The Relationship Bank Account
Similar to the Personal Bank Account (PBA) from earlier on in the book, the Relationship Bank Account (RBA) is a simple measure of how much trust you have in your various relationships. A withdrawal looks like breaking a promise, gossiping, being arrogant, and setting false expectations. The main difference between the PBA and the RBA is that a single withdrawal from an RBA may take many, many more deposits to make it back to where you started. In my opinion, the bank account analogy still carries over well, but can be a little misleading with the idea that each ‘withdrawal’ and ‘deposit’ has a concrete value compared to others.
Think Win-Win
The main message of this chapter is that you don’t need to have someone else be wrong for you to be right. There is more than enough victory in the world to go around, so depriving yourself or others of it is purely detrimental. This is a concept that I agree with heavily, because we see too much in this day and age of people painting things as ‘us vs them’ and having everyone end up damaged because of it. Comparison and competition can feed innovation and improvement, but outside of our constructed systems, they really provide very little benefit to society as a whole. Natural selection has proven cooperation as a whole to be a good thing, so choosing to only get half the deal is generally a bad idea.
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
A quote that is repeated many times throughout this chapter is: “You have one mouth, but two ears”. It goes over the importance of letting someone be heard, as well as proper tactics to make sure that whoever you are listening to feels heard as well. Done properly, this relieves a lot of stress from the person and usually prompts them to feel safe and willing to accept advice afterwards. Often, people think that they are helping by interjecting their own advice and experience, but often that makes the other person feel ignored and it is better to just listen first. However, this does not mean that you should only listen, it goes both ways. You should be able to talk and be heard, as long as you have taken the time to listen beforehand.
