In this special guest episode, we delve into the world of trust - how it manifests, evolves, and shapes societies across the globe - with Andy Vasily. Andy is a Leadership/Performance Coach, Podcaster, and seasoned traveler who has immersed himself in diverse cultures and gained invaluable insights into the dynamics of trust in the many places he and his family have called home.
Drawing from his rich, sometimes harrowing, experiences, Andy shares the nuances of trust in various corners of the world. As he describes how he has experienced trust in places like Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, and Azerbaijan, together we ponder the balance between competence-based trust and the human bonds forged through care and sincerity.
We would happily have talked with Andy for hours and since our conversation ended up being longer than our typical episode, we’ve broken it into two. This episode (67) is the first part.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
In this special guest episode, we delve into the world of trust - how it manifests, evolves, and shapes societies across the globe - with Andy Vasily. Andy is a Leadership/Performance Coach, Podcaster, and seasoned traveler who has immersed himself in diverse cultures and gained invaluable insights into the dynamics of trust in the many places he and his family have called home.
Drawing from his rich, sometimes harrowing, experiences, Andy shares the nuances of trust in various corners of the world. As he describes how he has experienced trust in places like Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, and Azerbaijan, together we ponder the balance between competence-based trust and the human bonds forged through care and sincerity.
We would happily have talked with Andy for hours and since our conversation ended up being longer than our typical episode, we’ve broken it into two. This episode (67) is the first part.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Trust on Purpose. My name is Charles Feldman and.
Speaker 1:
My name is Ila Edgar Edgar, and we have a special guest with us today. Charles, would you like to introduce our guest and set up our topic for today?
Speaker 2:
Yes, I would be happy to. Our guest today is Andy, vasily and Andy. Oh my gosh, andy, you know what? I don't have your bio in front of me, so I don't have all of the world and in very different cultures than our Western and North American culture. And right now you're putting down roots or planning to put down roots and settle down in Belgium. Get a different place for you. But you've lived in Japan. You've lived in Saudi Arabia. You've been in Cambodia. You've lived in Saudi Arabia. You've been in Cambodia. You've lived in Azerbaijan.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, China as well. China, yes.
Speaker 2:
So what we want to talk with Andy about because this is a podcast on trust is how trust is built, or perhaps damaged, in cultures other than the culture that Ila and I are firmly embedded in, which is the sort of Western, north American, western European culture. I mean, it's obviously trust and trust building changes and the sort of subcultures within Europe. But as you go to other places Latin America, middle East, Southeast Asia, japan we think it changes considerably, and so Andy is here to help us take a good look at that how trust shows up, how it's built, how it's maintained in some very different cultures. So welcome Andy, we're really excited to have you.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, thank you so much, and the conversation before the conversation is always so good and rich and meaningful.
Speaker 3:
But, like you said, charles, we're in Belgium right now and we're here just for five days because we've lived in Saudi Arabia for eight years and now we have an opportunity to move to Belgium for work. My wife and I decided to come here to kind of get legs on the ground, scope out. We're in Antwerp we're actually north of Antwerp, just about 10 kilometers, and, knowing that I was going to come on the podcast to talk about this and some of our lived experiences, I want to front load that with like they are just that lived experiences, with what it's like working and living in so many different cultures and trying to make sense of that. And that's what I'm here to share today, and I don't have definitive answers, but what I have are more curiosities and wonderings based on your work and the four domains of trust and then trying to map that against some of our experiences to make sense of it. But I'm really honored to be on the show and to have this opportunity to speak to you both. So thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
Thank you, andy. I also want to layer in that, Charles and I and Andy in the conversation before the conversation, that we're all also a fan of the culture map by Erin Myers and looking at the eight different scales that she has done her research around, and one of them in particular is this concept of trusting and task-based versus relationship-based. And it's so fascinating because the graphic she has in her book also shows how all of the different countries, again based on her research, map out. And so maybe the starting curiosity today is, as you consider the experiences that you've had, what do you notice about different cultures that you've had the lived experience in as it relates to trust?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, mapping the eight scales, aaron talks about communicating and evaluating. Communicating and evaluating, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling, persuading so literally like eight hugely different things. Yet trying to map each country and how that country is manifested on that scale is really interesting. So when I read the book and I started to think about my lived experiences but also map that against Charles's care, sincerity, reliability, competence and trying to make sense of that it leads to more questions. So I think I like starting with trust as one of the scales, because trust on Aaron Meyer's eight scales is relationship versus task, focused right, and different countries fall into different, you know, along the continuum in different ways.
