Your Road to Yes!: How to Build Trust in Yourself and With Others

| Justin Patton, 2022

What’s It All About?

There’s an antidote to every issue in your organization: trust! When you build trust into the foundations of your team or organization, it becomes much easier to address toxic relationships, improve communications, and create an environment where everyone shows up ready to go all in on your goals. Get started on your journey to building more trust with Your Road to Yes!: How to Build Trust in Yourself and With Others by Justin Patton.

In Your Road to Yes, Justin shares how you can bring more trust to your life and organization, just by learning to say “yes!” to three questions:

Do I take people with me along the journey?
Do I create a safe space for people to open up?
Do I make people feel less alone in the world?

These questions in Your Road to Yes serves as a roadmap for finding new ways to use trust to strengthen your leadership, communications, and team relationship. Justin’s book is full of incredible stories and insights. I especially loved his thoughts on how to communicate with togetherness by practicing the following format for making others feel heard:

Of course you feel _______(name the emotion(s))
Because ______________ (describe the actions causing the emotion(s))

Justin writes with a very open and straightforward style, which makes easy to absorb his lessons on trust, accountability, communications, and more. It’s clear that Justin cares about trust and about YOU, his reader!

Favorite Quote

“Trust is the unwavering belief that you will have my back.”

Biggest Takeaway

I walked away from Your Road to Yes thinking about a few of my own personal and workplace relationships, and how I could use Justin’s lessons to improve trust in my own relationships. I’ve been working on practicing vulnerability and having the courage to express my true feelings in my relationships, and it has become more comfortable the more I’ve practiced.

Justin’s book really heightened my awareness on how I can improve even more. It made me realize I need to get in front of the problem when something doesn’t feel right in a relationship. Instead of waiting for the issue to come up, I need to have the courage to ask questions, express my feelings, and build up a sense of trust with the people in my life.

Bonus Information

Justin Patton is an upcoming guest on the Mindfulness Manufacturing podcast, where he’ll share more great insights. Stay tuned to make sure you catch his episode!.

Reviewed by: Trevor Blondeel, April 25, 2024

At Manufacturing Greatness, Trevor Blondeel works with manufacturers to connect the top to the shop. If you’re ready to improve your own organization, contact Trevor to learn how Manufacturing Greatness can help you build stronger leaders and develop a dynamic, high-performing workplace.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website