Communication 101 | Journey Principles Podcast 027

Welcome to the Journey Principles, where we show you how to go from stuck to unstoppable with life strategies that work. Now, here's your host and creator of the Transform youm Framework, Stephen Scoggins.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Journey Principles. As always, we're here to help you become unstoppable with life mastery strategies at work. I'm your host. Host Stephen Scoggins. Joining me today is my director of connections, Connor Kraft, who is our co host, who's obviously one of our most influential people here. He's hooking her brother up and helping me grow of my own. So, Connor, what's going on, dude?

Not much, man. Mother's Day.

Whoa. Gosh.

Gotta turn that off. Yeah, I got, man, I'm usually the only that gets mad at you for that.

Okay.

Forgot to turn that on mute. My bad, guys. Yeah. So Mother's Day was this past weekend. Got to spend some time with my mom. How'd that go for you?

It was actually really good. Yeah. We got to hang out with Karen and obviously spend more time with her. The boys kind of did some stuff. I got her a couple little gifts here or there.

Yeah.

Some of which she enjoyed this week. She just. She's just. As we're recording this, she's just getting back from a beach trip. Right. Some close friends and allies. We'll call it that. Wink, wink. But yeah, no, it's good, man. Ready to. Ready to see her? I haven't seen her a few days.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it's cool.

So.

So, ironically, today's show is all about communication. And let's just be transparent and honest, everybody.

Yeah, sure.

We have had a hell of a time this week ourselves personally communicating well. Right. So we could probably. We'll probably be able to digest kind of where we made mistakes and then kind of how we were able to overcome those with a better tool of proper communication.

As we kind of showed concepts. Yeah. I mean, at the very least, we can tell you what not to do. We just recently learned. So.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, communication is very, very important. And one of our three main buckets that we teach in terms of how to transform your life is building better relationships. And you've always taught me that communication is very, very important in relationships, so it's an important topic.

Well, I also think it goes to show that it's a situation that not everybody's gonna get it right all the time. Right. The goal is to get it more right than you do wrong more often than you don't.

Kind of Scenario. Yeah, like an 80, 20 or 90, 10.

You might want to put that mic down just a little bit. I can see your nose. There we go. There we go. Sorry, guys. Yeah.

You guys out there may not know this on the audience, but whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening online through your favorite podcast out.

Building a brand or building a company like we're trying to build currently, to try to help as many people as possible with a very small team, very dedicated, very talented team, can at times be very difficult. Especially when during this Covid scenario when everybody's working from home, we don't get a lot of face time with one another. It makes it really hard to kind of plan and project and kind of come up with our top priority list. And at the end of the day, my number one priority list is help them. Right, Right. So, and all the only the arguments that we have internally are how do we do that? Yeah, right. How do we actually help them?

What are the priorities?

What are the priorities? What's the process? Who's gonna do what and stuff like that. And I, at the end of the day, everybody's bad. Communication comes down to either preconceived notions, assumptions. So preconceived notion, meaning.

They'Re not going to like this or they're going to respond this way. So that you almost get pre defensive ahead of time.

Yeah. So it's like you're assuming that you have the other person's perspective before you actually go and gather it.

Exactly, yeah. So I mean, I think that drives a lot of it. Using a negative tone, you're going to talk about something kind of sensitive.

Or.

Does that mean being overly blunt or.

It could mean that and then some. So it could be your body language, it could be the tonality you're using, meaning, you know, is your voice amped up? Is it drawn down? Are you talking soft? Are you talking loud? Like that kind of thing? Are your arms crossed? Are they open? Are you smiling? Do you have your stink face on? Your angry face on?

It comes from a variety of different things. Right. But we're sending signals. We actually send more nonverbal signals than we do verbal signals to people on a regular basis. Another unhealthy practice that we see a lot is trying to rally people to your side in an effort to have your side validated.

So there's a multiple person situation where it's a group discussion or it's a group disagreement.

It should be a group session.

Yeah, right. So I guess I'm saying is this is not really the case with conversations with just two people. But if there's a disagreement, let's say in an organization and people are going behind other people's backs and venting or talking directly to other people about the one person that they're having the disagreement with, that's less conducive than, let's say, bringing everyone in the same room and saying, hey, so there. Here's what I'm feeling. It's okay to go and get other people's perspective, but one of the things that I've been learning recently is, you know, I. I've done that some and gone around and basically gone one on one to. People would say, hey, this guy said this. I kind of disagree with this. What do you think about it? Thinking that that was a productive way of doing that. But that really goes behind the back of the person who I'm talking to.

It builds distrust with one. And you could end up having people gang up on one another by accident.

