Conflict 101

Hey guys. As we get ready to hop into conflict, it's important to understand where conflict comes from, how it's shaped, and really how it affects us on a day in and out basis.

So what I've done is I've taken one of our pieces of content called the quadrants of conflict, and I'm going to walk you through how we view conflict, how to funnel it to possibly get a resolution. So before we get started, consider some of the conflicts that you ran into in relationships, in business, even conflicts inside your mind. When you're actually trying to challenge yourself to kind of make a better decision, think about conflict. Conflict as a whole is a more encompassing thing. It can be literally any kind of struggle, any kind of roadblock. Conflict is really anything standing in your way.

As we get ready to start to digest conflict, it really comes in two forms. The first form is going to be external conflict. So that's types of conflicts that obviously happen outside of your behaviors. Now what I like to do with the quadrants, I like to break these things down into bite sized pieces. So let's take physical. For example, a physical conflict is going to do a couple different things, meaning it's going to come in a couple different ways. It's going to challenge your shelter or safety. It's going to challenge your provision for like food and water and things of that nature. It's going to come in to challenge the utilities. And finally, one of the things that's going to challenge is like water and provision in that way. Call it physiological needs. Now we all have those kinds of things, but many of us don't get enough rest, we don't eat well enough and we don't exercise. In order to utilize these things to get the most maximum result to actually move us forward, we're going to have to learn to look at that as a healthy bucket by itself to make sure that if we have conflicts coming in that way, in other words, are we getting properly hydrated on a regular basis? Are we getting the nutrients and the exercise that we need? Right? If you were to take that right now, on a scale of 1 to 10 right now in your life, how would you rank yourself as it relates to your physical health and then physical things? So on a scale of 1 to 10, are you a 1 meaning, hey, I really, really, really need a lot of work, are you a 10? Like I'm nailing this thing right? You guys know how much I love 1 to 10 ratios. Why? Because it helps us better understand where we're at in that particular quadrant. So for me, I would say I'm probably an 8, meaning I've got the muscle tone that I need, I got the exercise that I need, I got the nutrients that I need, and now all I got to do is lay off the sweet stuff and the cookies. Okay. At the end of the day, the greatest thing you have to focus on is your safety and security in your physical quadrant. Right? You want to make sure that you're helping yourself move forward and and not be held back, which means when you go to rank yourself, you want to make sure that you actually have a solid rank. And if you don't, then that will give you awareness into what you may need to change and how to look at it. Okay, so let's move on to the next one. The next one is a lot of people's favorites, which is financial. Now, there's a ton of people that focus so hard on the financial that they forget everything else. And all the other quadrants that conflict could arrive from that create struggles and roadblocks in the future. When we focus on financial, we end up not focusing on the other ones a lot of times. But for the sake of this video, let's go ahead and dig into financial. First of all, a financial conflict could arrive in the form of provision. Do you have enough to provide for your family, or is there enough revenue coming in, as we like to say? Or is there too many expenses going out? Obviously, business 101 and finance 101 is you want to have more revenue than you do expenses. Okay. How is your financial picture looking as you look at your ability to provide for your family, your friends, and even for yourself? Okay, Progress. Are you making consistent progress with building a firm financial foundation? Are you making progress on a regular basis? Are you getting enough things like savings? Right. Giving.

