Reduce Conflict By Leveraging Your Emotional Bank Account

DO YOU DREAD HAVING A DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS?
WILL YOU DO ANYTHING TO AVOID CONFLICT?
DO YOU JUST SWALLOW DOWN WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO SAY BECAUSE YOU’RE DON’T WANT TO HURT THE OTHER PERSON’S FEELINGS?

If you’re struggling with difficult conversations, fear conflict or not speaking up, you’ll find relief in discovering how to effectively create a strong emotional bank account in all of your relationships.

Improve Relationships By Making Deposits in Your Emotional Bank Account

The emotional bank account is a metaphorical concept that describes the balance of trust, positive feelings, and goodwill in a relationship. The idea is that just like a financial bank account, you can make deposits and withdrawals in your emotional bank account with others. You have an emotional bank account with anyone and everyone with whom you communicate on a regular basis. In other words, your family members, your work colleagues, and your friends.

In a relationship, positive actions such as showing empathy, kindness, and respect can be considered as deposits that add to the emotional bank account. These actions help build trust and a positive rapport between individuals. On the other hand, negative actions such as lying, breaking promises, or disrespect can be seen as withdrawals that decrease the emotional bank account balance, leading to a feeling of distrust and negativity.

Be very specific with your positive feedback and praise and tie it directly back to the behaviour or event or comment the other person just made. Make the positive deposit as quickly as possible to when they acted or responded, so that they can easily absorb your feedback. This will create a positive balance in your emotional bank account.

Just like a financial bank account, it's important to maintain a positive balance in the emotional bank account to ensure the relationship remains healthy and strong. Regular deposits of positive actions help build and maintain strong relationships, while too many withdrawals can lead to conflict, resentment, and the eventual breakdown of the relationship.

Overall, the concept of the emotional bank account emphasizes the importance of investing in relationships through positive actions and behaviors to foster trust, intimacy, and connection with others.

"The art of building relationships is to give as much as you can with no immediate expectation of return in mind." -Ken Blanchard & Scott Blanchard

Strengthen Your Relationships Even When You’re in Conflict

The chance for communication breakdowns happen whenever there are two or more people with an opinion. If you need to let the other person know that you don’t agree with them or you want to express a different point of view, it becomes much easier when there is a positive and healthy balance in your emotional bank account.

Emotional bank account withdrawals come in the form of judgments, harsh words, and angry actions, to name a few.

Having a positive balance in the emotional bank account means that you can make a withdrawal and still keep the relationship and trust between you strong. With a positive balance in the emotional bank account, you can speak up even when its feels challenging.

Practice making positive deposits into the emotional bank account with others today. Fill up the positive balance in the emotional bank account between you by:

• Thanking the other person for their action, or behaviour or response.
• Tell them that you appreciate their thoughtfulness or their hard work on a particular project - be specific.
• When you agree with their comment in a meeting, say so.
• Catch them doing something right and comment on it.

How many other ways can you catch someone doing something right?

Then when you hit a rough spot, and we all do, you can say what you need to say knowing that you won’t harm the relationship. Creating a higher positive balance in your emotional bank account will cushion the difficult conversations, lessen the conflict and increase the willingness of being able to speak up.

Shift Your Perspective & You’ll Feel Happier

We’ve all been programmed from a evolutionary perspective to look for harm. It started out as looking for the saber tooth tiger and then the poisonous berries. So, it’s easy for us to constantly look for what’s wrong, in ourselves and others.

When you are constantly focusing on how to make deposits into the positive side of the emotional bank account with everyone from family and friends to your colleagues and clients, you will discover that you are focusing on the positive aspects of your relationships and others more.

This perspective shift alone will benefit you and your relationships for the rest of your life. You’ll start to see the positive behaviours, responses, actions, events, thoughts in yourself and others much easier.

I believe that you have the potential inside of you to BE who you want to be, to DO what you’re passionate about and to HAVE the success you’re striving for. It’s in you.

I provide high performance mindset shifts that transform your thoughts and beliefs using quantum linguistics and proven coaching techniques designed to blast your through your limiting beliefs, so that you release your inner bad ass and confidently take action to grow your business and your revenue.

If you're ready for a magical transformation so that you can have tangible results, release your inner bad ass and confidently take action to grow your business and your revenue, schedule a Clarity Session with me.