31: Resolving Conflict With Goodness - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this episode, we're going to talk about ways to grow in your life and in your business. If you have a business, what you do in your mindset and in your personal life affects your business. What you do in your business affects your personal life. There's crossover. As much as we try to compartmentalize them, or as much as we might believe that they aren't connected, they are because anything that you touch is connected to you. And so I'm talking about not just what you do, but you and your impact and your legacy. And that's what the Grow youw Life podcast is all about. If you're not part of the Grow your Life university community, join that on Facebook. It's a group of over a thousand people just like yourself that are growing in their life and in their business. And if you want to win free coaching with me, you can leave growyourlife on any post that I do this week on my Instagram. I'll talk about that a little bit later at the end of this podcast. It's a full coaching session. It's not a sales pitch. It's an actual. Cool. Let's make a strategy for you that gets results. Now, on this podcast, I'm going to talk about communication and conflict resolution between parties that we have to work with, that we have conflict with. Now, I want to start this by saying this. You can choose who you give your energy to. Okay. A lot of times people feel like they have to work in a certain situation with people. I've talked about this in other episodes. I heard a man, his name was Michael Clifford, and he said, go where you're celebrated, not where you're tolerated. Meaning that if you are only being tolerated, not celebrated, spending your energy there is not going to be helping you. Now, sometimes we have conflict with people that are celebrating us, that are championing us on, and we have to resolve those to work together. And in that you even sometimes with those that we that don't celebrate us. A great leader can help influence other people, even ones that they disagree with and that disagree with them. I am talking about the absolute opposite of seeking validation from people. A lot of times when we have conflict, it's because we are trying to validate our worth to other people. If that's the case, you have to flip the script entirely. Stop defending yourself to protect your self worth and validation and start talking about with open and honest transparent communication of what you want. And this affects all Areas of life, this affects relationships, finances, business, family, friends, your health, your wealth. And in fact, this, this probably has one of the biggest areas on your mental health right here is this. You know, for me personally, I can tend to be somebody that tries to prove too much what I know. And I come across like I'm a wise guy and bulldoze over people. These are negative aspects of how I do things. When they're properly channeled, they can be really good. When there's no trust built, it makes me look immature and it makes me look just bad to people. And in that, you know, I become passive aggressive. I chameleonize myself with people or even sometimes appear dumb in that. And then when I come out and start acting authentic, they're like, who's this other person? So I want to encourage you in this, is that no matter, in everything that you're doing, establish your relationships from a place of honesty and integrity. Be integrous in everything that you're. That you're doing. I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Justin Miller, and we were talking about this and I was gonna have him on this podcast, which, by the way, I'm gonna start to have more guests on the podcast. I've had a few great high level people reach out to me for this and so I'm going to start to have guests. It's not just going to be me on here. The goal was never for this to be the Jeremiah Krakowski Show. This was just to kickstart the engine, so to speak, to keep moving. That's why in the Grow youw Life community, there's people helping other people, people that are not me speaking into things. And that's what I want to invite you to do in that community. And even as I'm sharing this podcast episode right now, I'm only sharing one perspective of things. And so here's what I want to ask you is either the perspective that I'm going to share is going to be some of the common ground that me and my friend Justin went through. And we realized that the two of us were very similar in nature to people that we both had conflicts with. We were very similar in nature to the ones that we fought against the most. Now let me explain that to you, Justin, he's a friend of mine, we have trust built. We know we're very different. But we have ways when we communicate that help bring us together and come find common ground to help raise each other up and sharpen our iron, so to speak, to grow to a higher level and so in that we realized the people that Justin was having conflict with had very similar strong bulldozer type personalities like I do. The ones that I have conflict with are more the ones that they feel like I'm not hearing them, I'm not honoring them, I'm not doing that. And. And I have to take personal ownership over my role in that. And so I'm gonna be vulnerable with you here on this podcast. You might hear some things that might disappoint you about me a little bit. And that's okay. I'm gonna be completely transparent to the point that it actually might make me look bad. As long as you decide to be completely transparent with yourself and ask internally, okay, what is my role in my conflicts, my relationships, my business interactions, my negotiations? How do I deal with objections and excuses that I get in sales? And so this applies throughout the whole process, whether it's leadership, management and sales. And the number one thing is this. In sales, it's