are openly your enemy. But pretending they are your friend while moderating your speech around them divulges a lack of honesty and truthfulness in your relationship. **Admit mistakes and apologise the right way** People need to know they can give you constructive negative feedback, and that you won’t bite their head off for it. You must show people that you are open to listening to well-intentioned negative feedback and that you won’t immediately turn defensive, dismissive, and aggressive towards them for their sincere care for you. Those who respect you the most won’t shy away from giving you the truth, even if the truth is harsh — especially so. Therefore, **if you want to be trusted, you need to show that you appreciate and reward harsh honesty**. People will then feel comfortable opening up to you and trusting you with their most inner thoughts. And if you make a mistake, and you genuinely know it, **apologise in a way that accepts accountability but also maintains your self-esteem**: the only way for an apology to be meaningful. If you denigrate yourself while apologising, then your apology is meaningless: “Sorry” from someone without self-regard doesn’t carry weight. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/how-to-apologize ***People will trust you if they see you are self-accountable. If they can rely on you, then they can trust you.*** **A caveat** Some people have trust issues, and they won’t trust you even if you are, and prove that you are trustworthy. This doesn’t mean anything. You are not to blame, and neither are they. **They never chose their trauma**. It’s fine. You don’t need anyone’s trust, even if you deserve it. You are self-reliant. You can’t win them all. It’s fine. And then there’s the masses, a huge chunk of the population (if not the biggest), who **trust based on the wrong standards**. They trust celebrities, narcissists, and abusers. They will trust anyone as long as he or she makes an assertion with enough **deluded confidence**. **They trust people based on how arrogantly they present themselves**. In the mind of the simpleton, when someone presents himself with enough swagger, tenacity, and self-assurance, it must be because they “know what they’re talking about”, right?. This naïveté neglects to account for deception and delusion, which is why people tend to fall again and again for lying politicians, faith healers, marketing scams, gambling, phishing, and generally shitty people in their lives. I keep saying it: **No one can manipulate you without your permission**. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/1st-chapter-from-how-to-manipulate The comedic irony is that those who trust the wrong people are untrustworthy themselves, because they have no standard for trust. And they will have the gall to find you untrustworthy, since they wouldn’t recognise trustworthiness if it hid them in the head. Sadly, most people won’t trust you based on what I propose in this article. But the ones who will are the ones who matter, whose trust matters, and whose approval is meaningful.