Speaker 3:
So I think what it's brought up for me is like what it was like to live in Hiroshima, japan, for 10 years. You know Hiroshima wiped out by Oppenheimer's bomb, right. You know Hiroshima wiped out by Oppenheimer's bomb, right, literally. So you have the birth of a new city and what trust was like in that culture. But then moving to Azerbaijan, which was really controlled by the Russians and the Russians went in there in 1990 and tried to stop independence and there was lots of killing and lots of fear in that culture and then moving from there to Cambodia, where it was the Pol Pot regime killing fields, which is an amazing movie, but it speaks to the heart of what happened in Cambodia and the lack of trust with government.
Speaker 3:
Moving to China. In Nanjing, china, we lived. There's a great book called the Rape of Nanjing, which is about the Japanese invasion of Nanjing and then living in that culture for five years and then moving to Saudi Arabia. So every country is different and what coming on the show talking about this has helped me understand is really deeply reflect on those experiences and what trust means in those different cultures.
Speaker 3:
And I have lots to share about it, but I'll just stop there because I think I've provided some context for the listeners around the different countries and some of the things that the countries have gone through and that's so pivotal to trying to understand people's relationship with trust.
Speaker 2:
Yes, thank you for that, because what you spoke about is basically their experience of suffering and how that can set up a relationship with trust of their government, of trust of each other and so well. One of the things that came up as you were listing all these different countries, for me is a simple question If you could name the two countries, slash cultures, in which trust building seems to, from your perspective, have been the most different, in other words, what people would do there, the behaviors that led to building trust, maybe some behaviors that could lead to damaging trust which countries and cultures were the most different for you and what was it about those two?
Speaker 3:
the differences, yeah, that's a great question. I think Japan comes to mind 10 years in Japan and really trying to understand Japanese culture and really bringing a North American experience into that. So we moved to Japan in 1997. We left university, moved to Japan, had two kids there who everybody always asks do they have Japanese passports? No, they have Canadian passports. But we had two kids there and it was such an amazing culture to live in and that probably stands out the most to me as being, you know, just having such a hard time understanding culture and the way you fit in.
Speaker 3:
But a couple examples I can give of the Japanese and there's a quote that I want to share, actually, because I looked up this quote in regards to Japan, and the quote is when it comes to trust is if you will treat me as a friend and trust me, you may find that I will justify your trust. So it's so relationship based, right. But I played American football for several years competitively before moving to Japan and then I was on the team as the only foreigner and I felt I was bringing lots of experience and I knew the game really well and they had just learned the game in the past two decades and I didn't think that I was going to go in there and teach them anything, but I thought that I know the game really well and I tried to change things right away when I saw that their system of playing the game didn't fit my system. And they initially trusted me in that process. And then we made it right to the national final. And then we're playing in the national final in the Tokyo Dome and it was a game where we should have won, but the referees were calling penalties one after another against us because they really didn't want the team with the foreigner to win. That was a fact. However, however, there were, despite all of the really bad calls against us, at the end of the game we lost. And then I was going crazy. I was so upset and half Japanese and half English trying to complain to the referees and my teammates were trying to say to me they were saying and my teammates were trying to say to me they were saying shogunai, shogunai, which literally means it can't be helped. Focus on what you can control and what you can't control. So I was like no, screw shogunai, like this can be helped. It was a bad reffing call, a number of calls, but the story goes on to like we lost the game.