actually leadership. Sales is leadership. You are leading somebody to take action. And the first step is this, is that on both sides, we all have to. No matter what personality type you are, this is a common thing. We have to listen more to each other and start to listen to people that we completely disagree with everything that they're talking about and recognize their strengths. Often this can be difficult to do, to recognize the strengths in people that we don't get along with. And it'll divide and conquer us. And there's divide and conquer that comes in and we become disconnected. There's accusations that come back and forth and there's no freedom of relationship. And so there's two sides to this. Is that in all relationships in business. And I have some notes here. I'm going to be looking at these. I took them while Justin and I were talking about. My question is this is what would happen if we were honest and fearless with each other in all of our communications. Totally fearless. We recognized the other person's strengths. We were confident in what we're saying. There was freedom to speak freely and love, to restore each other and take ownership for our own role, even apologize where we've made mistakes. That's the taking ownership and reestablish boundaries with respect and honor. To not sever the connection between each other, but to rather reconnect ourselves. To rather operate from a place of love with another human being. And a lot of times people are afraid to use the words love and connection as it relates to business. They feel like that's using manipulation. It's not having Mutual connection with another human is the basis of all business. Any business that you buy from, you have some kind of a connection to that business. Any business that you steer away from, you do not have a connection with. I'm also not asking you to make connections with people that you don't want to. This is the flip side of this, okay, is I've heard this message manipulated in a way that is harmful and abusive to where when there's no fruit, it's an abusive situation. People are trying to force connection where sometimes separation needs to happen for healing to occur. Okay? And so I want to encourage you in that is that take ownership for your choices. Take ownership for choosing to. Either I am choosing to be in this and have a connection, or I'm choosing to separate and realize that neither of them is superior to the other. There's always timing and process to it. We have to recognize our beliefs. We have to recognize what we believe. Is it true or is it just experiential truth? And take ownership for those beliefs. And what I found is the number one thing that happens with people when there's conflict is they're just not communicating. They're not communicating back and forth between each other. And one person feels that the other person does not understand them, doesn't hear them, doesn't want to help them, is coming with their own agenda, isn't honoring them, and is trying to divide the two of them. And here's what ends up happening, okay? Is those statements are actually believed to be true by both parties, when in fact the goal of both parties is connection is a mutual goal. And there's a book that I read on this recently. It's an incredible book. Highly, highly recommend it to some. Some people. Check it out. It's on audible. It's called Crucial Conversations. It's about. It's about talking when the stakes are high, when you're in the emotion, when things are hard. And it starts by asking this simple question, two questions. I'm quoting this from the book, okay? And I want you to get the book and listen to it. Because I can't distill all of that into this one podcast. I'm gonna kind of build upon the book. Here is these two questions. What is my goal in this conversation with somebody? When you have a conflict, when it's crucial, what is their goal? Ask. They can ask themselves that. See if the two of you have a same mutual goal together and start to anchor around that. A lot of times 2 people with conflict have a similar mutual goal together, and you can notice when separation, when you need to choose separation, is when those. When there is no mutual goals, when they are, they're not the same goals. They're actually very disconnected from each other. And there's just a lack of honesty and transparency between each other. You have to realize you can't control other people and other people can't control you. And so in that, we take a choice to listen, you know, we avoid bypassing and going around other people, and we just ask simple questions like, hey, let's start over. Acknowledge the elephant in the room. Acknowledge the thing that nobody wants to talk about. Say, let's try again. And sometimes when you have to say hard things, ask for permission. If somebody. If you're like, hey, do I have permission to speak into this? If they're like, no, or they react, that's because that person doesn't feel safe in that situation to hear that. And so that's when you need to listen more. And as leaders, we need to listen more than we speak. Okay? And so that's the foundation of all of this. And my question is, is this, what would happen if we made an effort to pursue a connection with other people? Even not to receive validation, but to give love and connection, to create connection? See, a lot of people confuse the two. And I've talked about this on a couple of my episodes about validation, about your why a lot of times people pursue a connection so that they can feel loved and validated. So that I can feel validated. You need to flip the script and stop trying to get and take and be a giver and connect. And in that, what if I was to pursue. Think of a dating relationship. When a guy pursues a girl, you know, or vice versa, how do we act in those situations? What would a pursuit of connection for the sake of our mutual goal look