Trust on Purpose
Trust on Purpose
Charles Feltman and Ila Edgar
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email [email protected] or [email protected]. We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us. 
A farewell built on trust
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you After four years and nearly 100 episodes of exploring what it means to build trust on purpose, we're coming to you today with a different kind of conversation; one that's deeply personal and one of the hardest we've had. Ila shares why she's stepping away from the podcast, and Charles reflects on what these four years of partnership, friendship, and shared commitment to trust have meant. This is two people who have walked each other through profo...
Apr 14
5 min
Can leaders rebuild trust after breaking it?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you You've messed up. You know it. Your team knows it. A lot of leaders know that sinking "Oh sh!t" feeling of realizing they've done something to break their team's trust. In this episode, we dig into a real story of broken trust: the situation, the impacts, and what ultimately turned things around. We walk through the moves that reopened honest dialogue and rebuilt psychological safety; from the leader acknowledging their oops without making...
Feb 9
29 min
What can we trust AI with and what boundaries do we need?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if moving faster with AI didn't mean giving up your judgment? We sit down with Lindsay Semas, an AI leader who's spent years building trustworthy technology at scale, to explore the gap between what AI can do and what we should let it do - from drafting emails to shaping customer strategy. We start with the quick wins: smarter research, better first drafts, fewer browser tabs. Then we get into the harder stuff: how to earn trust in AI outp...
Dec 8, 2025
44 min
Is your leadership creating trust or dependency?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if trust didn't depend on heroic one-to-one fixes, but on the environment you design every day? In this new episode, we explore what it means to shift from "I build trust with you" to "I build a space where everyone can build, maintain, and repair trust with each other." Through real stories and practical moves, we map out the leadership behaviours that make trust the default: intentionality in how you bring your team together, asking ...
Nov 24, 2025
50 min
How do you learn to trust when no one taught you?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when your early life didn't teach you how to trust? How do you learn vulnerability and honesty when those skills were never modeled for you? We sit down with Andy Vasily - Leadership / Performance Coach, Podcast Host and Educational Consultant - to explore how trust is a learnable competency, not something you're born with. We dig into the neuroscience behind protective behaviors, why withholding information robs others of learning, ...
Oct 27, 2025
59 min
What if the answer to overwhelm isn't working harder?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Overwhelm never asks permission. When it hits, our reflex is to work harder and push through. Yet that often distracts us from the one thing that restores clarity: pausing. In this new episode of Trust on Purpose, we dive into the difference between a nourishing pause and disassociation, how awareness of our sensations helps us return from checkout mode, and how small rituals create the space where we can make better choices. We share simple way...
Oct 12, 2025
41 min
Are you sabotaging your team by moving too fast?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when you choose long-term trust over short-term speed? Psychologist Susan David's powerful question launches us into a revealing exploration of how trust-building decisions fundamentally transform outcomes. This episode contrasts two dramatically different approaches to organizational change. On one hand, a team that prioritizes rapid implementation, making unilateral decisions and forcing solutions on users can lead to active sabota...
Sep 28, 2025
30 min
Why your team isn't delivering (and how to fix it)
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if the secret to breakthrough results isn't working harder but making better promises? Bob Dunham, founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, reveals the power of trustworthy commitments in creating extraordinary outcomes. Dunham challenges the mechanistic approach dominating today's workplace, where employees are treated as production units rather than humans with creative potential. "We've left out being human; everything's being ...
Sep 13, 2025
38 min
I shouldn't have to explain this
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you "I shouldn't have to explain this." Sound familiar? A lot of leaders feel this way about making clear requests of people. It creates a destructive cycle: vague directions lead to poor results, which fuel resentment and reinforce the belief that explanation shouldn't be necessary. The hidden cost is teams divided between mind-readers and the confused, while everyone wastes time "spinning," trying to guess what leaders actually want. What feels lik...
Jun 22, 2025
31 min
Letting life move through us: poetry, presence and leadership
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when we trust life enough to put down our armour and show up authentically? Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer takes us on a journey through the transformative power of creative practice and how it builds the muscle of trust - in life, in ourselves - that we need in our most challenging moments. Rosemerry opens our conversation with her powerful poem "Growing Trust," asking why we would ever "slip back into armour" when life itself is w...
Jun 9, 2025
43 min
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