One of my favorite quotes, which, by the way, always makes me feel guilty, is “On their deathbed nobody has ever wished they had spent more time at the office.”
I’ve often asked myself, “What do they wish they’d spent more time doing?” I think the answer might be “Spent more time with the people they love.” You see, it’s all about relationships, the stuff that life is made of.
What’s it like to be in a relationship with you? If you had to rate how well you’re doing in your most important relationships, how would you score?
HOW ARE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH . . . LOUSY EXCELLENT
Your friends? 1 2 3 4 5
Your siblings? 1 2 3 4 5
Your parents or guardian? 1 2 3 4 5
Your girlfriend or boyfriend? 1 2 3 4 5
Your teachers? 1 2 3 4 5
Maybe you’re doing pretty well. Maybe not. Either way, this chapter is designed to help you improve these key relationships. But before we go there, let’s quickly review where we’ve just come from.
In the Private Victory, we learned about the personal bank account and Habits 1, 2, and 3.
In the Public Victory section, we’ll learn about the relationship bank account and Habits 4, 5, and 6. As we’ve already discussed, the key to mastering relationships is first mastering yourself, at least to some degree. You don’t have to be perfect; you just need to be making progress.
Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Why is success with self so important to success with others? It’s because the most important ingredient in any relationship is what you are. As the essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” In many cases, if you’re struggling in your relationships, you probably don’t have to look much further than yourself for the answer.
The Private Victory will help you become independent so that you can say, “I am responsible for myself and I can create my own destiny.” This is a huge accomplishment. The Public Victory will help you become interdependent, that is, help you learn to work cooperatively with others, so that you can say, “I am a team player, and I have the power to influence and inspire people.” This is an even greater accomplishment. The long and short of it is, your ability to get along with others will largely determine how successful you are in your career and your level of personal happiness.
Now back to talking about relationships. Here’s a practical way to think about them. I call it the relationship bank account (RBA). In an earlier chapter we spoke about your personal bank account (PBA), which represents the amount of trust and confidence you have in yourself. Similarly, the RBA represents the amount of trust and confidence you have in each of your relationships.
The RBA is very much like a checking account at a bank. You can make deposits and improve the relationship, or take withdrawals and weaken it. A strong and healthy relationship is always the result of steady deposits made over a long period.
Although there are similarities, the RBA is different from a financial account in three ways, as a colleague of mine, Judy Henrichs, once pointed out to me:
1. Unlike a bank where you may have only one or two accounts, you have an RBA with everyone you meet. Suppose you come across a new kid in school. If you smile and say hello, you’ve just opened an account with him. If you ignore him, you’ve just opened an account as well, although a negative one. There’s kinda no getting around it.
2. Unlike a checking account, once you open an RBA with another person, you can never close it. That’s why you can run into a friend you haven’t seen in years and pick up right where you left off. Not a dollar’s lost. It’s also why people hang on to grudges for years.
3. In a checking account, ten bucks is ten bucks. In an RBA, deposits and withdrawals are not created equally. It usually takes many deposits to make up for one withdrawal. One subtle but demeaning comment, like “I didn’t know you could fit into a size 4,” can destroy weeks of deposits. So be careful when you open your mouth.
So how can you build a rich relationship or repair a broken one? It’s simple. One deposit at a time. It’s the same way you’d eat an elephant if you had to. One bite at a time. There is no quick fix. If my relationship with you is $5,000 in the hole, I’ll need to make $5,001 worth of deposits to get it back in the positive.
I once asked a group of teens, “What’s the most powerful deposit someone has made into your RBA?” These are some of their responses:
• “The steady stream of deposits my family makes that strengthen me.”
• “When a friend, teacher, loved one, or employer takes the time to say, ‘You look nice’ or
‘Great job.’ A few words go a long way.”
• “My friends made me a banner on my birthday.”
• “Bragging about me to others.”
• “When I have made mistakes, they forgive, forget, and help and love.”
• “My friend told me, after I read some poems I wrote, that I was brilliant and I should write a book. It was hard to share some of those in the first place.”
• “My mother called from California, as well as both of my sisters, to wish me a happy birthday, before I left for school.”
• “My brother would always take me to hockey games with his friends.”
• “Little things.”
• “I have four really good friends, and just being together as friends and knowing that we’re all doing good and are happy keeps me going.”
• “Whenever Chris says ‘Hi, how are you, Ryan?’ it makes me feel so uplifted the way he does it.”
• “I had a friend who told me he believed I was very sincere and always myself. It meant a lot that someone would recognize that.”
As you can see, there are many kinds of deposits, but here are six that seem to work every time. Of course, with every deposit, there is an opposite withdrawal.
RBA DEPOSITS RBA WITHDRAWALS
Keep promises Break promises Do small acts of kindness Keep to yourself
Be loyal Gossip and break confidences
Listen Talk too much
Say you’re sorry Be arrogant
Set clear expectations Set false expectations