Exactly. So it's always best when there's a group dispute or if you want to get other people's perspective, bring everyone in the same room. It's a more productive way of doing things.

That's definitely something that's been typically my Achilles heel. Not Achilles heel, my. My tool. My tool bag, so to speak. My Achilles heel has actually been being overly defensive or getting overly aggressive really fast in years past. So case in point, when I started Che, I got a customer that I was doing some townhomes for. Okay. So for those of you who don't know and haven't caught up some of other episodes, one of the companies I own is a very large. A construction company specifically specializing in exterior products. So siding, doors, windows, roofing, that kind of deal. That's the one that I started when I was sleeping on a car years and years ago. The largest of the current businesses I own.

When I was very early on, I was still. What do they call them? A solopreneur? Is that what they're called?

Solopreneur?

In the personal development space, I was a solopreneur. I didn't have any official team members yet, but I did have some subcontractors and we had this brand new project we were doing called Carpenter Village, which in North Carolina was out there in Raleigh. Not Raleigh, Cary. Moreso area?

Yeah, yeah, that's right by where I live.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you've driven past the project.

I've been in it.

So there's been Carpenter Village condos that sit behind These single family homes. And Che did all of it back in the day.

Wow. I know exactly what you're talking about.

It just so happened that I was having the night before. I hadn't slept well. I mean, I may have got two or three hours of sleep. And I had that moment where you wake up, you're late for everything you're doing. You can't find your shoes, you can't find your car keys, you know, and you're already late. Like you're, you know, it's just like one of those mornings.

One of those days?

Yeah. One of those mornings that everybody just like, ugh, Right. So I left the house angry. And then I get a. And then back in the day, we used to have these Nextel telephones. It was like, push to talk. Don't see those around a whole lot anymore. But you push the button. It's like a CB radio with a telephone kind of put together. Beep, beep, beep goes off. And it's this, this construction manager. What year was this? Oh, Gosh, this is 2000. 2001. 2002. A ways away. And.

He'S, he's calling me, he's like yelling at me to get going. I mean, he's basically telling me his problems and how I'm the source of some of his problems, meaning the guys that work for me working on his site with some of his problems. So I'm already mad. I already didn't sleep well, I already have a bad attitude because of all that. Then I have to basically speed to get there before a specific deadline, so I didn't lose my customer kind of scenario. And then I get there and without even thinking, I basically pulled my installers to the side and I began not cussing at them, but raising my tone in such a way that they had never seen before. To be honest, I'd never done it before. And I remember looking back at being at one of the biggest mistakes I made because I intentionally wanted other people to see that I was sharing their anger with other people, if that makes any sense. So some would call it dressing somebody down. Some people have been cussed at and stuff like that. In this particular instance, I was just raising my voice and whatnot.

And I remember feeling as soon as I was done doing kind of showing off with my attitude kind of deal, I remember being already regretful, right? And I realized very early, very like almost instantaneously, that I had already lost a level of trust.

I've had that happen so many times throughout my life. Like, I'll Just react out of anger and out of like frustration and not in the most mature and delicate manner. We'll say delicate and I'll just literally like freak out and just. And usually when I blow my top, my top really, really goes off. Like I will really, really freak out. Historically, I've worked on that a lot. I've gotten a lot better at that. But I mean, years ago, when I was especially younger as a teenager, especially with my parents and stuff like that, I mean. Oh, I would.

It's funny, in the time that I've known you, your. Your communication style has vastly changed and improved.

On a previous episode, we had talked about a disagreement you and I had and I was like, it was really hard to be mad at you. It was like you stole the bullets from my gun because you were like being man, you're manning up and being mature about it. It's like, I want to be mad at you and I can't be mad at you because you keep taking my bullets away kind of thing. So, you know, so when I look at back that situation, the situation you just described, the previous situation I just mentioned, when you look at all three of those, there are some things that call them seven communication mistakes that I've kind of got jotted down here that I think would hit every last one of them. In other words, you mentioned earlier that so we know what not to do. Wrong.

Yeah. Or not to do Right.

Yeah. Kind of scenario. So we know what not to do. And here's the first one using a one size fits all communication style. Okay. Now when we teach the personality styles and the self awareness things, it's a good idea that if you especially the more sensitive a topic is, the more time you take before you communicate about the topic. So for an example, this past week I was trying to make some pretty wise decisions. Not based on emotional frustration or anger or something like that, but from. Okay, here's a real perspective. Here are the real facts, here are the real impacts, here are the opportunities, here are the threats. Right? And the only reason I did that is because his history has taught me that I need to have that time for me. Okay. It also means that when you're looking at talking to someone, you are looking at their personality style, right? So if I'm going to be making the bigger decision I make, the more I retreat to myself, the more I go into myself to go think about it and process it. Historically, my lead pencil just died. Sorry about that. And in this particular situation, I knew that if I stepped out and I went out to even other people first. Or if I came out of my emotional frustration, I was going to say something I would end up regretting. And one of the moments that got me thinking about that was this time in Carpenter Village, because not only did I lose confidence in the people, that I had their trust. I mean, they were. They would have said I was a decent leader even then. And then I also lost the trust of the customer, even though the customer just got through doing the same stinking thing to me over the telephone.

