Mastering Conflict: One Skill To Save Your Relationship in Brief

All right, team, welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Connor Beaton here with a little bit of a cold. So hopefully you don't mind that. You can bear through the congestion. But today we're gonna be talking about the one relationship skill that could save your relationship, that could save your marriage, or at the very least dramatically improve it. And that skill is the skill of leading through conflict. Now, we all kind of know that, and if you've been in a relationship, you especially know this, everybody kind of knows that conflict is either going to make or break a relationship, right? How a couple navigates through disconnection, arguments, disagreements, disagreeing on, you know, how you should spend money or when you have kids or what house you should move in. All of those things are little small conflicts, or they can be massive big conflicts depending on where each person in the couple stands and how the individuals in the relationship navigate through that conflict will determine the quality of their connection, their intimacy, their communication, and usually the longevity of the quality of that relationship. So conflict, as I'm defining it here, and I'm going to give you some very tactical steps of how you can better lead through conflict in your relationship. Because one of the things that I've found is that men that are in happy, healthy relationships that they're enjoying, that they're fulfilled by, they know how to lead through the conflict. So, here are 5 things that you can do immediately to improve how you lead you and your partner and the relationship through conflict. At the very least, how you lead yourself through conflict in the relationship. Number 1, address your conflict kryptonite. Address your conflict kryptonite. What does that mean? It means that every single man, like Superman, has a kryptonite in his relationship that causes him to break down when conflict happens. That might mean that you are prone to reactivity. You get stuck as soon as the conversations enter into, you know, money conversations, and you shut down. Identify your conflict kryptonite. As clearly as you can, right? So my conflict kryptonite is when my partner is loud, or when my partner is assertive with me, it causes me to be defensive. So my defensiveness is my kryptonite. And step number 2 is ownership over blame. Ownership over blame. Finger pointing is easy, and most people do it, and it's why most people's conflict doesn't resolve because they are sitting there pointing fingers at one another, telling the other person what they need to do differently or change, or how, you know, they don't understand, or whatever it is. And you can continue to play the victim by saying, "But Connor, I always take ownership, but she doesn't." I hear this— guys say this all the time, trying to control things that are outside of your control, aka trying to control other people's behavior, how they are acting, how they are responding, how they are feeling, is a recipe for suffering because you have no control over them. So that leads to my next point, which is have what I call conflict agreements in your relationship. Conflict agreements. If you've been with your partner for long enough, you should absolutely have the rules of engagement, or the agreements for how both of you are wanting to go through conflict. These are the ways in which you and your partner are ideally, in an ideal world, not that that's going to go that way every single time, but that you and your partner are ideally going to go through conflict, right? So that you're going to listen, you are not gonna call each other names, and that you have certain non-negotiables. The last piece, is breathe, ground, and assess the situation. For a lot of men, they struggle to lead through conflict because their nervous system becomes hijacked. They become activated, they get anxious, they get afraid, they get embarrassed or frustrated, or they don't feel like they're being listened to, or whatever it is. And their nervous system starts to get you know, more heated, more activated, you move more into a sympathetic stressed-out state. And before you know it, you're all in your head, you can't think straight, you're disconnected from your breath and your body. And you are either on checking-out mode or attack mode. And neither one of those is a good place to navigate and traverse conflict. So as soon as conflict starts to happen in your relationship, the main thing that you should do is literally, as it's happening, take a breath. And you tell yourself that. I had to practice that over and over and over again. Take a breath. In and out. And you're just breathing while you're listening to your partner, or you're breathing while you're communicating with them. But you are taking some part of your consciousness and your awareness off of the conflict, off of the intensity, off of the "I need to be right." I gotta prove my point. I gotta make sure she knows she's wrong. You are taking some of your awareness and your consciousness off of the ego's drive and desire to reinforce itself and prove its point and be right and all those other things and back onto the simple breath. And what you will probably notice is that your breath has become quite quick, quite tense. There's probably a lot of heat in your body and you have been disconnected from your nervous system. So return back to the breath, Deepen the inhale, extend the exhale. Deepen the inhale, extend the exhale. Meditate forward. Share this ideally with your partner. Have a listen to it with them. Ask them what really resonated with them, what they loved, what they would like to integrate, how they would respond if you were leading in this way. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.