Built For Trust
How to Build and Rebuild Trust in Your Relationships
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He had spent more than a decade teaching Fortune 500 and business executives how to build cultures of trust. He had the frameworks. He had the data. He had the case studies. Then, at 3:30 one February morning, lying awake in a bedroom he could no longer share with his wife, Brad Cousins understood something that would unravel —and then rebuild-everything he thought he knew.
Trust is not something you can give or receive. It is something you build. And most of us have never been shown the blueprint of how to build trust intentionally.
In Built For Trust, Cousins walks us into the rooms where trust was discovered: the Copenhagen sidewalks where parents leave infants unattended on the street, the 1927 Chicago factory where six women rewrote industrial psychology, the Love Lab where John Gottman could predict divorce within three minutes, the orphanages that taught John Bowlby what every child needs to survive, and the hospital wards where Amy Edmondson named the single trait that separates teams that soar from teams that stall.
From a decade of research across psychology, neuroscience, game theory, and attachment science, Cousins distills the Universal Trust Model-a blueprint that operates by the same rules in a marriage, a multinational team, a faith community, and the quietest conversations you have with yourself.
Three feelings form the foundation: Secure. Valued. Respected. Seven practices sustain them: Commitment. Conversation. Connection. Caring. Collaboration. Confidence. Consistency. And when both are in place, two outcomes emerge that cannot be manufactured: responsibility earned not given.
Written with narrative power and emotional honesty, Built For Trust will change how you belong, how you love, and how you lead. Because the relationships, teams, and institutions that last are not the ones we fall into. They are the ones we build.
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About the Author
Brad Cousins is an executive advisor, speaker, and the creator of the Built For Trust™ model. For more than two decades he has helped CEOs, business owners, and leadership teams turn disruption into growth, advising more than seventy boards and chief executives across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
He is the founder of Brad Cousins & Company and Ingage Human Capital Strategies, where his work centers on leadership, culture, and the human dynamics that determine whether organizations thrive or fracture.