The Keys to Damaging Relationships

If you want to know how you lose important relationships, including critical client relationships, here are some of the reasons.

• A Lack of Integrity: There is nothing faster or more effective at damaging relationships than a lack of integrity. Being dishonest will cost you relationships, which is why honesty is the best policy. You need to walk your talk.
• Ingratitude: Taking people for granted and being ungrateful will cause you to lose relationships. When you no longer appreciate people, those relationships are at risk.
• Complacency: Relationships require an investment of time and energy. When you quit feeding relationships, those relationships quit feeding you. Like everything important in life, you need to go first.
• Assuming Bad Intentions: Some people believe in their heart of hearts that everyone is out to hurt them. They question their motives, believing that they must always protect themselves, and thus, never make themselves vulnerable enough to have a real relationship.
• Being Self-Oriented: The very word relationship connotes two people both caring about the other. When you care more about getting what you need or extracting value from the relationship, that self-orientation makes it impossibly difficult for a real relationship to exist.
• Making People Feel Small: The biggest people you will ever meet work very hard to make other people bigger, and they put forth the effort to make people feel important. When you have to be the biggest person in the room, you work against the outcome of making others feel important, and you hurt relationships.
• Attacking People Personally: Big people focus on the issues. Small people focus on the person. You can very easily underestimate the damage you do when you attack someone personally. Personal attacks are designed to hurt the other person, and even though you may apologize, the damage may not be that easily repaired.
• Lack of Trust: For some reason, those who are not trustworthy tend not to trust others. You don’t have to make any accusation for someone to recognize a lack of trust. That lack of trust is an indication as to how you feel about another person, and when it is felt, relationships suffer.
• Lack of Caring: This is a binary choice. You care. Or you do not care. When you don’t care, you have no relationship. Caring is what trust is built on, and that makes caring the prerequisite for all relationships.