Your emotional balance

Finding your emotional balance is not always easy. That’s why we will introduce you to a simple but yet profound and effective concept that can influence your private and professional life substantially. We discovered the principle called EBA — Emotional Bank Account from Stephen Covey.

We maintain a personal so called “emotional” account with our colleagues at work, our family and our friends. This account is like a financial one and it begins on a neutral balance. We can make deposits that will gain us interests or withdrawals.

But instead of dealing with money, we deal with emotional currencies and trust. It is about credit or debit, in the black or in the red. The more deposits we make on our emotional bank account, the better our relationships with the people surrounding us are.

And the more withdrawals we do, the more we destroy the trust that has been built and damage the relationship.

Understanding the individual, attending to the little things and keeping commitments are only a few ideas to create deposits, engender respect for each other but also respect in yourself. An account with lots of deposits represents a very strong and trustful relationship with a smooth and effective communication. You are true to yourself and easily understood by others. And vice-versa, when you ignore others, disrespect or criticize them, your bank account becomes overdrawn.

This introduction to Covey’s theory and interesting metaphor did remind us of how important constant investments in our relationships with others are and motivate us to evaluate our own situations with our parters, families, friends and bosses. We encourage you to do the same from time to time because it really helps you to identify where you should be investing more and try to keep the balance in your accounts.

Sarah Melcher