--- title: MAXHP - Base --- [Skip to content](https://www.maxhp.com/trust-makes-expertise-matter#main-content) # Maximus - Home - Products - Pricing - Blog - Company - Home - Products - Pricing - Blog - Company [![MAXHP](https://www.maxhp.com/hs-fs/hubfs/custom_thumbnail_large.png?width=255&height=122&name=custom_thumbnail_large.png "MAXHP")](https://www.maxhp.com?hsLang=en) [ABOUT](https://www.maxhp.com/about?hsLang=en) [INSIGHTS](https://www.maxhp.com/insights?hsLang=en) [CONNECT](https://www.maxhp.com/connect?hsLang=en)   INSIGHTS # Trust Makes Expertise Matter Why adept and embedded trust matters to elite human performance OCT 2026   |    BY HARRISON BERNSTEIN ![Trust makes expertise matterarticel images\_MaxHP (1200 x 630 px)-1](https://www.maxhp.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Trust%20makes%20expertise%20matterarticel%20images_MaxHP%20(1200%20x%20630%20px)-1.png?width=1200&height=630&name=Trust%20makes%20expertise%20matterarticel%20images_MaxHP%20(1200%20x%20630%20px)-1.png "Trust makes expertise matterarticel images_MaxHP (1200 x 630 px)-1") On a warm April morning in 2005, I stood on a practice field in Ashburn, Virginia, facing approximately 80 Washington Redskins players: I was 27 years old. Some of the fastest athletes in the world were looking at me, waiting to discover whether I had anything to say worth their time. I had prepared for this opportunity for years. At the Parisi Speed School, I had learned under Bill Parisi and Martin Rooney, developing my eye for movement and coaching athletes through thousands of repetitions. Later, I moved to Washington D.C. to build Georgetown University’s strength and conditioning program. Now, through a prior connection with the new Redskins’ strength coach, I earned an hour to work with an NFL team. One hour. My credentials and expertise helped get me onto the field. What happened next depended on whether the players wanted to listen. My role was to help players recognize small adjustments they could practice to become faster and sustain their speed longer. The session went well, and several players hired me privately. Those relationships eventually led to an invitation from Coach Joe Gibbs to join the staff full-time. This full-time position changed my relationship with the players. Those who had paid me out of their own pockets began questioning my intentions. I worked for the organization that determined their playing time and compensation: could something they shared with me now be used against them? My expertise had not changed, but their understanding of our relationship had. I had to earn their trust again. That experience shaped how I think about coaching: expertise reaches its potential when people trust its purpose, understand its relevance, and want to act on it. ## Getting to Trust Being embedded gives an expert access, and being consistently present gives that expert opportunities to understand people, demonstrate care, and earn credibility. Neither a job title nor yesterday’s relationship guarantees trust today. Research describes trust in terms of accepting vulnerability based on positive expectations of another person.¹ On the football field, vulnerability was practical as players trusted me with their bodies and careers. Once I became a full-time employee of the organization, they had to reconsider what that vulnerability meant. For an embedded human-performance professional, that is a daily responsibility. Who receives the information an athlete shares? How will a performance metric be interpreted? What happens when someone admits fatigue or uncertainty? Transparent answers, followed by consistent behavior, help people decide whether their trust is warranted. This matters in military environments as well. A longitudinal study following U.S. Army soldiers through a 14-week training program found that relational trust in leaders predicted later role-related performance.² The finding does not make trust a substitute for technical competence. It shows why developing trust-based relationships deserves serious attention alongside training plans to attain optimal results. Sports psychology makes a similar connection explicit. The Coach–Athlete Relationship Questionnaire measures closeness, commitment and cooperative interaction. Within closeness is a simple statement: “I trust my coach.”³ Trust is integral in creating strong expert-client relationships that provide the foundation for expertise to be accepted. I think about that whenever an expert becomes frustrated that someone will not follow sound, evidence-based advice. Before repeating the advice more emphatically, we should ask whether we understand what matters to the person receiving it. What are they trying to accomplish? What have they already tried? What might following our advice cost them? Have we explained how our recommendations serve their goals? ## Making it Personal Creating a story with your client as the protagonist gives evidence a recognizable personal setting. It conveys that you know what THEY want, what obstacles THEY perceive, highlights their AGENCY, and illustrates THEIR potential success. The client can now picture possible actions and outcomes of their own. Research on narrative persuasion shows that becoming absorbed in a story can influence beliefs.4 Consider the appeal of a charismatic fitness influencer promising a shortcut, a diet seller offering fast results, or someone marketing a peptide regimen through dramatic testimonials. Vaccine misinformation can arrive in the same persuasive form: a vivid story that speaks directly to fear, identity, or a desire for control. An emotionally convincing account overshadows the evidence supporting it. Experts should study storytelling while holding