like? How would we talk differently? And this is the second question from Crucial Conversations. If that was really my goal, the mutual goal, how would I act differently in this situation? What would I say differently? How would I frame the words that I'm saying to not be triggering, to not defend myself, to not protect myself, to not make myself feel safe, but rather to make the person that I'm talking to feel safe and truly care? If we recognize and take ownership for our role, how can we come to an agreement? How can we come face to face and even in confrontation? Confrontation, that's the buzzword right here, is how do we confront with love, confront for love and connection, not to try to make somebody change without any agenda, without any judgment. Without any conditions. Unconditional love given. Often we choose that we will not give unconditional love until we receive it. A leader will give unconditional love without with knowing full well they will probably never receive it back. And in that, we're able to walk in influence, we're able to walk in a way that is just righteous, you know, dare I say holy holiness. What would that look like? And so that's where this conversation came from was, you know, what if we, we made restoration and freedom between the two parties that are conflicting by recognizing our role and re establishing boundaries, relationships, operating procedures to be mutually beneficial and not mutually separating for both parties. And I've seen this in corporate settings where sometimes there's two conflicts. So people go through two mediators to talk with each other because they can't talk together. What would happen if the mediators disappeared and we came together without agendas? Not to change somebody, not to convert them, not to get them to come to our side, but to just understand another human being, not to be influenced and changed by them, not to take on and take ownership of their stuff either. That's the other side of this. And a lot of people are afraid and fearful that if they learn and understand another person that they're of the responsibility that they will have in that situation. The responsibility of. If I understand somebody that I completely disagree with, you know, we have a lot of issues politically that we disagree on. Yet if we start to come together, not in fighting each other, not in arguing our case, but rather to understand and hold two opposing viewpoints in our mind at one time, what would happen? How would we look at the world differently? And, and that's, that's scary for some people. They're, they, they can come up with any number of reasons why they can't do that. You know, religious reasons, socio, economic reasons, personal reasons, whatever. But it's usually always to protect what we've built, to protect what we have. Because if we're too vulnerable, we will create, we will, we will expose ourselves to possibly be taken advantage of, to be swayed into a way that we don't want. And this again ties to that belief of do other people have the ability to control me? This is the core belief that has to be changed for us to come together is these two things. If we believe I can control other people, and if I just learn how to, then I'll be successful. And the other side of the belief is other people can control me, so I have to protect myself from being controlled by other people. That belief has to change to I cannot control other people ever. It's not possible. And influence is not control. And the belief that other people can't control me by taking ownership of our role and choices in situations other people can't say something and make me mad enough to lose my temper, to react emotionally. And this isn't about cognitive dissonance, shutting down your emotions. This is about having control over your emotions and self control. This is about being able to choose and react strategically and tactically. And I've been studying recently military peace treaty making, peacemaking in military settings. How does peace happen throughout history, over the last 2,000 years, 3,000 years in massive wartime and conflict? I'm not talking about the wartime either. I'm specifically focused on that moment in time. What happened when the spark hit that that even for a moment peace was observed, even even if it was for a year or 50 years or a hundred years, something happened that sparked that piece. And there's a couple books I'm researching on that as well because I'm seeing that in business relationships we have an in life and in our interactions, in sales, in marketing, in building business, we have to deal with people that we don't get along with all the time. Now you get to choose who you deal with. That's the first part of it. But sometimes you also have to choose to deal with the person that you don't get along with because it's best for both parties and best for the greater good. This is why I really want to help get your eyes off of yourself and what can I get and into a place of what can I give and how can I impact the world around me? How can I empower other people? Not how can they empower me? Not how can I be impacted, but how can I become an impactor? And I want to encourage you to take what I'm talking about. I want to empower you on this episode right now. Right now. This is something that you're probably not going to hear a lot of podcasters or teachers say. If you hear me say anything on my podcast that resonates with you, I want you to take it, duplicate it for your own, modify it. Because I want these messages to get out to people you can or do not have to give me credit. I would love you to share this podcast with friends, with people that you know, just to get more people listening to this podcast and plugged in. But I want to empower you to also take these lessons and use them yourself and adjust them and change them. I want to impact the world on a deeper level than