Why You Should Stop Avoiding Conflict

There are many things in life that we deem “negative” such as conflict and then we spend our lives setting conscious and unconscious intentions to avoid it.

While there are times when you should choose to avoid, if you find yourself only adopting that strategy, you have limited your choices and given up your freedom to choose your own path.

Conflict is an opportunity to hear something different to your voice, have another opinion offered to you, becoming aware of what triggers you, where your boundaries are and many other gifts.

Conflict can become unhealthy when the tone of the conversation becomes hurtful and of an attacking or defending nature leaving you wanting to avoid any further potential conflict.

What if you selected a different path – one of being curious of the other voice in the room – with no attachment to the outcome. In other words, often when we hear a different opinion we might want to provide them with more information to convince them to change their mind. In essence we start to move to a place where they are wrong and try to shift them to our way of thinking. The trick is to rather stay curious of where they are, what their perspective is, their feelings and experience but not to attach any personal responsibility to self for their experience.

We all have the power to choose how we experience anything and we don’t need to take responsibility for someone else choice.

Try this technique out next time:

1. Rather than avoid the conflict. Ask the other person for their perspective.
2. Remind yourself to stay curious and keep asking to understand and not to respond.
3. Ask them if you were able to support them what would it look like for them.
4. Thank them for their honesty, openness and courage.
5. Let them know that you have heard what they said and will reflect on what you can and are prepared to do.
6. Most importantly, let them know when you will follow up with them and stick to it.