themselves to a higher standard of accuracy. It is possible to be compelling and veracious. Public health offers a constructive example. The CDC’s *Tips From Former Smokers* campaign paired real people’s accounts of smoking-related illness with practical resources for quitting. An evaluation associated the campaign with more than one million sustained quits between 2012 and 2018.5 The stories gave the evidence a human face and offered a next step. For subject-matter experts, the challenge is to make sound guidance equally relevant and usable. Coaches and experts alike can use effective storytelling to inspire our clients to accept our guidance. In *The Everyday Coach*, I describe inspiration as a three-step process: compel, convey, and create. It takes time because we are helping someone discover something deeply important about themselves. Compel means discovering what truly drives the person. Ask a Special Operator why they joined the Special Forces, and their first answer begins the conversation. We need to understand the why behind that answer. Through thoughtful questions across many conversations, we may discover together that the men in his family have served in the military for six generations. Becoming a Special Operator was his way of making his father and ancestors proud. Beneath his professional ambition is a deeply personal desire for acceptance, approval, and belonging within his family’s legacy. We cannot assume that story from his uniform or assign it to him ourselves. We have to listen, remain curious, and earn enough trust for him to explore it with us. Convey means helping him recognize the fuller significance of that discovery. What does honoring his family mean in the way he serves today? How does the legacy he inherited connect to his responsibilities as a Special Operator? Together, we can connect his desire to make his family proud with the competence, judgment, and character he brings to his team. His service carries personal meaning, represents something important to his family, and contributes to the country’s generations before him chose to serve. Create means helping him envision the positive future that acting on this inspiration could make possible. He might picture himself becoming a decorated Special Operations leader, capable of protecting his soldiers and accomplishing complex objectives. He might imagine his father’s pride in the leader he has become. Looking further ahead, he may envision his own children, drawing inspiration from his example and freely choosing to continue the family’s tradition of service. The vision gives his actions a place in a much larger story. Training, studying, and developing sound judgment become ways of growing into the person he wants to be. The future is an opportunity he can work toward, with choices and responsibilities that begin today. Storytelling weaves compel, convey, and create into a narrative connecting where someone comes from, why their actions matter now, and who they could become. Its emotional force comes from meaning discovered with the person. The expert helps them see how sound guidance can move their own story forward. Inspiration now has somewhere to go beyond the goosebumps. The person can see why the work matters and wants to take the next step. Our responsibility as experts is to remain present, help them find workable pathways, and earn their trust as they pursue that future. Today, whether I am speaking to a Strength Coach, Football Coach, Doctor, or CEO, I return to the same responsibility. Learn the person as seriously as you learn the science. Help them see a credible path toward something they value. Stay engaged long enough to discover whether your guidance actually helps. Our credentials may earn us an introduction. Understanding the person, earning their trust, and inspiring action make our expertise matter.   1 Trust and vulnerability: Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., & Camerer, C. (1998). [Not so different after all: A cross-discipline view of trust](https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1998.926617). *Academy of Management Review, 23*(3), 393–404. Provides the definition underlying the article’s discussion of vulnerability. 2 Military trust and performance: Schaubroeck, J. M., Peng, A. C., & Hannah, S. T. (2013). [Developing trust with peers and leaders: Impacts on organizational identification and performance during entry](https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0358). *Academy of Management Journal, 56*(4), 1148–1168. “Relational trust” in the draft refers to the study’s *affect-based trust*. The longitudinal findings support prediction, not experimental proof of causation. 3 Trust within coaching relationships: Jowett, S., & Ntoumanis, N. (2004). The Coach–Athlete Relationship Questionnaire: Development and initial validation. *Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 14*(4), 245–257. Trust is an item within closeness; the other dimensions are commitment and complementarity. 4 Narrative persuasion: Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). [The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701?utm_source=chatgpt.com). *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79*(5), 701–721. Experiments examined narrative absorption and corresponding beliefs. 5 Smoking cessation campaign: Murphy-Hoefer and colleagues (2020). [Association between the Tips From Former Smokers campaign and smoking cessation among adults, United States, 2012–2018](https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0052.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com). *Preventing Chronic Disease, 17*, 200052. 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