Afraid Of Confrontation? Watch This

Welcome men to the Man Talks show. I'm Connor Beaton. If you are new here, just a quick reminder that Man Talks is all about bettering you as a man, as a father, as a husband, as a leader. We talk a lot about self leadership. We talk a lot about how to develop the skills and the characteristics necessary to lead yourself through life, to be able to lead yourself in business, to be able to find an actualize of purpose, and to be able to lead yourself in your relationship. Today I want to talk about confrontation. And I want to talk about confrontation because after working with thousands of men from around the world, I have seen time and time again that many of us have a very broken relationship with confrontation. And confrontation is a necessary part of being a human being, of being a part and taking part in the human species, in our culture and our society, and more so in our current modern state, in the world that we live in. Confrontation is everywhere. I mean, you cannot escape confrontation. Go online, go onto social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever your, you know, favorite or not so favorite social media app is. And you'll be inundated with forms of confrontation. Every single post you could may feel confronting, every single posing opinion that you read may feel confronting to you. Not only that, but knowing how to engage with them and knowing how to limit, maybe or gauge the degree to which you should engage in confrontation, considering the amount of polarization that is currently happening within our culture. So there's a couple different sides of this. I'm going to look at the social perspective of this and they're going to narrow in and I'm sure they're going to miss pieces to this conversation. And so, you know, I look forward to hearing your comments on this, but I'm going to look at the social and cultural aspects of this and then narrow in on why you as an individual need to repair your relationship with confrontation. Whether that's, you know, you needing to temper how much confrontation you actually engage in in your relationship or in life or with your friends, or being able to press yourself into more confrontation oriented interactions, conversations. So first and foremost, there's sort of two sides to confrontation that's happening right now in our culture and our society. On the one hand, you have the kind of fragile environment that seems to be showing up within the, the university cultures. And I talked about this recently on Instagram where, you know, some recent studies have been showing that less men are graduating from college, less men are going to college and university. And this can happen for a number of reasons. There's a there's a larger piece to this that the researcher was saying that less men going to college is going to equal a mating crisis, which I'm going to look at doing another video on that different conversation. But within the university culture and within some corporate cultures, there's this very pervasive, fragile narrative where confrontation should be avoided, right? That any type of confrontation or confrontational intention, confrontational way of speaking, confrontational language, confrontational ideas are largely to be avoided. And not only that, they, they should come with trigger warnings and safe spaces that come along with them. And so in many ways, the university environment is a, is a kind of showcase for the, you know, woke mindset that has become very pervasive within our culture that says that confrontation is inherently bad unless you are on the right side of that confrontation, right? And then everything should be done to cater those individuals, to create circumstances and situations where that narrative, that very specific narrative can go unchallenged. And this sort of echo chamber or echo chamber, not eco chamber, eco friendly echo chamber can be created where that specific narrative can be propagated and thrive unencumbered from any form of discourse or disagreement. And unfortunately, the reality is that in many ways, civil liberties, freedoms, progress requires a certain amount of discourse and critical thinking that, that is confrontational. You know, if you want to have progress, whether it's individually, within yourself, in your marriage, in your relationship, in your business, there are going to be moments within all of those places, all of those spaces in your life where confrontation is a necessity, where you need to confront, let's say, the inner critic within you, that voice that is constantly deprecating, or you need to confront a hard conversation with a partner, with a business partner, with a colleague. And that can feel both confrontation, confrontational internally and the act itself can feel confrontational because maybe you're giving that person feedback, maybe you are having a hard conversation with them about needing to let them go or whatever the case may be. There's the, there's the sort of woke space that seems to be emerging within university cultures and corporate cultures where you, you can't say certain things. You have to really watch what you say and you have to kind of avoid confrontation because there's this ideology that words violent, right? That what you say can offend somebody to the degree that they have become harmed to some, to some degree. And on the other side is the sort of idea of being able to say whatever you want. There's sort of this anti fragile movement, which is great. You know, the anti fragile is wonderful. We Want to be able to build ourselves to be antifragile. If you want to learn more about that, you can go and read some Nassim Taleb. He's got some great information on this. But there's this pushback that has started to happen where people want to say and do and experience whatever they want. And I think for some individuals, they overcompensate by being overly confrontational for the sake of being confrontational, just to trigger people, just to cause a shitstorm or shitpost. Right? As the terminology goes online. And the polarization that we're experiencing socially, culturally is such that it feeds off of this constant kind of confrontation. It feeds off of garnering and getting your attention as often as possible and for as long as possible by playing off of the reality that our minds and our bodies respond to confrontation, right? When you are going into a kind of. When you're going into any form of confrontation, what ends up happening within you is that your body releases stress hormones and. And you can move into fight, flight or freeze. You know, it can feel very exhilarating on some degree. Your amygdala is activated. Maybe adrenaline is coursing through your body. And all of that can happen when you're engaging with a Facebook post, when you're engaging with an Instagram post. You know, when you're chatting with somebody that you've never even met before and they disagree with you and attack your character, and they. And they engage you in a form of unhealthy confrontation, what does this mean for you as a man? Well, to be more specific and more direct and narrow it down outside of the cultural ramifications of what confrontation looks like, you can be sort of like the nice guy that doesn't want to get into confrontation, that doesn't want to say the hard thing, that doesn't want to set the boundary that, you know, doesn't want to say no, that wants to people please. And that can have real effects on your life, right? If you look at your relationship as an example, if you avoid confrontation, and you avoid, even if it's internal confrontation, of being uncomfortable enough to say what you want to, you know, have for dinner or where you want to go for the weekend or where you want to travel on vacation or the type of sex that you want to explore, if you avoid that kind of confrontation, you're likely going to be wildly unsatisfied in your relationship, and it's going to cause you to inevitably be resentful and et cetera. And by the way, that confrontation avoidance that Kind of conflict avoidance is, you know, usually birthed out of a very specific experience. Right. A lot of us have experienced, many people have experienced things in their childhood where they're bullied, right? Where confrontation harmed them in some way, where they witnessed confrontation in a sort of abusive way, whether that was a parent or, you know, a caregiver or whatever the circumstance might be. And so they're confrontation avoidant because confrontation has been labeled internally as a bad thing. On the other side are the confrontation.

