Why Your Energy Decides Every Conflict

Do you handle conflict well or not? Is my energy inflaming the situation or improving it? A lot of these things are escalating because of me. What I'm saying, how I'm feeling. Almost all progress in a conflict happens when one side or the other or both realizes things can get better. How can we make this better? Where should we start? Do you handle conflict well or not? Can you face that, and can you improve that? That is the ultimate ask of maturity. And I know that sounds almost condescending to say to people. They don't like when you say stuff like that, but I wish somebody told me that earlier. I think I was 21 years old before I really figured it out. Let me share how I developed progress through conflict. In college, I worked in the dormitories, and, you know, when I went to school, I stayed in a dorm. And that first year in college, I got in a lot of trouble. I was constantly at arguments and fights with, you know, the resident assistant, the ra, the person on the floor who's a peer, who's, like, in charge of everybody on the floor. I hated this guy. We fought. I just thought he thought he knew everything. He was just condescending and mean to everybody. But I was like, all right. But in that year, some of you know that story. In my first year as a college freshman, I had a breakup with the first woman I ever love. She cheated and left the relationship. And I was devastated. I won't belabor the point. But that did, like, spark a lot of anger and hurt, and I lashed out at her. I lashed out at other people. I had grown up doing some martial arts, and so when we were out with friends all the time, I had a lot of friends who were pretty rebellious, like, maverick kind of kids. And in the place that I grew up, there were a lot of fights. Like, when you went to a bar at night, you. There was always a fight. Like, almost always. And so you just kind of thought that that was going to happen. With a lot of my friends, that did happen, and I was the backup guy because I've almost never started a fight. But if you mess with my friends, I mean, my. I would boil, and I would be in that pile fast. You know, I'm a small guy, but I could tell you I was extremely fast and capable in martial arts. So I would be the person who ended a lot of fights. And, you know, years later, after I thought I found some maturity, I became an ra. And I laughed at that. But you know what? When you became an ra, not only you get to help out some people, which at that point I developed in wanting to do. If you those who know my story, but I also, you know, they paid for room and board and I was working three full time jobs in college. And so I needed the money, I needed that job. And I remember that, I think in a twist of irony, I got placed in the dorm that was the last dorm on campus to fill up. If you've ever been in ra, you know what that means. Well, what that means is these are the kids who applied for college at the last minute. They were probably the lower grade point average. They did not want to get in there. Some of them, their parents made them go to school. It's like they're not the preparers, let's say that, right? They're not that kid who's preparing for college early, filling out forms. They're like the last kid in. And that was the dorm that I oversaw. So a lot of great kids and some misfits. But also it was the building that was notorious on campus for more drug use, more alcohol use, more, more problems. And I had an amazing team, amazing staff. But I can share with you. I remember a lot of nights walking the hallways because as ra, you kind of patrol the floors each night multiple times. Like you walk through the whole building, walking through the hallways, looking for trouble, looking to clean things up, looking to report anything if you have to, looking to help people who get locked out or drunk or laying on a floor or in some kind of trouble. It just, you know, just trying to keep the floor quiet so people can sleep and reporting any issues. I mean, it could be a light bulb is out or it could be there's blood on the floor. I mean there's just. You never know what you're gonna find at night. And in a lot of those situations, I would encounter people who were drunk. Now when I grew up, there were a lot of people in the towns I grew up who were drunks and had major alcohol problems. And I grew up around a lot of violence in that, not in my own family, but just on the blocks that we lived in, places we lived. And so I already had a problem with it, right? I already knew that people who are on alcohol could be very dangerous. And I knew that physically. And so I was always kind of on the watch. Well, now I'd be walking down a hallway and here's, you know, know some kid coming in late at night, screaming, making tons of noise, upset, and I gotta calm them down so the floor can sleep. Now I'm I'm, like, ready to go. I'm like. Immediately every part of my body is, like, in defense mode. It's upset. And, you know, I would find that, you know, maybe that first year, a lot of those things escalated because of my energy. Is conflict escalating because of your energy now? You know, there might be a problem. This kid screaming at me in a hallway at 1 in the morning. Problem, right? However, is my energy inflaming the situation or improving it? Remember at the very beginning, I said, we're going to gauge ourselves differently. There's an ascendant arc. Things get better. It's flat. It doesn't get better, or it declines. It gets worse. Which one are you? When met with anger, threat, upset, misunderstanding, where does your energy go? Does your energy dip and bring down the situation in defensiveness or victimhood or upset? Are you steady, Eddie? You can say steady through the situation, or are you so conscious of your own way of being, your own energy, that you might be able to lift that situation up? Let me ask that question again. Do you lift it up? Do you stay steady, or do you decline the situation? Part of being an adult is being aware of that. It's owning our responsibility and our energy in that situation. Obviously, the situation sucks, right? You don't want to be there. I don't want to be up at one in the morning working a job. I'm working just to pay for school and having some kid scream at me drunk. I don't want that. But that's where I was, and that's happening night after night. I mean, that's not like once in a while. That's like a constant thing.