Speaker 3:
And the next week after the game the team lost confidence in my ability to create an offensive attack, so they wanted to go back to the old way of doing it that for them worked and for me that was trust completely. And when I think of that, it was like the domain of competence. So they no longer felt I was competent to control the offense and they wanted to go back to the offense that was in place before I played on the team and that to me was a breach of trust. So we had this moment where it was like trying to figure it out. And then we met halfway where they adapted a bit and I adapted. But that in itself speaks volumes about relationship and competence. Like competence means you have to get the job done and if you don't get the job done, then trust is not in place.
Speaker 3:
But then the flip side to that is we were very close friends with a Japanese family. The Japanese couple were probably in their 60s at the time we met them. They welcomed us to their family and literally the week before we were leaving Japan so we knew them for 10 years their 27-year-old son died of an asthma attack and it was terrible when we received the news of that, but then we didn't want to believe it. We heard about it, but then we drove to their house and then in Japan, when there's a death in the family, there's black lanterns. And there were black lanterns in front of the house and they were a very well-known family in this small area. And then when we arrived and we went up, there was an elevator that brought us up to the main floor of their living. They had a business on the bottom floor and then their housing was on the top. And when the elevator doors opened up they were bowing to us and we were crying and we realized it was real and we hugged them.
Speaker 3:
And in Japan they have the body on display in the house and all of the close friends and family come and they just sit in the room with the body. And his name was Hironori and he was an amazing trombone player and he was supposed to go to the Tokyo School of Music to study his master's when he passed away. So his peers were there and it was one of those moments where we were in shock, but we were welcomed into that trusting circle and then the funeral was the next day and we were able to sit with the family and that was a beautiful way of inviting us into their inner circle, which was all based on trust, based on relationship, and that's what comes up. When you ask that question is like it really is relationship based, and the beauty of that story at the tragedy of it, but the trust behind it is what stands out the most. So it's not task oriented or task based. It's very much based on relationships, whereas other cultures are very much task oriented.
Speaker 2:
Those are amazing stories and, to me, speak a lot to a different way of looking at trust, different way of understanding both of them actually, and especially the first one, the football team, and the fact that you got as far as you did. And let me just check this out, the way I heard you tell it. What I heard was that everybody kind of knew that the calls were bad calls, but nobody was going to challenge that, for they didn't want to accuse the referees of acting in a way that was untrustworthy. And you started doing that. Yeah, here you are. This American guy starts to go in and say A barbarian, a barbarian. And disrupt the system, yeah, disrupt the balance of trust there, and the trust was again probably based more on relationship than anything else. It's not so much about ability, skill, the competent side of things. That's what I was listening. So, yeah, do you have any thoughts about that?
Speaker 3:
Well, I like what we said in the conversation before the conversation, where Hila mentioned this idea of trust and relationship building and then looking at the domains of care and sincerity in there. So I think that comes out in the relationship side of it, charles. Your domains of care and sincerity really come alive there. If you show me care, if you are sincere in your actions on a consistent basis, then I will trust you, and that goes back to the kind of the human condition of belonging that if your actions manifest care and sincerity, then you are welcome to the tribe, and if your actions are not about care and sincerity, then you will be shunned and pushed out of the tribe, which leads to you know, thousands of years ago led to death, right. But I think, ila, I really appreciated that you mentioned that because that made sense to me. It's relationship-based. You know how does that resonate with you, ila, in terms of the story I shared?
Speaker 1:
I think for both of them and I'm a different listener than Charles is to me the part of the story that really resonated was actually with the family and having this deep personal relationship with them and having something so tragic happen.
Speaker 1:
And there is still this honor and respect in the Japanese culture, this tradition, this it feels so deep and rich and I'm not articulating this very well, but I just feel like this deep, deep care, this deep, deep sincerity that is so rooted in honor and respect and tradition and culture.
Speaker 1:
And I'm really moved by how you were invited into that to show honor and respect to this again, this amazing human that died too young. And so I'm really sitting with that right now and I don't know how to switch out of having that deep, profound experience, like my own body, my own system doesn't know how to then go to what is a task-based, trusting relationship. Feel like it feels so this is a weird word to come out of my mouth it feels so foreign. I've got Erin's book open here and I'm looking at the different countries and how she's mapped them out on this continuum. So in your story, both the football but especially the family I don't know how I would relate or function or how I would navigate a culture that is so task-based versus relationship-based. So that's kind of where it's got my headspace.