So it's interesting that everyone's always watching and how you communicate with other people. And it's important to realize that in order to get a point across, get a healthy communication thing across, you're going to have to lean in the other personality style.

What ended up happening with that job?

Yeah, so, I mean, what ended up happening is I ended up having to basically put my tail between my legs and go apologize to the installer and actually go man up to the customer and tell the customer, I never should have done that to begin with. Wow.

What happened when you did that?

It took a couple of weeks for the. For the sting to wear off. And then slowly, over time, I earned the trust back, and they realized it was an isolated moment of stupidity, which we are all capable of having from time to time. Yeah. You know, it's impossible to basically be what my wife would refer to as on all the time, meaning constantly being aware. I find that I personally make my biggest, stupidest mistakes when I'm tired or if I'm hungry.

I'm so tired today, guys, so I'm just gonna be quiet.

Let him do the podcast, you know, so those are some areas, so you gotta lean in. I think another thing that I learned in that moment, some of the other things we talked about is communication is so much more about listening than it is about speaking.

Yeah, for sure. That's one of the biggest things that I've recently learned about you or learned from you and some of the content that we teach. And as I've tried to implement that more and I've practiced it, because I've had situations where I just want to blurt out how I'm feeling. I'm like, you know what? Hang on, let me hang back and ask them what their perspective is on this first. And what I found very, very often to happen is that when I listen first and I hear their perspective, everything I wanted to say, it might be valid, but you gain extra perspective, and you're like, oh, well, you know, two of the things that I wanted to complain about would actually be solved by if I worked on the things from their perspective. And then we can come together. And there's still this one thing that I think I need to bring up to the table.

So passionate.

And then you come in together and basically make a compromise. And I found that that yields way better results than just two people yelling at each other trying to get anything that way. Yeah, no, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, no, I totally, totally agree with that. You know, we. Listening comes in a variety of forms, I think, and I think that's why it's so difficult for people to understand what listening is, because there's listening to understand, which is the primary goal. And there's also listening to just hear. Right. That means you're staring at the person across the table or across the way, and they're talking.

You'Re listening kinda, but you're more focused on what you want to say rather than what they're trying to articulate. And then there's also listening out of personal bias, meaning there's an element of.

You're looking through a personal lens of previous disagreements. There's listening from assumptions. Right. None of these things are really all that helpful unless you're listening to understand. And one of the things that I think you've seen me do it several times, that I learned from a good friend of mine, Chris Locurdo, a long time ago was one phrase, which is, can you help me understand? Yeah. So can you help me understand where you're coming from? Can you help me understand your perspective? And it's always important to validate the perspective. Okay. You know, it's okay to say, hey, I think I understand where you're coming from. And this is what I heard you say. Right, Right. Which makes the other person feel heard, which typically brings the tone down.

Right? No, exactly. So you see, the first step, though, is to ask them, hey, can they help me understand? Then when they explain it to you, then you can essentially repeat to them, okay, so here's what I'm hearing you say, and when you repeat that, I found that that kind of creates a bridge between what you want to say and what they're trying to say. And you can essentially connect.

Yeah. I mean, wisdom comes from listening first and speaking last. You know, I've learned that that's the hard way. And it's the most difficult time to listen. Well, when you're the most agitated. Yes. And I think that makes you human.

That's why it's very, very important. And you can't technically, I guess, Always do this because there's. Well, maybe you can. You can tell me. But it's really. If you feel like you're too agitated to really be responsible and mature in an argument or in a debate, it might be a good idea to essentially step back and say, hey, look, I need to take a few minutes or a few hours. I will get back to you in a little bit. We'll have this conversation, go outside, take some deep breaths. And then, you know, for me, like, I. Like I was very frustrated with you yesterday even. And then today we came in and we had this very pleasant discussion. There wasn't all pleasant because it was. We were doing. Using these tactics.

Well, we were. We were trying to focus on the problem and not the person, which is the difficult part.

But yesterday, you know, I was all like, you know, if we had had that conversation yesterday, I wouldn't have handled it as maturely. And then this morning, I just woke up, I had slept on it, and I was like, okay, I think I know what I needed to do. I got in the shower, I was taking deep breaths. I was like, okay, what are the things that I want to say? And then how am I going to go about this? And my mind just came up with, okay, well, you're going to listen to what he has to say first, and you're going to keep everything that you want to say.

