How to Trust and Be Trusted: 5 Lessons

by Rachel Botsman

Trust is a word we use a lot. But have you ever learned how to make smart decisions about trust? How to earn the trust of other people? Or, how to repair trust when it breaks down? Rachel Botsman has helped the world’s brightest minds change the way they think about trust. Now, in How to Trust and Be Trusted, she shares those insights with you in five clear principles.

Curated to strengthen connection and engagement, these five principles guide the listener through a series of accessible and relatable lessons, all with the groundbreaking framework of placing trust at the center of our daily conversations, decisions, and behaviors.

Leveraging more than a decade of research, Botsman examines the fundamental principles of high trust teams and cultures, combining eye-opening insights with compelling stories. Botsman guides listeners through interactive exercises that challenge our assumptions around trust, teaching us how to develop as individuals and team players—and ultimately experience the profound impact mutual trust can have on our lives.

Botsman has engaged with graduates, CEOs, start-up founders, and leaders from all walks of life about their trust challenges. In How to Trust and Be Trusted, she distills the most powerful takeaways to share new and unique ways to rethink trust and shine a light on its powerful role in personal and professional fulfillment.

Learn how to give your trust to the right people and how to be more trustworthy. It can be life-changing.

Audible Audio

Published January 14, 2025

About the author

Rachel Botsman is a leading expert on trust in the modern world and the author of three critically acclaimed books - What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust? and How To Trust & Be Trusted. Rachel was the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, where she currently teaches leaders and entrepreneurs.

Her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times and she is consistently voted the audience's favourite speaker by audiences at global events.

Rachel writes on trust and profound societal shifts for the Financial Times, The New York Times, Guardian, Harvard Business Review, and Wired. She also engages with over 92,000 subscribers through her Rethink newsletter. She was the host and writer of the BBC Radio4 series The Trust Shift, and her podcast Rethink Moments was nominated as one of the top five Best Business Podcasts of the Year.

Always driven by curiosity, Rachel is an artist and storyteller at heart after studying art at the Ruskin School, University of Oxford. She reimagines historical artefacts to question our relationship with work, society and each other, most recently through her Roots of Trust installation at the London Design Biennale (2025).