Speaker 3:
And I just want to add to that, if I can tag on to that our experience in Azerbaijan shifted completely to mechanical relationships and then saying that is like you know, again, knowing that I was going to come on the show, I started to kind of reflect. I was like, oh my God, like we've been through so much. And in Azerbaijan, you know we were there only two years for a reason. It was not a safe country. And you know we were there only two years for a reason it was not a safe country Beautiful culture, but not a very safe country. And in the first two months we got robbed where I literally I was cooking dinner and then my wife and I were like, let's get a bottle of wine. I was like, oh no, we don't have any, I'll leave, I'll go get some wine come back.
Speaker 3:
In the time that I had left to come back, there was a knock at the door and my son who's now 20, was four at the time and he, nila. My wife thought that it was me coming back, but it wasn't. It was this guy who came in. My son opened the door and this guy walked in and our master bedroom was right beside the front door and he walked in. We had 400 American dollars and some rings and stuff on the dresser and he came and he took it all and he walked out. So he just somehow showed up at the door. Maybe I don't know how it happened, but anyways, when I got back then my wife was like oh my God, you're not going to believe what happened. So this is what happened. He just walked out the door. And when I was walking in the door I remember somebody walking out of the apartment building like an old rustic, you know 1940s style apartment, walking out the door. And that was probably him. And I'm glad that he wasn't walking out when I was actually walking into our apartment, because that would have been not very good. And the reason why I share that story is that my boss, when we were only in the country three months and then I sent him a message he literally, like within four days, comes and hands of 600 US dollars to recoup the cost of what we lost.
Speaker 3:
So then it goes from being relational to just mechanical, saying we see what you went through, we're sorry, here's some money to cover your losses. But there's not the relationship in place. But we see, the attempt is to kind of just say like we got your back and then three months after that, my 20 year old son, who was four at the time, got meningitis. He was like unconscious for three days and this brought up I thought about this today Again, the same person who gave us that money goes to extraordinary ends to have my son medevaced out on a private jet to Vienna and next thing you know we're in an ambulance that's racing towards the airport, where we don't even have to show our passports, where we're just delivered right to the tarmac and we get onto this private jet that takes us to Sick Kids Hospital in Vienna. We stay there for 14 days and I stay by my son's bedside for 14 days with tremendous gratitude that we were looked after, but there was no relationship in place.
Speaker 3:
It wasn't like I had deep conversations with this person. He just stepped up at the time that we were going through hardship and wanted us to know that he had our back and him having our back could circumnavigate all of the systems and immigration and all of that to get us the help we needed. So what if we didn't have that advantage? My son might have died. So when you look at trust around the world and I'm certainly not an expert, but, based on my experiences, people will have your back. But people will have your back if you are in the right circumstances at the right time, which is kind of a sad thing for the people that are not in those similar. So I share that as I make sense of trust, because I had profound trust. He was the only person I could turn to in the moment and he came through for me and he came through for you.
Speaker 1:
And I find this so interesting, Andy, because your description, and again this is your relationship with him, but it sounds like he did care with him, but it sounds like he did care and so, even though there was no relationship to speak of, like he showed up for you numerous times, critical times, and I'm just curious how would you describe the relationship?
Speaker 3:
He was a rugby player, I was an American football player. That was our connection. We talked about. He was a tough guy, big dude, six foot four. He knew I played American football and we just had those conversations. So I think that sense of connection was there but we didn't have a lot of interactions. So I think it goes back to the same stories in Cambodia. The same thing like the wealthy kind of control the country and then if you're connected with the wealthy of the country then you can get what you need. But if you're not connected with the wealthy then you're on your own. And that's what I have found through our lived experiences in different countries is is you feeling very fortunate to be connected with people who can come through for you, but also recognizing completely you're a foreigner and you're not really a part of the culture? Yeah, charles, what's happening for you when we talk about all this in relationship with your own work?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I'm listening through the lens as much as I can of the four assessment domains of trust to these stories Fascinating, and I'm wondering more questions than thoughts or answers or ideas about it. So where do you see trust in the actions of the man in Azerbaijan? You said that they didn't have a longstanding relationship with him. That might otherwise, in other places, have really provoked a strong sense of care. I really have your back. And yet he behaved in those moments in ways that said I have your back. And then you're saying but if I weren't connected to him, if I didn't have some relationship with somebody who had money and power, you would not have had the same response from somebody else who didn't have that kind of money and power. Do you think he trusted you and if so, why?
