Most artists never get to feel rich, and yet I did, in some unnamable way, as I filled out my profile on Trusted Housesitters. A friend had asked me to stay at her house in Albuquerque with her cat for two months between moves and wanted to organize it through this app. 

I wasn’t rich in cash, but in some other thing I’d never quantified — the ability to get people to trust me with their pets, as well as the use of the homes I hearted, in New Mexico, Canada, and England, with views of horses, rainforests, or gardens with swimming ponds. Temporarily, I could get access to the same things one might trade cash for. 

With a website and a public life as a writer and writing coach, a few thousand followers on social media, a history of working with companies people know, and Google search results free of the words “arrested for” or “infamous leader of,” I felt empowered to convince people that I could feed and walk Dougal or Ozzy or Tink and not burn the house down. 

Another kind of currency pulsed underneath all this, and, as I did a total of 17 pet-sitting gigs over seven months, I lived on it, mostly rent-free. What I’d stumbled on was my reputation capital, the token that works the arcade of the sharing economy. 

How the trust economy works

To fully understand any system, it helps to examine its individual parts. Let’s start with the riches I felt when laying out the public markers that I’m not dodgy. The balance in this bank is called “reputation capital,” according to Rachel Botsman, who writes about how our tech-powered reputations can revolutionize the economics of our lives.

In her TED Talks on the topic, Botsman defines your reputation capital as “the worth of your reputation, your intentions, capabilities, and values across communities and marketplaces.”

Most internet searches for “trust” bring up romantic relationships, leadership, or religion. What we’re talking about here Botsman calls “peer-to-peer” or “distributed trust.” 

She says we've gone from traditional car ownership to car-sharing companies, like Zipcar, to peer-to-peer car rental, where you can make money from renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day. All these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation.

While money exchanges hands in some of these cases, what I love about pet-sitting is that it’s an equal exchange of value. I get a place for the weekend in central Taos, New Mexico, whomever I’m sitting for gets to go rock climbing without paying to board their cats, and the cats get to chill at home rather than in a crate somewhere. The only thing flowing between us is trust. 

Most people focus on the physical assets on one side of the equation, such as the house, the car, the boat. But Botsman says we need to recognize skills, time, competence, and experience as valuable assets as well.

"People are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets, from skills to spaces to material possessions, in ways and on a scale never possible before," Botsman has said. 

I discussed this with one of my hosts as we sat up drinking wine in his 500-year-old estate before he left to go hiking in Italy with his wife. He mentioned he’d probably rent the sprawling home for about $1,200 a night. Without his trust — and his vetting of me via the house-sitting app and a Zoom call — my 10-day stay would have been $12,000, aka not happening for me financially. Instead, I took his dogs for a walk each day through rolling Cotswolds fields and then enjoyed his gardens, his wok with an actual wok burner, and his back deck, writing with the view of the lilies in the swimming pond. 

Charles Feltman, a leadership coach, wrote that “trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” The more risk someone places in your hands, the more trust they’ll need in you, and the more reputation capital you’ll need to pony up. Reputation capital helps “de-risk” the situation, a verb I’d never thought of before studying the trust economy. 

Grow the balance in your trust account

In his book “Trusted Leader,” self-described global trust expert David Horsager outlines eight pillars of trust: clarity, compassion, character, competency, commitment, connection, contribution, and consistency. 

“Many people come in and say, well, trust, that's probably something you have or you don't,” he said. “And that's not true. It's something you absolutely can actively build and do something about.”

Take consistency. “It is the little things done consistently that make the biggest difference,” Horsager said. “Consistency is trusted.”

With reviews, people can see my consistency, in the same way a credit score shows that you consistently pay your bills. 

To me, it also means tending to your network, making digital connections with those you interact with in the world. I take the step to request a review on the house-sitting app. Even better might be a scenario in which a possible client knows someone I know on LinkedIn. The technical term for this kind of vouching, Horsager says, is “transfer trust.”

