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In 1989, Stephen R. Covey published his classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The book was a staple of management and personal effectiveness thinking for those coming of age in their careers in the 1990s, and has remained an influence for generations of leaders, with Covey’s timelessly catchy metaphors and pithy expressions of key habits like “sharpen the saw,” “begin with the end in mind,” and “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
One key metaphor introduced in Covey’s book was the “emotional bank account.” Covey used this image has a way to frame our thinking around relationships. He posited that the strength of our relationships with others is reflected in balances of emotional connection and trust that increase or decrease based on our everyday interactions with each other. Actions like kindness, active listening, and appreciation, act as deposits, thereby increasing our balance while actions like criticisms, broken promises, and ignoring efforts to connect, act as withdrawals. A healthy positive balance enables us to endure the inevitable slights that occur in any relationship.
The emotional bank account metaphor is highly rational and easily understood. It is an effort to quantify and structure something that is wildly variable and resists measurement. A quick search reveals the psychological science behind it with expressions like “keep it in the black” by maintaining “the magic ratio,” which appears to be five positive deposits to every one withdrawal. However, one must be careful as some frameworks suggest as many as 20 positive deposits to every one withdrawal in order to keep that balance high.
There are many dangers in trying to quantify goodwill or trust. Positive or negative actions may be valued differently based on the individual and the impacts of withdrawals from our emotional bank accounts often dramatically outweigh deposits – it seems that the weight of hurt and slight is always heavier than the lighter currency of kindness. Trust once lost may sometimes never be recovered, and years of goodwill can be spent quickly in even the smallest acts of selfishness.
For a young man, recently graduated from college and newly married, the emotional bank account metaphor offered a graspable vision of rationality to the highly fluid reality of relationship: at home and in the office. Of course, 1992’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus helped novices like me realize that human beings must agree on a standard of currency before any assessments of value can be made. Now more than three decades later, I find the emotional bank account metaphor woefully inadequate, if not dangerously deceptive.
Simplistically suggesting that you do more kind things than unkind things on a daily basis not only glosses over the immense complexity of the human dynamic, it implies a transactional, utilitarian foundation for the most intimate aspect of our existence, communion with other human beings. I’m not criticizing the desire or effort to more deeply understand human relations, but we attempt to quantify them at our own risk.
This brings me to the Catholic Church’s Liturgical calendar and today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. In it, Jesus shares the story of the sower indiscriminately scattering seed on various types of soil: the walking path where it is stolen by birds, among rocks where it withers, among thorny ground where it is choked, and finally upon rich soil where it yields fruits, a hundred, sixty, or thirtyfold.
What is the seed that is being sown? It is “the word of the kingdom.” Jesus is referring to himself, the Word, the Divine Logos, offered to all. But what is he really offering and what grows from that?
The extravagant casting of seeds upon all types of soil is an invitation to relationship, an invitation into God’s divine life. In Galatians 5, St. Paul describes the fruit born of the seed of the Word through that invitation to relationship: love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Years after 7 Habits and Men Are From Mars, I heard a speaker debunk a common platitude of marital relationships, saying, “People often describe a marriage as a 50/50 partnership. That is a misconception, it needs to be 100/100. Each person must give 100% for it to be all it can be.” Marriage is clearly unique in the world of relationships but there is profound insight in the message: you get what you give. A recent speaker’s challenge to “love foolishly” gets us closer to the Christian ideal and further away from the quantification of relationship deposits and withdrawals.
We are made for relationship, for communion with others. Human relationship is not a bank account with balances and transactions. Intimacy and impact are not measured in debits and credits. The Divine Sower gives us an example of what extravagant love looks like and what communion promises. Not all relationships are equal and communion with others doesn’t always mean soul-baring intimacy. However, the fruit born from our own seeds sown will reflect the abundance of our love…not in the balance on an emotional spreadsheet, but in the joy of having loved foolishly.