In your peripheral vision while hearing him out first.

Would you say that putting the listening module first, meaning actually coming in ready to listen first, set you up to have a better conversation? 100%.

Because when you. When you listen and you hear it also, like, if you, frankly, if you do want to get your way with things, don't you think it makes more sense to understand what the other person wants so that you can basically use that and say, okay, well, I understand what you want. I also understand what I want. There's a connection there.

Okay.

You know what I mean?

I was wondering where you're gonna go with that if you're gonna go with manipulation.

I'm not. Well, I'm not trying to. And I heard it, and my voice sounds like. It does sound like manipulation, but. No, but, like, strategically it does make more sense to.

What actually came out of your mouth was you got to be looking for a win win strategy.

Right, Exactly.

So. And I think that's. That was the tempo. Like, there's. It's okay to voice a frustration. It's okay to voice some resentment, some hurt feelings, stuff like that. I find that most of the time, the reason those Things are in place is because an expectation wasn't met, and a lot of times the expectation itself wasn't clearly articulated, which is why the disagreement happened to begin with.

Yeah, 100%.

So I see that a lot.

That's what I meant. A win win.

Yeah, exactly. In this particular situation, I felt like, because we came in ready to listen, and I was ready to listen to.

You first, I'm like, I know. I know you were. That's what was crazy is like, I walked in, you're like, all right, what do you have to say? And I was like, oh, that's interesting, because I just recently learned from a very wise man talking about you. I was like, that I should listen before I speak. So you go first.

Yeah. Which was interesting. And then. But, you know, to your point, though, I think we both had a couple of days, at least. Me specifically, because I'm a recluse. Like, when I've got the more important the decision, the more time I take. I know that sounds crazy because people see me move fast or what I deem as the most important decision.

The more time I take to kind of make sure I do it. I go as a person of faith. I go and spend a lot of time with prayer. I may or may not reach out to a coach or a mentor, somebody I can kind of confide in and trust. That's completely unrelated to the. The business side of the things, or the, you know, a marriage or something like that. Right. It's people that have some experience, you know, in the. In the given category. And.

I needed time to process, just in general, to get into. And I've. And I've been using that technique for a long time. I quit just sitting down with someone, letting them speak, trying to listen, and then trying to settle the argument, the disagreement, the debate, whatever you want to call it in that moment in time.

Sometimes one of the best things you can possibly do is to sit back and say, thank you for the information. I want to take a few. I want to give this the time it deserves. I want to take a few moments to go ponder this. Can I with you in the next 24 hours or 20 or 48 hours, in our case, 100%.

And also, like, I was just. This just came to my mind about the win win situation thing. How do you expect to find a win win situation if you haven't actually asked the other person what a win looks like for them? You can't. So if you go in, when you.

When you hear this podcast, you quote Connor on that one that was good.

So, I mean, I just. I feel like if you. If you go in, go into it, basically just trying to communicate your win. You don't. You don't know what theirs is. So you can't find the bridge.

There's no way to get a bridge.

There's no way.

Yeah, because you. It's like trying to build a bridge off a cliff. Right. There's no other piece of mountain to join it to, for sure. Yeah. No, that's brilliant. Nice job. I file on that one.

Yeah. All right. So the other thing is, we mentioned this earlier, but the third biggest mistake I see people make is assuming. Assuming. Assuming you already know the answer to the question. This has been said by somebody else, but I most often hear it out of my wife's mouth, which is assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

Oh, I like that assume.

Yeah, it does. And it's true. Every time you assume that you already know the intention of the other person, you know, the action of the other person, the. The perspective of the other person, every stinking time, every time, at least in my experience that I've ever seen that happen, it blows up in your face, which makes you look like a jerk.

And that's why it's important to ask their perspective first and clarify that even if you think you have a history with this person of, oh, I know where they're going with this. Oh, I know what their attitude is. Because I found way more often than not that I am surprised because I think that I know exactly where they're coming from. Turns out they have a completely different perspective. And they're like, well, no, I'm not doing this, this, and this at all. I just. Here's why I felt the need to do that. And then I'm like, oh, I actually contributed to that a little bit a lot of times. And I'm like, oh, okay.

What was it like figuring that out, having that little epiphany?

Humbling.

Yeah. Why?

Because I went into it thinking that it was all the other person's fault. You know, anytime I've ever been in that situation, I went into it thinking, you know, I have this problem because this person wronged me. This person is just such a. A hole or whatever for. For acting in this way. And, you know, they must be doing that because of this, this and this reason that I've created in my mind when in reality, when I go and ask that person, hey, why'd you do this?