And so I recognized pretty quickly that I want to.

And I probably did probably the first, like, 10, 20 times. I'm like, I want to take control of the situation. I want to tell the person, go to your room, or I'm going to write you up. You're going to be in trouble. Like, do I need to call the cops? In other words, I want to threaten the position as fast as possible. That's like, just how I felt. I'm young. I'm like, I want to be in command. I want to tell this person where to go. They're doing something they're not supposed to doing. They're being rude. Not just to me. They're loud and they're screaming. The whole floor is. They're waking up all these kids who have exams and work and jobs and class tomorrow. So I'm offended that they're screaming at me, but I'm offended that they're screaming for everybody else, but notice how silly that is. I'm offended that a person who's not in a good place is doing something.

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I'm offended that somebody who's not in a good place is doing something that I don't like and others might not like. I'm like, why do I have to be offended? Why do I have to feel offense at all? Why can't I just recognize the situation? This kid's in a bad place. Being loud, needs to go to bed. What's my energy going to be that's going to help with that? After I failed at that for weeks on end, I realized I don't know what to do. So I started reading all these books on conflict management. I thought it was. Actually I took classes on it. I was very passionate. I enrolled in a mediation center on campus to learn how to be a mediator. I got instruction from Bill Wilmot, who was one of the top conflict management academics in the world, as well as a practicing mediator and negotiator. He was amazing. And I started learning. I was like, oh, a lot of these things are escalating because of me. What I'm saying, how I'm feeling, the air I'm putting off. Have you ever been shocked to find out that you're part of the problem? How easy to say, no, it's them.

But soon as you are interacting with.

Them in a conflict, now it's the two of you, and that's the biggest breakthrough you're ever going to have in conflict resolution. So let's jump into our first major concept. Hopefully you've already been taking some notes, but I think this is really important. The most important thing to understand in any conflict situation is what's called a shared future. A shared future. And this is a little abstract. So let me get to it. What we usually do is we go, I am against you. I'm gonna win. But there's no shared future in that. This is why you always heard hear people teach you it's about the we, not about the me in conflict. What this means is you need to frame the positive about the two of you and things are going to be okay in the future. Or that things have a goal in the future. Because, listen, in a marital spat or conflict, what's the worst thing in marriage? Well, somebody threatens divorce, right? Someone threatens to end the relationship. People, of course, fear being abandoned or rejected. And so, you know, you can pull.

That card real fast.

