difficult conversations

The last few months have been interesting ones, and much more challenging than usual.  I’ve found myself in the middle of several conflicts and am still actively navigating my way through some of them.  Like most human beings I don’t like conflict and have often looked for ways to avoid it in the past.  Maybe I avoid having the difficult conversation or just avoid the person entirely.  Navigating these murky conflicts has also been a struggle because I crave certainty.  It’s often easier to handle a bad outcome if we know what the outcome is.  The process of navigating through ambiguity, of uncertain outcomes, of not having closure can create a lot of angst.  It’s been hard to sit with.  But I’ve made a conscious choice to lean in rather than run and to get more comfortable with the things that are difficult to sit with.  So sit I must. It’s been challenging too because I value relationships.  I pride myself on showing up as a relationship-oriented person.  I’ve worked hard to cultivate that over the course of my career – early on I got feedback that I tended to focus on my goals and objectives while ignoring that was important to others.  I took the feedback seriously.  I worked hard to bring more balance into my approach.  To not be the kind of leader and colleague who only focused on task at the expense of relationships.  To model servant leadership.  To show up as a true collaborator with my peers.  To put people first.  Our inner critics will scare us out of conflict if we let them But no matter how much work I’ve done and no matter how many tools I have in my belt – all this outer turbulence has still managed to kick up inner turbulence in my mind.  My inner saboteur has grown louder and louder as the conflict intensified.  Maybe I haven’t worked hard enough on the feedback from early on?  Maybe I’m bad at relationships after all?  I should be better at difficult conversations at this point in my life.  I should have learned all these skills by now.  What kind of coach am I if I can’t practice what I preach?  My saboteur has been using every trick in the book to get me to run away from the hard work and just throw in the towel.  Conflict is scary after all.  It’s funny how the mind works and how it plays tricks on us.  For a long time, I think I viewed my worth as a human through the lens of my accomplishments.  How much money did I earn this year?  How many fortune 100 clients do I have?  How many times have I had articles published?  How many certifications do I have?  These were the benchmarks by how I measured my success.  And I say “were” very intentionally because I don’t think about these things so much anymore.  I’ve learned to let go of many of these metrics as a […]

The last few weeks have been tumultuous ones, and I’ve been shying away from writing this blog, waiting for things to settle.  It’s the space that often brings the insight.  And it’s starting to emerge, where I can now come up for a little bit of air and reflect on the last few weeks.  The last month or so has been a powerful opportunity for me to lean into conflict.  It’s not my favorite thing to do.  Many of us really struggle with conflict, it’s one of the top topics that comes up in coaching sessions with my clients, and I’ve been hit with it from all sides lately – on the family front, on the business front and even on the friendship front. I think at times we go through tumultuous periods, it’s part of the wonderful and annoying mystery of life – it’s an amazing reminder that we’re obviously not in control and life is full of ebbs and flows.  I can feel a lot of things shifting in my life as I have grown as a coach, as a leader, as a wife, and the bottom line is that often the status quo behaviors that we have become accustomed to cease to work with new levels of awareness.  Relationships may fall away as you outgrow them.  Advocating for ourselves in different ways, asserting new boundaries or expectations might create tension as we work to negotiate new agreements. What is the conflict trying to teach you? The question I often ask myself in times of conflict is – What can I learn from this experience?  How can I grow?  Sometimes it’s super hard to see the silver lining on the conflict cloud, especially when we don’t get the outcome we were hoping for.  Maybe a cherished friendship comes to an end.  Maybe a business relationship comes to an end.  There could be sadness, disappointment and grief on the other side of conflict.  These emotions are scary, and we often try to avoid them. When I ponder these potential outcomes, maybe conflict is an opportunity to experience these darker emotions, to really feel them, and to learn to live with them.  Maybe it’s an opportunity to go deeper into ourselves and recognize the pieces of us that need to heal.  Maybe it’s an opportunity to learn how to communicate with the people we care about more effectively.  Or all of the above. I’ll turn to the situation about my family.  I’ve been navigating a tricky situation with several family members where an inheritance is concerned.  Tensions have flared.  Hidden agendas have been uncovered that have resulted in a lack of trust and prevented open and honest conversations.  The conflict is often not about the surface issue The interesting thing about family is the presenting issue is often not what the conflict is really about.  Still waters and root causes often run deep.  We’re not talking about huge sums of money.  We’re not talking about large tracts of land.  There’s […]