I didn't think like that at all.

Well, yeah, well, yeah, they're like, oh, well, you know, here's why I did this. I understand that that's not what you wanted, but here's why it happened. From my perspective. I'm like, oh, I actually could have prevented that by me fixing something or, you know, oh, that was just a miscommunication or misunderstanding on their end. They weren't intentionally trying to, you know, cause a disagreement or something like that. Exactly. So it's easy when, especially when you're angry to go straight to like, this person's intentionally doing this to, you know, to stab me in the back or whatever. Whereas usually people have their own reasons for things, and whether they're justified or not, they might believe. Actually, I feel like they almost always do believe.

So ironically, there's a team member that we have in the CHE office and her name's Faith. Faith Hudson. Shout out to you, girl, if you're listening, who came up with a wise decision or wise saying. I'm sure she didn't originate because she mentioned that she says, my dad always said so that tells me that's coming because he's a pastor. She said that every man is right in their own eyes.

So no matter when you talk about intention, you know, even in our disagreement, I was pretty certain that I, I was anchored on truth. And you were pretty.

So was.

I think we were like, wait a minute, there's parts of this and that both of us can be right on.

And, and, and when two people both are convinced that they are right and they're unwilling to relinquish any kind of. Relinquish any kind of like, okay, well, let me hear your perspective. Never going to end well.

Well, and I think that's why. I think that's why we keep hitting the word perspective. You know, the first phase in transform you when we use. When we overlay it with the grow process is gain perspective. Truth is found when we gain perspective. Right. It's truth that we're really seeking. Right. One of the things that's worked really well and it's funny how people, including myself, can get it screwed up one day and be basically the bar room cooler the next day. Meaning they're the person that this basically putting back together somebody else's disagreement. But it's interesting how that happened. But one of the things that I'm trying to do after I hear. So step one for me is I try to let the other person speak first. I honestly try to listen to what they're saying. If I feel like I'm struggling to listen, I actually make myself repeat back to them what I think they're saying. Because it's also really surprising that when you do that, people will also say, well, I didn't say that. And you're like, yeah, you did. Right. And rather than say, well, yeah, you did, and you're gonna say, well, I must have misheard, misunderstood something, because that's what I felt like I heard. Right. Again, you're focused on the problem. But so step one, perspective. Step two, repeat it back to them if possible. Step three, the goal was to find common ground and build backwards. So even in our discussion today before we went on air, which I'm glad. See, I love the fact that we had the discussion before we went on air because I would rather be honest with people.

What's crazy is most people would think, like, like, oh, that would throw off the whole mood of the podcast and all that kind. Yeah, no, no, I think.

I think people are. I think people are dying for transparent parents and authenticity. I think especially when you look at influencers and you look at people that are in the personal development space, there's a lot of.

There's a lot of people putting on a show.

That's. That's where I would go. Yeah.

And I would rather name any names or anything. But, like. And there's dis. Plenty of legit people, too. Of course there's plenty of legit people.

There are days when I feel like I've done a really good job of communicating. I've done a really good job of helping people. There are other days that I have a bad day. I got two hours of sleep, I didn't eat, my kids aren't cleaning up their room, any number of things. A customer calls me all bad and all that kind of stuff and all that kind of. You know what I'm saying? There's a whole ton of that kind of stuff. And I think that's where the difficulty comes into play is most of us aren't going into a communication to look for common ground. So you can't get to win win situation until you get a common ground situated. Right. So that's kind of the number one goal. The other thing that I think is the fourth thing that could be the biggest mistake you can make in communication is, and this didn't happen in Carpenter Village, but it's happened recently within our organization that we've had to kind of address and get to the bottom of, and that is used is actually avoiding difficult conversations. Right. So avoidance doesn't make the pain go away. If anything, it intensifies it.

You're saying you. Yeah, it's a mistake.

You don't want to avoid it. It's entirely appropriate to say, hey, look, I'm not in a good frame of mind right now. I'm seriously, I don't really feel like I'm doing, like, if I respond right now, it's not going to be good. Some people are going to want to fight anyway.

Yeah.

So let them fight. Just, you don't have to talk about kind of thing.

So you essentially have to put your ego aside for the sake of maturity. Let them blow off their steam, take the beating, be the punching bag for a little bit and then. And then walk away. And you will come back. And by the way, you'll have the high ground when you come back. Because oftentimes, especially if you just take that beating, what's going to happen is. And I'm not advocating for anyone to just like let someone run all over you. But if you do that, oftentimes when you come back, that person kind of feels a little guilty for the way they handle things. Especially if you are calm and mature and it gives you the leg room to.

