Moving Relationships Forward
Understand the Root Cause of Your Successes and Failures
Empathy and cooperation are essential to human achievement, so the quality of your personal and professional life hinges on your relationships; thus, conducting a relationship inventory can reveal where to focus your time and energy for a better life.
Take Stock of Your Emotional Bank Accounts
Healthy relationships rely on mutual trust and goodwill, akin to an emotional bank account where genuine acts of kindness build deposits, while emotional withdrawals can create imbalance; thus, consistent, sincere interactions are essential for maintaining and repairing these connections over time.
Clarify Motives to Speed Up Difficult Conversations
Uncomfortable conversations can be eased by clearly stating your intent from the start, admitting uncertainty, and assuming good intent in others, which fosters a collaborative atmosphere and reduces awkwardness.
Talk Less and Listen More
Psychological studies reveal that even infants possess a natural impulse to help others, highlighting the importance of reflective listening—an empathetic approach that prioritizes understanding over judgment, allowing individuals in distress to feel heard and supported.
Communicate Effectively Through Email
Todd Davis emphasizes that while electronic communication, particularly email, is effective for building relationships, it requires overcommunication to ensure clarity, as tone and emotion can be easily misinterpreted without face-to-face interaction.
Get Your Volume Right
Recognizing that strengths can become weaknesses when overemphasized, it's essential to manage both your own and others' strengths by identifying when to dial them up or down, ensuring they enhance rather than hinder relationships and performance.
Make Headway on the Most Important Things
To enhance your relationships and productivity, take a week to evaluate how you spend your time by distinguishing between urgent and important tasks, allowing you to prioritize meaningful goals and commitments over unnecessary busyness.
Empathy and the drive to cooperate are at the heart of achievement. In practice, this means that the quality of your personal and professional lives depends on the caliber of your relationships. But relationships are complex, notes Todd Davis, FranklinCovey’s chief people officer. Their success depends on both parties’ abilities to listen, communicate, and manage difficulties.
Learning Objectives
- Perform a relationship inventory.
- Ameliorate difficult conversations with honesty.
- Be a better reflective listener.
- Make more time for your relationships.
- Communicate clearly online.