How to Write Effective Essays on Trust? Learn With Us!

The entire human civilization is based on trust. We trust our loved ones, we trust our teachers, we trust our community and so on.

A trust essay highlights the importance of this powerful value. It tells you what is trust and how the absence of trust affects people individually and even the community at large. Here are some steps that you can follow to write a great essay on trust:

Trust Essay – Define The Concept

The first step when you start writing essays on trust is to define the word trust. Essentially, it is the faith that you have in another person. But trust is also a two way street. It is not just about you trusting someone but also about being that person that someone else can put their trust in.

Start by writing a short paragraph on trust with statements like “In the most basic form, trust is the confidence that you have in someone else.” You can then work in the subject of what makes a person trust another person.

Trust Essay Sample

Leadership and Trust

Leadership refers to the power and ability of an individual to lead others. Leadership is often spoken about in terms of nobility, charisma, and the ability to inspire and mobilize others, each of which are positive qualities that exemplify leaders and vice versa. What goes ignored is that leaders can have those characteristics and look to use them for bad or evil. Leaders are not only at the heads of corporate organizations, community groups and churches; they are also the heads of manipulative and mind-altering cults and command their power and ability to influence the behavior of others. Leadership styles vary from person to person, as well as the motives for harnessing that leadership. From business executives to cult leaders, leadership manifests in ways that serve the greater good, however, that “greater good” depends on the motives, desires and personality of the leader.

 

One iconic leader was Nelson Mandela, the face of the nonviolent uprising against the South African government and its racist policies and function. He was more than a leader, but a visionary capable of transformational leadership in a movement against the government that contributed to the lost lives and livelihoods of many, including himself. Mandela’s call to action for the South African people was reinforced and believed by his inimitable leadership. Mandela saw that the way that the government was running the nation through apartheid was, at the least, unsustainable and at the most, detrimental to society. Imprisoned for more than a quarter century On Robben Island along with several other activists, Mandela stood by his convictions and worked strategically to oppose and transform South Africa from the inside, finding that “the political prison of apartheid” (Schoemaker & Krupp, 2014) would have been far worse than serving out his prison sentence. He stood up to prisoners and guards, positioning himself as a man of nobility and dignity even though it came at the expense of his freedom and the realities of harsh prison life. As a leader, he researched other leaders and where they went wrong and where they went right. Observing the teachings of other nations and leaders, he hoped to inspire change by getting the South African government to deviate from a dangerous path that caused the decline of the country of Zimbabwe following a tumultuous and brutal period of dictatorship by Robert Mugabe. Mandela’s nobility shone through in wanting to nonviolently resist oppressors, instead surprising “with restraints and generosity.” Mandela called for peace when people wanted retribution and revenge, even if it was rightfully so. After being elected the first black president of South Africa, Mandela continued to inspire with his charisma and language, using inclusive pronouns like “we” and “our” to bridge gaps instead of widen them, calling on the people to act as a united front to bring about a new world. Nelson Mandela was a strategic leader who was able to harness his emotion and motivate people strongly enough to have continual support. On the contrary, leaders out to do what most perceive as harm have this drive as well—the key difference is in their motives and what they set out to achieve.

 

For those who do not fall under the most understood category of leader, like cult leaders, how the world looks upon them is quite different. Cult leaders are those who often portray themselves as the next messiah, but to others not under their spell of charisma and manipulation, look like manipulators, deceivers and sociopaths. However, the charisma that allowed people like Charles Manson to manipulate and convince his “family” to commit heinous murders unlike the Hollywood scene had seen is not only within him. Back in the 1960s, Charles Manson recruited a group of devote followers he called “The Family,” who shared his love for hallucinogenic drugs and an unconventional lifestyle led off the grid. The key to Manson’s power and control was his ability to position himself and the members of his family as a superior elite that had to do whatever it took to protect themselves and the world. There was danger in his charisma, which allowed his notoriously warped and outrageous ideals to result in the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Steven Parent and Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger Coffee fortune.

Manson and his followers had a strong sense of moral values that, in their minds, made them better than the untouchable Hollywood elite. He used his own painful, shattered past to draw in people who had been stripped of their identity—if they ever had one—and fulfilled their needs, creating a dangerous connection between their self-esteem and worth and his provisions. Manson sought out people like him who had no sense of stability or identity; he was born without a name to a young, fleeting mother raised in a strictly religious household whose baby’s father abandoned her and their son. While he never directly carried out any of the murders. In prison, Manson studied religion as a tool of control and as he fluctuated between imprisonment and freedom, he harnessed the art of manipulation through advice for other criminals and books like How to Win Friends and Influence People (Romano, 2017). Manson, now deceased, has gone down in history as a symbol of the rebellious hippie counterculture that culminated in gleeful carnage, spurred by a strong distaste for the wealthy, racism and prejudice, and shared lifelong social rejection. As a leader, he is in no way comparable to Nelson Mandela or those like him, but his reign is a painful reminder of cult leadership and pseudo-transformational leadership that captivates and motivates people just as much as nobility does.

 

Leadership has to be understood in a context that allows both good and evil to prosper. History demonstrates that there are those who are looking for positive change like Nelson Mandela, as well as those who want the ultimate revenge and unending, unquestionable power like Charles Manson. To understand both is to understand where and how leadership can go right and wrong, although the concept itself is broad and complex in definition and application.

The Role Of Trust In Relationships

Essays about trust are almost impossible to write without some reference to relationships. The bottom line is that every relationship that you have from neighbours, friends, relatives to your spouse is based on trust.

In fact, you can write an entire essay on trust in a relationship. Why it is important and how breaking someone’s trust is the hardest thing to recover from.

When we trust someone, we also expect that they reciprocate the same, while maintaining our trust and not hide anything from us. This love, faith, and trust can be a subject of discussion in your essay with respect to couples and relationships. You can also break down your trust essays into several layers such as the absence of trust leading to suspicion. And suspicion leading to the breach of trust by snooping or prying into the private mails and texts of the other person.

Betrayal and trust are vital turning points in any relationship. You can use other examples of breach of trust like cheating on a partner to show the effect that it has on love and faith between partners. It is also a great topic to use to define trust itself.

How Trust Affects The Community At Large

We vote for someone because we trust that they are good enough to run the country. A group of people in a corporate follow their team leader’s instruction because they trust that the latter is leading them to success. When parents leave their kids with a baby sitter, it is all about trust.

The point is that without trust, there would be no community. This is a great subject for your trust definition essay. It also gives you a new perspective and approach that is different from the relationship angle. There are enough instances of breach of trust within a community to include in your essays on trust. This will help you explore the definition of trust better.

The community angle gives you a lot more content for trust essay writing. You can talk about recent world events or even take references from history to show how trust plays a massive role in the community. There and endless examples of betrayal in history that have uprooted thriving kingdoms.

It is easier to write a definition essay on trust using these concepts because you can highlight both the angles. First, why trust is important in a society and why being a trustworthy individual is equally important.

Essays On Trust – Dealing With Them The Right Way

While writing an essay about trust, try to give relatable examples from real-life that establish trust between two people. This is the easiest way to bring out the definition of trust in its true essence.

If you need any writing assistance for your college essay, get in touch with us today. You can also go through a trust essay example to help you understand how to approach this subject with more depth and variety.