Circle of Trust

It’s early morning hours at work and I am here, my brain still sleepy waiting for the caffeine to kick in so I can attack my day full-force.  Carpe Diem and all that shite!   

I find my mind wandering and thinking back on a conversation I had yesterday with a colleague about the concept of the “Circle of Trust”: having a sufficient comfort level with the folks in your immediate circle to know that what you say or do within that circle stays there.  In my dayjob, the Circle of Trust is paramount to my work, as I have been given charge of some highly sensitive data.  It almost goes without saying (though people still do – ALL THE TIME), that what is discussed within the confines of a closed room must stay there. 

In my other life, it’s a little trickier.  I encounter people of varying degrees of professionalism and maturity, much of which depends on age and lifestyle.  I know that with my immediate colleagues, my trust level is high as they have an understanding of what can happen when certain bits of information filter out to the masses.  However there are others whom I work with directly or indirectly who still take the approach that some stories are just fodder for idle gossip even though it would be obvious to most others they shouldn’t be spread about.  I was recently burned by this very mindset: someone whom I thought I could trust flapped his gums about an incident involving myself and another person, and before I knew it the story was all over town and coming back to me in the most awkward way possible – via the other party. 

Not cool. 

But still…I gave pause and pondered the situation for what it was: the offending gossiper is young and inexperienced with a holdover schoolboy mentality where he speaks before he thinks.  So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him that he can say what he wants, but in the future he needs to be mindful of where his words go.  My only hope is that he will think twice the next time he wants to tell stories about people he knows.   Just like I now think twice about saying anything to him that has any remote chance of coming back to bite me in the arse.  At the end of the day, it was a win-win: valuable lessons learned all around!

The music community is small.  People know each other or at least have heard of each other.  There is a false sense of security in a business where the person next to you will step right over you to get to that next rung in the ladder.  But the higher you go, the further you fall and you might need a soft landing at some point.   Best not to piss anyone off in the process.  My .02.