“Transfer trust is the quickest way to increase trust without knowing someone personally,” he said.

While in England, I read “Pride and Prejudice,” the plot of which hinges on reputation and who can be trusted with what. In that pre-Google era, your reputation was thrown about meeting in carriages or on walks, and the only way to actively improve it was simply by bragging. 

What if you get a bad review, or one that makes you seem inconsistent? Focus on rebuilding trust, Horsager says. 

"It is good to apologize if you have done something poorly, but you will only rebuild trust when you make and keep a new promise that corrects the situation," he said.

Michelle Reina, who holds the title chief trust-building officer at her eponymous company, echoes the importance of clarity: “If we were to boil it down to the space of human beings and what they're looking for, I think there's transparency and honesty about what it is that I have to offer you.” 

All business is conducted through relationships. The best are built through trust, and trust is built through behavior. 

Reina emphasizes a need for “being honest about what is here, rather than a comfortable spin or comfortable variation or some delusion around what is there.” 

I’ve been tempted to apply to pet-sit horses, but, though I have ridden horses, I had to be honest that I would actually have no idea what I’d be doing if left alone with one for days on end. If I lied about what I could do, I might fall short and end up with a negative review. 

Give trust to get it

Trust is a two-way street. As I headed to tend chickens and a black Lab in Canada in ways that border control could absolutely not comprehend, I had to extend trust to the homeowners in order to get it. 

“To have trust in this sharing economy, you need to be both trustworthy and trusting,” Stephen M.R. Covey, the author of “Trust & Inspire,” wrote to me in an email. “Technology creates a platform where relevance and quality are decided and moderated by a system of transparent ratings and reviews — from average, everyday people — that form a basis for trustworthiness. No trust, no deal.” He explains that in the sharing economy, doing the right thing and doing the economic thing naturally converge. As doing the right thing builds trust, that trust builds the assets that help you thrive in the trust economy. 

Gatekeeping in the trust economy

This isn't some utopia, though. The same flawed systems that have produced discriminatory hiring practices — that have disenfranchised people of color and kept historically marginalized folks out of many positions of real power — provide the cultural ground this trust economy has been built on. Many of the apps that are supposed to evenly distribute trust put all the distribution power in the hands of the owner of the home, pet, or car, with all their possible biases. 

But individuals have the power.

According to Carol Frazer Haynesworth, senior partner and head of multicultural strategy and inclusion at the advertising firm Carmichael Lynch, people have unprecedented access to make change. 

“Every individual right now is a chief stakeholder that can make or break a business,” she said. “They have social media to amplify in one second anything that they felt was right or wrong.” She added: “We don't have to fear institutions. You have to fear individuals that have the courage to stand up.”

Why bother at all with the trust economy, if it’s not level? Perhaps for the same reason we still go to work, though there are discriminatory hiring practices. We date, though the people we date have unconscious bias. I eat, though the industrialized food industry seems to not care if I live or die. These are the systems that swirl around us. There is no opt-out button. It’s a balance of working within them and working to change them. 

How to work the trust-economy system

What’s something you want, but can’t yet afford to buy? A car? A villa? A coach?

That’s the place to start when you approach the trust economy, Botsman said.

Could you rent the car from its owner on Turo, like a BMW convertible I could afford to use for a week while in England but would be way out of my budget to buy? Is there a place you can visit as long as your only cost is the flight and your accommodations are covered with dog walks? Is there a coach who will barter if you send them a message on LinkedIn, where your skills are not only listed but endorsed? Use that desire as the push to give the trust economy a try. 

By pet-sitting, I extended my trip to England by three weeks, which would’ve cost at least $3,000 if I’d been paying for accommodations. Instead, it cost the $120 change fee for my flight. 

If you don’t have money to get into the rooms you want to be in, you may have the reputation capital — you just haven't realized it yet. 

Paulette Perhach is a freelance writer and writing coach.