Meaningful relationships are the food for our soul. But the take time and patience to develop.

I have not been always good at developing deep trust and relationships, but once I started to forum such friendships sometime in my graduate school, I realized how fulfilling and (emotionally) rewarding these are.

As I said, I don’t consider myself to be born good at building deep relationships. I am somewhat awkward at times. I have hard time thinking on the spot under pressure. I am a bit of a contrarian. All that makes quick trust building difficult.

But I have found some simple methods to develop trust in the long run. And I have helped my coaching clients deepen their friendships and relationships. Here are 6 simple ways to deepen the trust, if you are willing to give it some time!

Listen deeply to others. Give them the gift of attention.

Listening will also make you an interesting person. The best way to become an interesting person is to become an interested person.

Listening helps us understand what space people are in — rational or emotional, and respond accordingly. And no matter what space people are in, listening is a prerequisite to deepening the connection. If they are wanting you to listen, there is not much to do. If they are wanting you to help them, listening will help you cater advice to an educated situation, not what you think the situation is.

Listening deeply does not come easy to most people. We usually are forming responses in our head when others are speaking. Instead, try doing the following to listen deeply.

• Do active listening, and on a regular interval, rephrase what the other person said in order to crystallize your understanding and get a confirmation from the other party that you are understanding thing right.
• One impediment to listening is the emotional response others’ words generate in us, and how they take over our rational faculty. It is helpful to one conscious breath regularly to notice your own emotions and sensations in the body, so you are aware of them.

Deep listening is powerful because people don’t feel or get listened much nowadays. Everybody is busy, and our attention is fragmented. Attention is the biggest gift you can give others in the current world of diluted social media connections and excessive electronic notifications.

Don’t make fun of other people, unless you both can have a shared laughter. Have fun together, not at the cost of other person.

Sometimes, we tend to make fun of people for some light-hearted fun. But the fun should be shared, otherwise, it becomes embarrassment. And there is nothing that breaks the trust and erects emotional walls more than feeling embarrassed by the words of other person.

Consider the perspective that everybody is doing their best given their current circumstances, awareness, and beliefs.

If you don’t understand how they can behave in such and such way, become curious about how their current behavior is the best given their circumstances, awareness, and beliefs. Try to understand how what they are doing is their best, not if they are doing their best.

So are you. You are also doing your best. If you blame yourself internally for screwing up, or making mistake, it is also time to contemplate how you are doing your best? Understanding yourself and trusting yourself is a surefire way to build trust with other people.

We all can do better of course, but the present moment is inevitable, and considering this is the best moment with best outcome (given the past) helps to have a good footing for good relationships.

Give people the benefit of the doubt — believe they are doing their best, and they will surprise you.

Trust and verify. Be vulnerable, be open, but also make sure you are doing that with the right people (by verifying).

Some people start to trust others (about big things) prematurely. They only know how to trust other people. They trust out of need, not out of choice. And then get bitten.

Others keep being skeptic but never really trust. They never really know how to open up, be truly vulnerable in front of the other person. They also never develop deeply meaningful relationships. Vulnerability is one of the most important ingredient for deep relationships. Deep relationships require being vulnerable, being open to hurt, and opening up to other person.

The best way is to combine trusting and verifying. Start trusting on small things, and then verify once in a while that the other person is trustworthy. The climb the ladders of trust and verification simultaneously — one step up one ladder, and then the other step up the other ladder and so on.

The other side of trust equation is how to behave when other person breaks your trust, or behaves badly. You want to scale back your trust, but not necessarily go back to Square 1. Many times, what we call breaking of trust is a misunderstanding. So, it makes sense to forgive other person’s behavior once in a while to start ramping up the trust again and start verifying again. In game theory, this strategy is called “tit for tat with a bit of forgiveness”, and it works very well in human relationships too.

Do what you do to another person, but never put them out of your heart.

These are the words uttered by India saints Kabir and Neem Karoli Baba. Don’t let other people misuse you, but don’t intend bad things for them either. Keeping your own intentions clean will make you a truly confident person (internally) when relating with other people. When we have bad intentions, we feel guilty (even when other person has started the bad behavior), we feel closed up, we raise our emotional boundaries, and that is not a recipe for deep relationships.

If you set boundaries and hold them with other people (without wanting or intending bad for them), people generally come around to appreciating your honest interaction, and that builds trust in the long run.

If you realize you had even an iota of bad intention, take an initiative to apologize (and this applies even when the majority of the mistake on the other side). Apologize genuinely for the whatever fraction you are part of. When we apologize, it is not to help the other person, but to help ourselves. Letting go of the grudge is like dropping the burning coal we were holding in our hands with the intention to hurt other, without realizing it was burning our hand. Bad intentions and grudge will hurt you first, and maybe the other person later (if ever).

Appreciate more, criticize less.

Most living being are loss-averse: loss is a lot more painful than the gain is pleasurable. Our evolution wants us to focus on the criticism, what is not right, what went wrong. That is important for our physical survival.

But in the current world, physical survival is rarely threatened. It is emotional survival, ego survival that we are fighting with most of the time.

Tara Brach (a Buddhist teacher) likes to give 5 appreciations for each one she thinks about, and 1 criticism every 5 criticisms she thinks about. That is a good rule for us too, to negate our bias toward negativity.

Appreciation builds trust. But only genuine appreciation. Never do phony appreciations. The appreciations can be as little or as small as you can genuinely find, but make them honest and truthful. Make them specific too. And deliver them — in writing, or in speaking, to the person directly, not through someone else.

So here it is: listen to others, make them feel good (particularly, don’t make fun of them), know they are doing their best (even if you don’t see it), start being vulnerable on a small scale and increase that level over time, have good intentions even when you are practicing tough love, and appreciate more and criticize less.

Find one thing you want to apply in your relationships and follow that for a few weeks, just focusing on that one thing. Once you start to notice you are doing more and more of that, start to add a second point.

I wish you deep and meaningful relationships. They take time and humility to build, but they are totally worthwhile!