Like, you can be like, if you don't change, I'm leaving. And that's compliance. That's seeking somebody to change or else that's making a threat. Well, usually making a Threat does not get progress in a conflict. Almost all progress in a conflict happens when one side or, or the other or both realizes things can get better between the two parties. And not that one is going to be left behind and one's going to advance or get what they want, but rather we're both going to make out okay. There's some kind of win, win positive thing that's going to happen here. And it's not me versus you. It's that there's some sense that both sides can recognize we're going to be okay or better together. Do you know one of the definitions of progress is betterment? Betterment meaning things get better, like in a fight, in a relationship's trouble, in a conflict with your business partner or even a client or a customer. When things get better, when both can sense that things will be better in this situation, usually threats de escalate, but if it's always about compliance, getting somebody to do exactly what you want, how you want, when you want, then that conflict just escalates. You know, I remember even when I was growing up, I had, you know, my parents, when they were arguing often, I would hear my dad say, you know, it's always got to be what you want, how you want, when you want it. I would hear that in the house, and then I would hear that in, in school, and I would hear that around the neighborhood. It was like, I don't know, people just said it where I grew up. It's kind of funny. And then it took a long time to learn, like, oh, well, that was one of the problems, is that people were making the accusation that the other person had to have it perfect and that they were selfish. Do you want to ruin a relationship real fast? Just, just start calling the other party selfish. Just take that position, assume it, believe it, scream at him. That's what I did to the kid who's drunk in the college hallway. I'm thinking, what a selfish jerk. Drunk, screaming, making noise, being rude to me, not understanding the context, being rude to everybody else. Now, was that person wrong in that situation? In most cases you could say, yeah, that behavior is not good. So you can set boundaries, you can have conversation as we'll discuss here in a minute. But at the end of the day, if I'm going to make that person wrong and I'm going to threaten that person, that's two great strategies to escalate the problem. If you make the person wrong and you make threats, could you write it down? If that is your go to default, you. You make the person wrong and you make threats, they're wrong, they're wrong, they're wrong. Threat, threat, threat. That is, that's like literally the double sided coin that flips the divorce. That is the double sided coin that wrecks the relationship, destroys the negotiation, kills it all. You feel righteous, you feel offended, so you speak out that they are wrong, they are selfish and you make a threat. And that's what kids do. And so if you never learned other skill sets than that, then that's what we have to talk about. We have to make sure that we recognize that just doesn't work. It might feel good in the moment, but it actually makes the situation worse. So what can we do? Well, there's two very simple things. That first idea I shared with you is like there has to be some understanding of betterment, that things are going to get better and that the two of you are going to figure things out together. That's what betterment is in a conflict, right? We're going to figure things out together. We might see things differently. That's perception. But we have a common problem. And the common problem is how do we move through this to find a place of betterment? Does that make sense? The problem is not the person, because right now you're in a process of conflict, like you're in it too. The problem is we need to move through this and better it. That's the problem. You have a shared problem. You learn this in marriage a lot, right? That it's the two of you against the problem, not against each other. And so I know you've heard that so many times, but when it sinks in deeply, it can really change your life that I'm not against this person. But now that we're engaged in this argument, in this fight, in the situation, in this difficulty, I got to figure out how to work with this person through it, even if I don't want to work with the person. Because we're going through it and we're either going to go worse or go better. And so I'm in it. And once you are in it, you have to say, all right, I guess we're in it and we have to figure this out. And that's why again, that conversation of we has to come front and center. So how do you engage that with real people in real life, with real language? What you're sharing with people is you're saying things like, you know what, let's figure this out. And it's that simple. Hey, you know what, let's figure this out together. Hey, Can I work with you on this? Hey, I want to make this better for the both of us. And it takes a lot to do that. It actually takes a lot of practice to be able to say that, to be able to say to somebody, you know, your spouse, you know, I hear you, honey, and I want to work through this with you, and I want us to be happy together. So let's talk about this and work through this together. Because I know you love me and I love you, and that's why we're together. So how can we make this better? Where should we start? How can we make this better? Where should we start? It's a positive framing. It's not an accusation. It's not blame. It's not playing victim. It's not playing martyr. It's not acting from ego. It's moving into a shared future of betterment together. Holding that space is one of the greatest achievements you will have in your life. The ability to hold that space even when someone's really upset. Now, let's talk about the concept of conflict for a minute. Because earlier we said, you know, progress. We defined terms progress. Well, that's moving towards a direction or a goal, a state that you want to move towards at the speed that you want to move towards it, feeling the way you want to feel. Like that's a sense of progress. And that's what's different than change. Some people can change, but they don't.

Feel good about it.

Not all change is progress. Not all advancement is even progress. Sometimes some people advance in their career, but they feel worse. So progress is a state of betterment and is a outcome of betterment. It.