Right. How many of these areas are you actively making progress? Have you been stagnant for the last two or three years, or what are you doing differently? Why? Because if you're not making progress, conflict is going to continually show up in your financial picture. Right. The next one is going to be planning. Right? What are you setting aside for your future? What are you setting aside to make sure you have a future? So many of us will focus so much on getting enough income for today's needs, not realizing that eventually we're going to become older than we used to be. And when we become older than we used to be, we may not have the same earning potential that we used to have. So it's always important to have a balanced portfolio, if you will, of Savings, spending and giving on a regular basis. Now some of those savings will end up going into some different buckets. For example, it might go into a money market, it might go into an investment, it may just go into a straight savings account. But if you're not focusing on that, what you're going to do is you're going to eliminate the potential of having a financial legacy. Okay? These are important items in this particular quadrant. So many times most of us will focus on this one quadrant and as a result we don't get the result we need. Okay? We're not focused on the correction or identifying what's going on. What we're actually focused on more than anything else is whether or not we have money, right? We need to set ourselves up to build a framework to have money and that way we can avoid having conflict in that area. Alright? The next two are a little bit easier. They're what I refer to as the internal conflict. Okay? There are the types of conflict that you're going to have internally on a regular basis. So let's start off with the emotional conflict. Okay? Emotional. What is your day to day attitude? In any circumstance, any time or frame, how often does your attitude reflect moving forward? How often does your attitude actually hold you back? You can take any situation, even a loss of a job, if you will, and have a different attitude about it. And that attitude is going to move you forward or backwards or towards progress or away from it, right? Emotional states, okay? Happiness, joy, peace, sorrow, these are all feelings that you can feel on a regular basis. And if you're not aware of those feelings of what you're going to have is conflict that comes in to attack your very identity. It creates that element of self worth. It creates that element of not feeling like you're going to ever measure up, right? These are important things, relationships. Almost every single relationship you have is going to have an emotional tie to it. Whether that be a friendship, whether that be in professional or whether that be in a love love style relationship like a marriage or a dating relationship. Either way, conflict happens here fairly regularly. Why? A couple different reasons. First of all, you're trying to drive two people together or merge two belief systems together. And secondly, a lot of times our attitudes and our emotional states disrupt our ability to communicate. Okay? If there's no communication, you're going to have conflict in your relationships, alright? Your sense of meaning, and I don't mean significance, meaning how you feel about yourself, I'm talking about how you look at a specific time and instance and situation and the meaning you put on it. Okay. For example, those that get divorced can do two things. They can learn, they can heal and they can grow or they can tell themselves that they're unlovable. Right. That's a different meaning to a different emotional response or a different emotional feeling, if you will. Alright, the next one. Significance. Significance is the identity about how you feel yourself. Right. If you've got the same conflict solution, then what's going to happen is, is if you're having a consistent level of conflict, you have a low ranking on that scale of 1 to 10 we talked about earlier. If that scale is low enough, then there's a good chance you're going to feel unworthy, insecure and have some of those attributes. So what we want to do is make sure we get that up there. All right. Before we move on too much further, let's go back to financial. We didn't do the rating here. Okay. I want everyone to take the time to rate where you think you are financially. Okay. One to ten. Again, I'm probably gonna give myself an eight here. I'm in a pretty secure foundation right now to have a future. Where are you at? Alright, same thing with emotional. Now that you have some of the elements of what an emotional quadrant could be, attitude states, relationships, meaning and significance, where would you rate yourself in a global picture? On a scale of 1 to 10, how emotionally secure are you? How emotionally aware are you? Okay, so I'm going to go to probably I'll give myself a seven. Right. Because there are some days I get frustrated really quickly and I could do a much better job of controlling my attitudes and my emotional state. Okay. That's just me being honest with myself. All right, let's move on. Spiritual. Now, some people like to think of. As soon as I say spiritual, I'm talking about a religious background or a religious identity or a religion specifically. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. Right. Everyone knows I'm a person of faith. I always share that all the time with no embarrassment behind it whatsoever. However, when you go to look at faith, think of faith as the way of resilience, Right. Do you get lost in fear? So something bad happens and all of a sudden you think the world's going to come to an end and everything is going to fall apart? Or are you more on the faith side? Are you able to believe in another day? Right. Those who struggle with this particular quadrant oftentimes live in that victim minded thinking that we talked about one of the last videos. Right. We don't want to live in victimhood. We want to work towards living in victory on a regular basis. So even when bad things come, your healthy mindset comes from that resilience, that place of resilience. Okay, resilience. How often are you able to get back up again? We've talked about this before. Always think Rocky Balboa here, right? What made Rocky Balboa successful? One thing. He always got back up.