Speaker 3:
I think, in our limited interactions, that we had had some good conversations and I think that we were connected by sport. I think that's what kind of drew us together. But again, just going back to you know, I want to share one more story about Cambodia, because that's another example of maybe it's an investment that you meaning the both of you, me we have to trust people enough to open ourselves up and make that initial connection right. But in Cambodia, when we were there for two years and then I spoke to the both of you about my accident and so for the listeners, my ulnar artery was severed and I almost bled out and died in Cambodia, and that was May 6th 2011,. Literally five days after my wedding anniversary, and my boys at the time were very young and in bleeding out, literally arterial clamps hanging from my severed artery with a tourniquet and no doctors in place that could deal with it. It wasn't just stitching up my wound, I needed like arterial and an operation to stop the bleeding. And we found a doctor not we, but the doctors there found a doctor who could help me and I was rushed to him and he couldn't even. He didn't even have the tools to reconnect the severed artery so he could just stitch it shut on either side, which is an arterial ligation it's called. And then they were like you need to go to Bangkok as soon as possible for total reconstruction of your wrist, otherwise you'll lose use of your wrist and hand. And our passports were being renewed in Thailand at the time at the Canadian embassy, so we couldn't even get on a plane.
Speaker 3:
At the school we worked at the president of Cambodia, hun Sen is his name His son and daughter-in-law had children in the school and we knew them and I literally taught the wife how to make bolognese sauce, right. So she came to the house with the bodyguards she had a whole entourage of bodyguards on bikes with big guns and then they come to her house and then I teach her how to make bolognese, because she always orders out pasta from the local restaurant. So I teach her how to make bolognese. My wife Nila reaches out to her when we're in this situation and we have to fly to Thailand, and she's like no problem, they pick me up, they bring me directly again past immigration, right on the plane with no passports, and at the same time she's communicating with the Canadian embassy to meet us on the other side with emergency passports.
Speaker 3:
So I guess you go back to that idea that trust is built through your actions and before the accident happened you know like we had connected and you invest a bit of yourself and they invest a bit of themselves and then you have this relationship in place.
Speaker 3:
And I think that's what it comes down to at times is sometimes we shut off certain relationships and when we stay open to relationships in our lives, with no ulterior motive but just to be a good human, people will have your back For the most part, I want to believe. So that's my wondering is sometimes we can shut down really easily and we don't extend ourselves to new relationships. But with every new relationship comes the opportunity to connect and learn and grow together. And I think looking back, based on this conversation and reflecting on all of the countries and all of the people we've come across, is me trusting in the beauty of the human spirit and just trusting that if I extend myself a bit I will get to know them, and with no ulterior motive other than just the connection. And then when it comes, push comes to shove and you need somebody to have your back blown out artery in Cambodia. They're going to rise to the occasion, because it's human instinct to want to help other people. I think Right, and that's Ila, the Karen sincerity piece.
Speaker 2:
Ila, I see, because I can see you, that something is cooking for you. I'm also noticing, though, that we've been engrossed in this conversation, this wonderful conversation, for over half an hour, and I sense that there's more ground we can cover. So let's stop here for now and pick up where we're leaving off in a part two episode with Andy Vasily. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:
On behalf of both Charles and myself, we want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner. Hillary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonas Smith. Music was composed by Jonas Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust at trustonpurposeorg.
Speaker 2:
And we'd also like to thank you, our listeners. Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time, until next time, until next time.