Well, I think that's brilliant because you got to find common ground in order to build the bridge. You can't build a bridge without common ground, and you can't get a win win strategy without building a bridge.

We want to make sure we take the time to do those types of things. It's okay to step aside for a time frame. I'm going to advocate 24 to 48 hours for a very difficult conversation. Okay, got it. Now, you may need up to a week, but you don't want to get really past that. Right. You don't want to because then you get into avoidance.

I'm curious, what's the best way to actually do that?

Well, I mean, I think it's just like almost like what I shared with you a couple days ago when we, when I messaged the entire team said, guys, I'm going to just, you know, I'm going to make some big decisions. And as I'm looking at these big decisions, I'm going to step away and I'm gonna be gone for a little bit, meaning I'm not gonna communicate a whole lot. I'm just. Because I want to have clarity of thought. I don't want emotions to influence my decisions. I don't want negative thinking to influence my decisions. I want to look at it from an opportunities and threats kind of perspective. So the bigger the decision, the more time you Take. It's that simple. But it's okay to say, hey, look, I don't feel like we're getting anywhere with where we're at today. Why don't we both go and get a few minutes to ourselves and kind of work through that a little bit. So you make sure that you don't take the time to avoid difficult communication. You want to spend enough time to process the information, get to a good, stable place, emotionally wise, then hit it, then actually have it. You also have to give the other person that same time. So all because it took you 24 hours to get to the healthy place. And the answer, if it takes the other person another 24 hours, then you should wait. Don't rush into it, but then don't avoid it as well. Got it. Reacting, not responding.

What I mean by that is if you respond out of anger and frustration, like I did in this Carpenter Village example that we talked about a little earlier, you were going to make an ass out of yourself. You're going to devalue trust.

You want to make a calculated response, you need to sit back and think. I've actually noticed the biggest thing that I've probably done differently, or at least I've worked on doing differently this time around, because obviously I knew you four or five years ago as well. And you said that there's been a big change in my communication. I think the biggest thing that I've noticed in that time frame is now. You even told me when I came back, you said, you know, you're a bit more calculated now like a sniper rather than a, like just someone who.

Bazooka, which was going to blow more stuff up, right?

Because I used to. I used to just kind of essentially react immediately and just be like, well, that frustrates me because of this and this and that's wrong and blah, blah, blah, and. And not even really like sit back and calculate and think. But when you sit back and think and you just take a second before rushing into your response, you can kind of run through and consider what's the most mature way to handle this.

I mean, from my perspective, it is to, again, basically take a deep breath. I mean.

So I'm going to use just a recent example of where you and I personally were in a disagreement.

And.

I felt like the best thing to do was to not continue to argue or debate about a given thing that was causing frustration on each one of us. I felt like it was wise to step away, wise to get clear on one. Ask yourself, am I part of the problem here? Right. Is my ego in the way? Is it pride? What is driving me to anchor in so much on this, this one concept, this one concern, this one way in which I'm approaching this.

And then actually asked her to take that next step and say, hey, look, I wonder what it would be like to walk in their shoes. Right? What it would be like to have to step in from their perspective. And I think that was one of the things I enjoyed about even our meeting before we went on air today was that's exactly how you did it. You were like, okay, so here's my frustrations. Here's where they came from. But then I realized that some of these frustrations, as if most of these frustrations would have been alleviated had I done this, taken this particular action or made this particular decision. And I find that a lot of. That a lot of times that can happen for a lot of different people in a lot of different circumstances. So I would say the wisest thing to do to avoid just reacting is to make sure you're in the right head space to respond. Right. Make sure you're. It's not an emotional trigger. Right. It's never wise to have a debate or an argument when you're mad. It's just not. You're not gonna get anywhere because it's gonna be like, well, if you. And you and them, and if you, like, that's all you're gonna. That's all you're gonna be talking about. And the other person be like, all right, my shields are up too, buddy.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I can play ball, right?

I mean, yeah, anytime. Anytime someone's got spears and. And arrows and guns aimed at you, you're gonna hide behind something or put something in front of you.

Yeah.

Right.

Or throw your own arrows.

Yeah. Well, you probably do both. Yeah. Right. So what it makes it really hard to have this massive war is what if the other person just walk away? It makes people mad sometimes, but, you know, it's. You gotta. You gotta make sure that how you.

Yeah, you're. There's a good chance you piss people off by walking away, but. But it is at the cost of short term, pissing them off in order to come back in a mature and collected manner. Now here's a question. If you have someone who's very immature and they're like, you walked away. And you're like a little wimp. I don't really know how to put this, but does that mean that that person isn't worth having the conversation with?