When it comes to your life, your spiritual quadrant is going to determine how often or how much time it takes you to get back up. When life throws your curveball, think Rocky Balboa. Always, always, always be willing to get back up. And if you can do that, you're going to become unstoppable. Moving on, replenishment. Where do you go? What are you doing? And how do you replenish on a regular basis? One of the things that we've gotten wrong in our American culture is we go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And we forget that we need to recharge and replenish. We forget that we need rest, to time to reflect, the time to analyze kind of some qualities about our life or qualities about our careers. It takes time to reflect, replenish, and move forward. Right. We want to make sure that we answer three questions. When it comes to replenishment, where do I go, what am I doing? And in some cases, who am I with? That's Replenishment 101. Where do I go, what do I do and who am I with? For example, where would I go when I want to replenish? When I want to have time away? I personally like to go to the mountains. Okay, what am I doing at the mountains? Sometimes I'm writing in a journal. Sometimes I'm going for a walk. Sometimes I'm going down to the local kickback. Jack's. Right, restaurant. All in all, I've got a place I'm trying to go, doing something specific. Then occasionally I do it alone because I might need solitude, if you will, to kind of reflect. Other times I want to be with my wife Karen, who's amazing. Okay. Gives you an idea of what replenishment looks like. Spirituality also is your divine connection, whether or not you believe in it or not. That's okay because you can even, even have a connectivity to nature, for example, Right? Where some of us might be more connected to the God that we believe in. Either one of those, those are points of connection that add value to resilience and levels of faith and capacity. Alright, so go ahead and take the time to rate yourself 1 to 10 on where you think you're at. Okay. I'm going to give myself about a seven here. Okay. The reason I'm going to give myself a 7 here is because while I am a person of faith, I think I can do a much better job in each of these categories to move forward. Now, when I go back and look at my quadrants, I'm living a reasonably healthy lifestyle. Are there levels for improvement? Absolutely.

However, when I was homeless, this is what my scores would have looked like. I'm going to make a mess here. That's okay, because we're doing this live.

Right? Look at that, A lot of big yellow finger. Alright. When I was homeless, my physical shelter was a one. Okay. My financial picture was a one. I had no money, I had no physical shelter and I had a struggle time getting just basic needs. Okay. My spiritual part of my being at the time was I didn't have a level of faith at all. I didn't believe in anything at the time. I didn't have a way to be resilient, I didn't have a way to replenish. I didn't have any real connection to anything outside of myself. Okay. Which means I live more in fear than I did throughout faith. And as a result, I would also put that of a 1.

Emotional attitude states and relationships. Look around the board right now. Look around the board. I got a one. A one. A one.

I didn't really want to take my own life, but I did consider it.

This simple cheat sheet will help you understand why you may or may not feel empty. At my lowest point, it was very easy to see that I needed massive help. Okay. So when you go to rank yourself, give yourself an honest opinion about each one of the quadrants on where you're in. It'll do two things. First of all, it will bring awareness to where you need the most help and where you can need the most improvement. The second thing it'll do is it will tell you where you need to go. It'll give you an idea of where you need to connect with someone else to help strengthen these quadrants. Okay? So I hope you guys got a little bit from this. I know it was a little bit confusing and I wasn't trying to make it that way. At the end of the day, the quadrants, these are the four areas that life most often hits us. Okay. It most often causes problems and as a result, by ranking them, we know where to focus and improve. In the meantime, we'll take care and we'll see you again on the Next Journey Principles.

Hey guys, if you enjoyed that lesson about conflict, I highly recommend you grab our free ebook. It's linked in the description of this video. It's packed with information about how to get from where you are today to where you want to be in your future. Also, would you do us a favor and like and comment? Subscribe. That way we can stay in touch and see you in the next video.