Do you want to know a secret?

I shouldn’t be telling you this but a colleague of mine told me the other day that he had heard something very interesting indeed.  He told me that it was a secret and that I shouldn’t tell anyone.  The problem is, I find what he told me so amazing, I simply need to get it off my chest and tell someone.  So who better than my regular blog readers?  So as long as you promise not to tell anyone where you heard it, I’ll let you in on a little secret about a client of mine.

With all the press attention about the latest round of Wikileaks I thought it a good place to examine trustworthiness.   I have met hundreds of trustworthy people in my time but very few that can be trusted with a secret.  What I mean is; in every sense of the word you can trust them: trust them to look after your children, trust them to step in when you are in dire need, trust them to deposit a large amount of cash, trust them to be on time at the airport, trust them to come up with a good solution.  However I have literally only known a handful of people in the whole world that I would implicitly trust with a secret.  Mostly because, even if they want to keep the secret, there are too many people like me about that are very good at creating environments where people feel like opening up and sharing secret information, even when it is not asked for.

Now there are secrets and secrets:  There’s the kind of secret that is deeply personal and would cause you embarrassment or upset someone close to you that you love dearly.  And then there are business secrets that if divulged could cause financial damage to the revealing party.  In any case, choosing someone to share your secret with is a very tricky thing.

Firstly there’s your motive to consider, then there’s the impact on the receiver: is it in their benefit or not?  “I saw your partner in town last week, looking in the window of a jewelers store, arm in arm with someone else”.  But then there’s the biggest challenge of all; understanding why it is that most people cannot keep secrets.  For the simple truth is, most of us can’t.  However, I can so I am not going to tell you what my colleague told me about my client, even though it is very interesting indeed, you’ll just have to wait until it hits the press or figure it out for yourself, sorry!”

Have a good week,

Harley