That's a hard one. Some of these people you're gonna have to have conversations with. Now, I would say that would fall into close to the toxic categories, which means you create distance that we talked about previous episodes.

That's a toxic relationship type thing. Like it's more toxic than that. You try to, try to set healthy boundaries and say, okay, hey, I need some time to space to walk away. And then you come back the next day and you're like, okay, I'm ready to have a mature conversation. And they're essentially being an a hole still, is what I'm saying. Like that's, that's a toxic behavior.

It can be construed as a toxic behavior. It's there. It's definitely not going to help you get any common ground. And the best thing I think you can do in that situation is to just distance yourself. Distance yourself. Don't engage. Meaning, don't. I kind of look at it like this. I kind of feel like it's a. They're laying a snare out in front of your feet and trying to entice you to step in it.

Right? Because they're like, oh, well, you want to come back and be all kind. Here you go, here's the snare.

Exactly. And then you, then if you, if you take the emotional action, put your foot in it. Guess who gets caught up in the truck tree?

You.

Exactly. Which leaves you vulnerable.

You get pissed off again because you're like, oh, I went and did the mature thing here. I'm approaching this from a mature because I've had that happen a lot. Like I'll take a step back and try to be the mature one. And then the person who before was arguing me is not ready to be mature. And I get all pissed because I'm like, I'm trying to do this in the right way and you won't even be reasonable. Now I will say, when you execute these communication tactics, right, I found that more times than not they will be reasonable and amicable. But there are some people who are just that stubborn who won't.

It just takes time. Everybody's on their own emotional intelligence journey, their own self awareness journey. And you may or may not be higher in them. They may have, for all you know, their dog just got died, got killed that day.

That's true.

Right. So traumatic things or difficult things tend to make difficult conversations more difficult that day. Right. That's why I made it a point to. So, you know, I think you've heard me, I think you've heard me say this before. I will never tell the team or anybody that works for me or my family, my kids that I'm always right, because I'm not.

In fact.

I'm probably. I could probably always use more grooming like everybody else. I would say that I am always willing to say I'm sorry. It may take me 24 to 48 hours to get there, but if I realize that I've screwed up and I could have done something better, I have zero problem going up and being a sincere. I'm sorry I jacked that up. Because we're human, right? Right. So those are the types of things I think will kind of happen there. I wanted to kind of close out the show with a couple. Three very wise things that I've heard in part.

One of which is for my wife, which I'm actually. This. This. I remember we were sitting at a rest. We were sitting at a Chili's restaurant one afternoon. Gosh, it was probably four years ago, and it was a beautiful day outside. She was in her beautiful little sundress, kind of like thing with her shoulders kind of showing. And we got to talking about something. Journey. We had just started Journey Principles. And we were trying to figure it out and figure out, what is this going to be? What's it going to look like? Is this something we're going to do together? Is this something we're going to do separate? Meaning? You know, because she's really heavily. She's like super rock star when it comes to the Endometriosis foundation, like an outspoken spokesperson. That's definitely her calling. And one of the pieces of her calling for sure. But the disease hadn't kind of reared its head again in our relationship yet in our family and whatnot. She.

Was she asymptomatic?

Yeah, asymptomatic, or she was keeping the symptoms from me kind of scenario. Like, she wasn't. It wasn't out in the open, let's put it that way. And I remember we got on the subject about talking or about communication, and she said these words. And this is important because I think this even played a part in some of our debating that we had this week ourselves. Words cannot hear what a mouth cannot say.

Words cannot hear what a mouth cannot say. In other words, all these different things that you want to communicate to a person that you wish they knew.

Well, the only way they're going to ever know it is if you speak it.

So all the bitterness, all the resentment, all the frustration, all the dissatisfaction, all the low expectation, all of that stuff, if you're not communicating it in a healthy manner, then how can you ever expect the person to respond in such a way that you would deem as a win win strategy?

I always thought that quote was brilliant. That came from my wife. Like I said, we're sitting at a Chili's and she's like, boop. I'm like, my gosh, I even quoted it back in the day. Yeah, I bet it's still down, like way down in the Instagram feed.

Probably is with her.

I mean, because I took the picture at the moment she said it.

No way.

And then quoted it. Yeah, I think it's way down the Instagram feed. All right. The other one is it's okay to be passionate as long as it doesn't become personal.

In other words, it's okay to go out of problem. It's okay to have communication that becomes passionate. And people communicate passion in different ways, right? So if one of my wife's friends is married to a full blooded Italian and everything about him is loud, right?

Hey, da, da, da.