just what I can get out of it. And the only way that I can do that is to empower you to take what I share and to share it to as many people as possible without me ever getting any credit. And if you can, if you never care about who gets the credit for something, your goals will successfully manifest themselves without you even having to strive for them. I'm going to say that again. If you have big goals, you have to work with other people, people that you don't even know, people that you have conflict with, people that you may never meet. And so if you don't care about who gets the credit, you're not seeking validation, self validation for everything. The level of impact that you can have on the world around you is limitless. Now, there comes a time where getting credit for something is important, and I'll touch on that here briefly, is if it. If is. I ask myself, this is. Does me getting credit for that help leverage my voice to impact more people than me not getting credit for it? Okay. And so that's, that's what I like. But I don't want to ever make somebody feel like they're forced to give me credit for something. And I love when people just take what I do take, take it as their own and copy it. It's literally something that I love. I take stuff from multiple sources all the time and, and share them on this podcast. Like I said, the book Crucial Conversations, my friend, Justin Miller. There's a word that a lot of times people avoid because it's scary to think about what would happen if we had one. And that's called having an open mind. And even me saying that if you grew up in a religious setting, it triggers certain things. Having an open mind. I'm not talking about an open mind that just takes in limitless amounts of whatever, but rather a filter that takes in useful things that serve you weighed out through truth and spitting out what doesn't, taking in the meat and spitting out the bones. And if you can do that, and we can listen to people and understand them, even people that we diametrically oppose and disagree with, we can come together in understanding each other to produce exponentially greater results than any of us could on our own. And that's what I really wish could happen in society and culture, is for people to come together in unity, in oneness, in a common goal. Not to convert each other to be the same, to be copies, but actually to appreciate the massively diametrically opposed differences we have and say what can we learn from each other and accelerate the results? To go further, to make it a safe place to disagree with your friend, to make it a safe place to be friends with people you disagree with. You don't have to agree with everybody that you're friends with. And this is what's called what? This is called being an adult. Children often have to stay with people that they only agree with because there's a fear of what would happen if I went outside the bounds of this, what would happen if I did something differently than I've been doing up to this point. As we grow into being an adult, we release the chain that is holding us back from our history and we have freedom and we are able to walk in freedom. And this applies to our interactions with other people. Not dividing and conquering, not accusing another person, not bypassing them, but letting them know that you see them and you hear them and be fearlessly honest about taking ownership for your role. And I wrote this down the other day, that if your vision for your future and your destiny takes a front seat to other people and other people's feelings and the hearts of other people, you will be limited in the effectiveness of your impact. At the same time, if you take the hearts of other people and their opinions to be that much greater than the vision, you'll be swayed either side based on how people feel and feelings and emotions. And it's about holding the two and not prioritizing one or the other, but rather having equal and mutual respect for the two same plane, how other people feel and your vision and saying, how can we work together with no agenda? What beliefs do I need to change? What beliefs aren't serving me? What do I believe about my interactions with other people that have brought me to this point to where I have these conflicts? What beliefs do I have about that other person? We need to recognize these beliefs and take ownership for these beliefs and ask ourselves, are these true or is it based on a past experience that I had, or am I repeating an even a negative thing that has been told to me? And when we do this, it allows us to come together, recognize our strengths, and honor each other. Another great book about this is Culture of Honor by Danny Silk and Keep youp Love on by Danny Silk. And what I've been talking about on a lot of my content comes from Keep youp Love on by Danny Silk and Culture of Honor. And so I highly recommend those two books as well. And so I'm gonna put links to these books on my podcast. I'm gonna put Links to these books on my blog for you. Crucial Conversations and the Danny Silk books, they're incredible books for you to take a look at. And this is, this is the question we asked is what would happen if we came with no judgment, no conditions, no agenda. Honored another person, took ownership for our role, were honest, fearless, confident. We recognized another person's strengths and recognized ourselves and our beliefs. And we operated with pure love and freedom for another person to reestablish and restore what was lost or what once was or what we desire to reestablish the relationship, to come together and say, hey, can we start over? Also starting new relationships on this foot helps as well. And we do this by embracing another person for their differences, welcoming them, connecting with another person, understanding them, hearing them out, recognizing them, seeking them out. It's a form of courtship, not