I am a big fan of Stephen Covey’s book on “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. And one concept mentioned there is something I beleive in strongly. The same concept has been explained by Sean Covey in his book – “Seven Habits of Teenagers”. So, I thought I will blog on having a bank account and becoming rich. However, this bank account is intangible and ever enriching – Relationship Bank Account(RBA)
We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a reserve from which we can make withdrawals when we need. A relationship bank account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship. Each one of the many relationships that you have in your life, whether it be family, personal, or professional in nature, are each like a separate checking account at your local bank where you make your deposits and withdrawals. With a financial checking account, you must maintain a positive balance by making deposits and avoid writing checks that exceeds the amount that you have in the account. The same holds true with all the relationships in our lives, but instead of money that we deposit into our account, we make “emotional deposits,” into our relationship bank accounts in the form of actions that build trust and deliver value to that person. Like a checking account, we can also make withdrawals from our relationship accounts in the form of taking actions that cause the other person any amount of pain and if we make too many withdrawals from our relationship account, the other person will eventually close our account with them.
The primary focus in this financial analogy is to make as many high-quality emotional deposits into our most important relationship accounts as possible so that we can build value and trust in those accounts. Here are few of my simple and age old ways of becoming rich in your RBA –
- Deposit Acts of Empathy – Example: Actively listening, understanding rather than judging or criticizing, respecting the differences of others, etc.
- Deposit Acts of Kindness – Example: Making someone else feel important, remembering an important day for the other person, increasing the level of self-esteem in others, giving a co-worker a ride home, help a friend/colleague with a project, cooking dinner for your wife etc.
- Deposit Acts of Trust – Example: Being honest, doing what you said you will do, trusting others, keeping up promises etc.
- Deposit Acts of Loyalty - Example: Speaking good things about a person when he is not around, being there in times of crisis, etc.
- Depositing Acts of Unconditional forgiveness and seeking genuine apology – Example: Taking 100% responsibility for your actions, offering a sincere apology for a mistake, accepting another person’s apology when they offer it and giving them forgiveness.
All of these work like magic… So, why wait… become rich… start working on it… 
