Atrophy

It's one thing to have good intentions about your relationships with others.You also need good practices to bring them about, repeated actions by which you

listenpay attentionstay open or defend yourselfshare your cares and commitmentschoose what to say and what not sayrespond to emotionsinterpret events as they happen.

When the practices that connect you to one another are neglected, relationships atrophy. At first slowly. And then quickly. Before long nobody can point to the moment when the trouble started nor to what it is that is missing. It's just that something necessary isn't there, something that once brought this team, this family, this organisation alive.And then it becomes easy to judge others and blame them for making things so hard. And to forget that it's how you're acting right now that's keeping things the way they are.Restoring relationships calls for more than wishful thinking, and certainly for more than blaming others. It requires waking up to the actions that genuinely connect people.And it requires remembering, a central act of all leadership: recovering the very ways of speaking and listening that once supported you, and bringing them purposefully back into being all over again.

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