in a romantic sense, but rather pursuing true love and connection with another human being because we care about them and how they feel. And we come to agreement, even contractual honor. This is a weird statement, meaning we agree upon honor, we agree on how we will interact, we agree upon boundaries, and we can work that way. That's the benefit of contracts in business. It's not to protect or attack, but rather to draw lines and to bring honor and connection to not sever that. That way there's no conflict in the future because there's a mutually agreed upon guidelines. You know, I hear a lot of people, they say they got taken advantage of in business by a bad contract, they need to take ownership over their role in signing that contract. And they also need to realize, you know what? I wasn't as wise and maybe I got manipulated, totally fine, move on and go to the next level. What if we cared about our brothers and sisters? What if we cared about those in the world around us? What if we cared about their needs more than just our own? What if everybody did? And what if we supported each other? What if we loved each other in a sense, in the sense of the word, that. Not that we sacrifice our own life or get exploited. Not to the point that we make ourselves lesser than. See, a lot of people look at this as these extremes. I either need to be greater than or lesser than. You know, in the United States, the Declaration of Independence says, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. All men and women are created equal. When we can look at ourselves in that way, we can combat tyranny. We can come against conflict, we can resolve situations of war with treaty and peace. And we can make limitless possibilities Manifest, we're able to operate in truth and honesty with open and transparent communication, respecting other people mutually having the benefit that comes from possibly saying, maybe I misunderstood you, possibly misheard you, possibly am filtering this through a lens of experiential truth that is not true. And I assumed something about you that was never even verified. What would happen if we came together in all things with unity, love, respect and honor for each other for what we mutually hold. And instead of focusing so much on defending ourselves against what we don't want, we declared what we do want in all things and did not bring into the conversation what we are afraid of, what we want to avoid and what isn't helping us. I hear so often people say, well, I don't want that to happen. I don't want that to happen. I don't want that to happen. I've been a con, the word a chronic, don't want that to happen. Person my whole life. And that comes from pain, it comes from past trauma, it comes from past experiences, things that you never deserve to happen. And we create stories in our mind based on what those things mean that happen to us. They develop experiential truth in our minds that we hold as truth. And we have to replace those experiential truth with the truth and replace our beliefs, create new beliefs that will serve us. That lie has served you up to the point to keep you stuck where you are right now. That experiential truth has kept you exactly where you are right now at this moment in time. And if you're somebody that wants to go forward, wants to progress, you have to change the beliefs that you have and discover them. And, and we can do that by listening to other people, listening to people that are opposite of us, listening to people that we oppose, that we don't agree with, that, that, that we actually might not think have even our best interest, because they probably don't. They have their own best interest just to listen and honor and respect another person. Not to assume ill will, not to come with some kind of an agenda, but rather to make love our goal. And that's what Danny Silk's book Keep youp Love on is about. Is making love be the filter that we filter everything through in all of our human interactions. A lot of people, the word love has been twisted. I'm not talking about sexual, I'm not talking about romantic. I'm talking about like, you know, I'll see somebody I just met in Japan. I've never, never met them before. If I go to Japan and have A love in my heart for them as a human being that lives on the same planet I do. You know, having love in our heart for even evil people and seeing people through a lens of goodness and kindness, not trying to prove, validate, protect, bring hatred into it, but rather how can we bring love into this situation and let love win. And so I want to encourage you in all things. Walk with love, no matter what it is that you're doing. Walk with goodness, walk with graciousness, walk with grace and integrity. You don't ever have to do anything that you don't want to do. Other people can't control you, you can't control other people. And we can mutually learn from each other and grow into what we were created for and go towards our destiny. I know this is a hard conversation for some people. This is even hard for me to talk about because I don't fully walk it out in my life all the time. But I'm learning to and I'm learning to and I'm growing with you and I want to hear a dialogue from people about what this makes you feel, what you think, what your thoughts are on this. In the grow your life community, look up grow your life on Facebook. Go to the group, type in your questions, your comments. This is going to help us grow together. If you want to win a free coaching session with me, hashtag grow your life. Leave growyourlife on my Instagram where I give away free coaching every single week. On Sunday I pick one winner that leaves GrowYourLife in the comments on my Instagram to win the 30 minute session with me. I believe in you and I know that the impossible is possible because greatness is inside of you. Grow your life everybody. And we'll talk soon. Sa.