I don't really have a terminology for this, but the people who overuse confrontation. Right. I guess we could say that I joked around before that some people have conflict as a love language. Right? How they engage, how they show their love, how they build relationships is through constant confrontation. Right. They're very quick to call people out and they're very quick to put people in their place. And they're, you know, there's, there are these sort of like domineering, using confrontation to build their relationships and build their lives, never really knowing how to sort of take a step back and create connection, create intimacy, create conversation, discourse, whether that's civil discourse or discourse within a relationship without it moving into this highly confrontation, conflict oriented space. Which can be exhausting, right? Can be exhausting to be that person that is constantly needing to be in sort of attack mode with people. And it can be exhausting to be around that person as well because they're, you know, most of the people that are around those types of individuals feel almost like there's a sort of like learned helplessness, you know? Martin Seligman, famous researcher and creator of positive psychology, talked about how when we're put in these situations, sometimes we can feel like we learn a sense of helplessness where we know that no matter what we do or say or the boundaries that we set, they're just going to get bulldozed over. So those are the polarities. And what I've noticed is that at some point in every man's life, regardless of where he falls on that spectrum, he will need to repair and rectify and reconcile his relationship to confrontation. Because if you're a man who uses confrontation to constantly get what he wants in every single situation, at some point, it'll feel exhausting on some level, when you start a family, it'll likely be damaging to the people around you because their opinions, their perspectives will have no place and no space within that. And so it's, it's sort of moving through life and ruling in a kind of dictatorship style or authoritarian style. And rather than Earning people's respect. It's just demanding it. And so there's a, There's a repairing the relationship with confrontation on that side. On the other side, it's being able to take a step forward and engage in healthy confrontation. Engage in. And know when to set the boundary, know when to have the hard conversation, be willing to step more fully into what you want the relationship to look like, or to speak up at the work meeting or to share your opinion when you would normally just lurk in the background. Right? So it's about finding a middle ground where you're not constantly caught up in confrontation and you're not avoiding confrontation entirely. And in order to do this, you first have to be able to identify like, where do I land on that spectrum of confrontation? Do I have a particular adverse reaction towards confrontation or do I love it and I constantly engage with it on a regular basis? And then to move towards a more, a more balanced approach with confrontation, to be able to say, here's where engaging in confrontation in my life would be worthwhile. Because I see a lot of men that want to engage in generative, healthy confrontation in their relationship or in their work environment, but they don't. And then, you know, they're the people that are online completely like shit talking and you know, starting stuff online because there's anonymity and they, you know, there's a disconnect between. There's no real ramifications, right? Conceptually, there's no real ramifications for them. Shit talking somebody online versus being able to step into a healthy form of confrontation in a relationship or at the work environment. Setting boundaries and parameters with where you are engaging in confrontation is important because you don't want to be a man who is engaging in all battlefronts, right? It's not that you're trying to fight and win a war on every single battlefront. And that everything is a, Everything's a battle, everything's a fight, everything's confrontation. And it's not that you want to avoid, not avoid fights, but yeah, avoid fights, avoid confrontation altogether. It's that you want to know where you want to engage, where you want to exert that energy, where you actually want to bring forward some of that assertiveness, that directness. And to be able to say, here is what I want. Here's. Here's the direction that I, that I, that I want our relationship to go. Here's the direction that I want our business to go. Here's the direction that I want my career and my health to go. And and to confront the parts of you that are getting in the way is the very first step, right? Whether regardless of what side of the spectrum of confrontation you fall on, there is an internal confrontation that needs to happen. Right First. And for the man that loves confrontation constantly and uses conflict as a love language and is constantly domineering, that confrontation is the one of being able to surrender a little bit, being able to soften, being able to step back and not engage in the conflict and to ask questions and to lead with curiosity and to understand and create a sense of compassion and empathy. And on the other side, it's the ability to start to bring a more assertive direction, direct oriented mode of communication into certain aspects of your life. That's the real key here, is to identify where do I need to repair my relationship to confrontation? Where is my relationship to confrontation unhealthy.

And sort of degrade, not degrading, but devaluing and diminishing my leadership in my life. Whether that's in your work environment, whether that's in your relationship or in your health and your fitness or your finances. So those are the pieces that I would just leave you with here in this conversation about confrontation is get to know your relationship with confrontation, try and bring it into a more healthy form of balance, and choose the sort of proverbial battlefields where you are going to engage. Because maybe right now, in the time that we live in, where there's so much polarization about so many decisions, so many actions, so many choices within our culture, engaging in constant online bickering is a form of confrontation that is maybe useless or sapping a lot of your energy that could be going towards developing and bettering your relationship or bettering yourself physically or bettering yourself financially, right? So learning how to direct the energy and the brain power and the physical force and the emotional force that you use in confrontation is absolutely vital for you as a man. Because when you learn to do that, what you are learning to do is to direct the current of your life, the currency that you bring to the table. It's sending the warrior within you into the battle of your life and pointing him in the direction that matters most to you, that's meaningful to you, that you're willing to fight for, that you're wanting to build and create and structure. So let me know what you thought about this video, any questions that you have, what stood out to you. If you're watching this on YouTube, comment below. Don't forget to share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Don't forget to rate and subscribe wherever you are listening to this or watching this. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.