All About Trust: What bell hooks Taught Me About Work

There’s a reason bell hooks’ All About Love still gets passed hand to hand, highlighted, dog-eared, and gifted. She told us something most of us were never taught: love isn’t a feeling you fall into. It’s something you do. It’s a choice, it’s a practice, and it’s a verb.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I believe the same is true of trust. When I travel the country speaking with teams, people tell me, “I don’t trust my manager.” “I don’t trust leadership.” “I don’t trust this company.” But when we sit with it, they’re really saying nobody ever asked what they needed to feel safe, seen, and supported. That isn’t only a trust issue. It’s a communication crisis.

hooks argued that love is made of many ingredients, describing it as “care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect.” Read that list again with your workplace in mind. Those aren’t soft words. They’re the foundation of every team that actually works.

So here’s how I see her ingredients showing up in the seven trust languages:

Transparency → honesty. hooks wrote about how normal lying has become, and how small deceptions corrode love. At work, it’s the reorg nobody explained or the decision made behind closed doors. People can handle hard truths. What they can’t handle is finding out later.

Security → trust itself. For hooks, love can’t live where there’s fear. Neither can good work. Psychological safety isn’t a perk. It’s the ground everything else stands on.

Demonstration → responsibility. Love shows up in behavior, not declarations. Your values statement on the wall means nothing if your people don’t see it lived in the room.

Feedback → knowledge. You can’t love someone you refuse to know. And you can’t develop someone you won’t tell the truth to. Meaningful, consistent feedback says, “I see you clearly enough to help you grow.”

Acknowledgment → respect. Respect means really looking at someone. Acknowledgment is how we say “I see what you did, and it mattered” out loud.

Sensitivity → care. Care is paying attention to the whole person. People bring their full lives to work, whether we make room for them or not.

Follow-through → commitment. hooks reminds us love is sustained over time. Trust is too. Doing what you said you’d do, again and again, is the quietest and most powerful trust language there is.

hooks believed a love ethic should shape every part of our lives, not just our romantic ones. I’d add: especially the places where we spend most of our waking hours. We don’t have to call it love at work if that makes people nervous. But we can practice its ingredients. And it starts with one simple question I ask in every room: What does trust look like for you?

Maybe you can’t speak every one of someone’s trust languages. But you can learn one or two. And that’s how trust, like love, gets built: not in one grand gesture, but in daily practice.

So I’ll ask you: which trust language do you need most right now? And which one have you been withholding?