In this short dialogue, Speaker A and Speaker B discuss how trust is built and broken in relationships, using Dr. John Gottman’s “emotional bank account” metaphor. They note that many positive interactions (deposits) are needed before a single negative interaction (withdrawal) can damage trust, citing varying ratios (e.g., 2:1 up to 10:1 or even higher). They illustrate how a single breach can cause lasting damage, referencing their own experience at Starbucks where trust was repeatedly broken and took a long time to repair. The conversation then shifts to the importance of accountability: acknowledging mistakes, taking ownership, and implementing a concrete plan to repair the breach. The overall tone is conversational and reflective, emphasizing the need for consistent positive actions and honest repair strategies to develop “emotional muscle memory” in relationships.
Chapters
Anytime that you break trust, you better clean it up fast. Right? Well, I see it as emotional. It takes forever to get it back.
Right. It sounds like this idea of emotional muscle memory. Dr. John Gottman, who's actually out in Seattle, I'm not sure if he lives in Seattle. Yeah. So, so he has this, this idea of positive versus negative sentiment that for every— how many deposits do you need to put into your emotional bank account with people before you do one debit? Right. So it's like, is it $10 for every $1 you take out? And people on average are kind of like, I don't know, it's like, you know, 2 to 1, 4 to 1, 7 to 1, 10 to 1. The numbers are— what do you think or what do you know about that? Like, what do you think the numbers are? I don't know, they're in the hundreds. Yeah, it's probably like between 60s and 90 positive interactions before you take away one for every one negative interaction.
And if you take— when you take away that one, it's amazing what damage it does, right? And that's the way that it is. If, you know, you keep putting rocks on that positive scale and then all of a sudden you take one off, right, and trust is broken. It takes forever. Starbucks, you know, not a perfect place. We broke trust many times and it took us forever to get it back. And, but we worked on it, we stayed with it, and we, we were honest about it.
Well, is that part of the whole accountability thing? That we are going to acknowledge if we mess up on something, we're going to take ownership over it, and then we're going to put a plan into action about how we're going to repair it and make it better?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
And is that— I think like, I feel like in a lot of ways this accountability, and I want to dog the young professionals like the millennials that everybody's making fun of, because as I had this conversation with this 22-year-old today, he really— we were talking about like why his friends are already 22, 23, 24 years old, already on their second or third job. And he finds that like, they don't bring— they don't feel like they're valued. Yeah. Which is very different than people are like, nope, I'm going to my job to do my paycheck. I don't care if I'm valued. I just need to get my paycheck at the end of the week. So culture has changed with that. Have you seen that in Starbucks and other places that you've talked to and other friends?