You know, he's just kind of boisterous, right? Whereas someone who is not as boisterous might show their passion by using their hands a lot. Okay. It's okay to communicate in passion as long as it doesn't come personal. When I'm angry and frustrated, that's not the time I want to sit down with somebody and have a conversation with them. I want to come back at it when I can make sure that what we're talking about, even if we're passionate about it, like, even the conversation you and I had earlier today, we can be passionate about our points of, our perspective and our points of view. But I don't want to be personal, you know? And if I look at just our dynamic, right. You've always trusted me to be a good leader and to mentor you when you were and stuff like that. And then I've learned a lot just by watching you grow, which hopefully makes me better. Right? But I also think you're an amazing human being with amazing potential who's gonna do a lot of amazing things, right? And the last thing that I want to do is let one passionate conversation short circuit that whole dream or that.

Whole, yes, I feel the same way because I'll get really excited and passionate. It's. It's because we want the same thing. Yeah, we both want. We both want to transform a million lives. We both have the same goal. We just sometimes have different opinions on what's the best way to get there.

And those things are open for discussion.

And when. And when both of us are like, well, I'm right, and I'm so confident I'm right because of this reason and this reason and this. Then we can butt heads because we're both like, I'm not gonna sacrifice the mission just because you are wrong. And that's basically where we take it. Sometimes we have to take a step back and be like, okay, are they really wrong or are we both kind of right?

Yeah.

And which is usually the case.

Well. And I think was what we ran into. We were both all right, and we were both all wrong in this particular instance. Yeah.

The same time. They're both right. Both wrong.

The one thing that I realized, though, is we did. I don't know that in this particular situation, we both communicated from a healthy place on the early onset.

We didn't.

Like. I don't remember even telling you last week when we were. When this whole conflict. This was the beginning of this week.

Yeah.

This whole thing originated. This whole debate originated. I remember saying, hey, Connor, here's the reason why I feel like I need to jump in and do this. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I just did it.

Right. And I was like, why did you do this without telling me and communicating? And I was like, lack of communication. Then we were going back and forth. You're like, well, I should be able to do this. And the whole big deal.

We went down a rabbit hole. You guys have been there. Like, don't play. We know you've been there. So here's what we've learned that you guys can learn from. Take a step back. Don't let it get personal. Come ready to build a bridge. Yeah.

And don't. Neither of us, at the end of the day, we were able to resolve our conflict, first of all, because we both stepped into maturity. But second of all, because both of us want the same thing. And we both refuse to let the mission or. Sorry. We both refused to let our ego and pride come before the mission for sure.

And at the end of the day, what you would find is if somebody came at you, I'm the first one to get in front of the bullet. If somebody came at you or came at me, for sure. While you and Karen may fight for the. The place, but.

Right.

So you come after my kids, my wife, we got a problem. Let's put it that way. You will see the Wolverine, or lion, as you guys like to refer to it internally. Yeah.

But yeah, you really are the Wolverine, man. I mean, the comics version, for sure. 100%.

Although I am 5 foot 5 and he was 53 in the comics. Just for a record, I got, oh.

Dude, you've got some inches on him.

It's the first time in history. All right, guys. We wanted to make sure today was more of a transparent, open conversation, communication. We covered a handful of things of what not to do. Hit those really fast. Don't use a one size fits all approach. Don't speak more than you listen, don't assume, don't use negative tones, don't avoid difficult conversations, don't react, respond, and always keep and don't have a closed mind. Right? Those are the things to avoid. The things to do are take a step back, gain perspective, build a bridge. So those are the takeaways for the show. We also want to let you guys know because we are transparent and vulnerable. We're real, we're authentic. We are human beings. We're going to have our ups and downs as well.

We're not your average perfect guru, for.

Sure, but if you think about some of the conversations that have happened in the past, these are types of things that take relationships apart, right? And if one of the things in our wheelhouse, our core values, if you will, is to. Is to build quality relationships so you can surround yourself with great people, then you're going to bump into communication and you need to know how to handle it correct. So if you use those principles, you'll start to win, you'll build a bridge. You'll have lived to fight another day, and you won't hurt anybody or lose anybody in the process. So we hope you enjoyed the show today. Feel free to, like, share and comment. We'd appreciate any comments and whatnot. It helps us make better content for you.

As a pivot of that, make sure, if you have questions, make sure you email them at questionsurityprinciples.com in the coming shows, we've actually got some questions in which I'm pretty excited about that. We'll take one question and do an entire show on. We've got some really good questions coming in and I want to make sure we give those the time that it needs and deserves. So make sure you get your questions in. Until then, we'll see on the external principles. Take care, guys. Bye. I'll see you in the next video. And please, if you don't mind and you enjoyed the Life Mastery content we're building, consider hitting the subscribe button and also hitting the bell so you'll be the first to get notified anytime we release new content.