Introduction To Conflict | Journey Principles Podcast 025

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 go from stuck to unstoppable with life mastery strategies that are simple and that actually work as always. I'm joined with my co host, Connor Kraft, director of Connections. How you doing, my friend?

Good, man. I'm doing good.

Yeah, dude. It's been a long journey, man. A lot of podcasts in the not last too distant future.

Oh, man, like 24. 24.

It's.

It's hard putting out two a week.

Yeah, it really is. Especially with time constraints, running businesses and families and for sure, for sure, all that good stuff. But the feedback's been great. Oh, yeah, yeah. So we're loving that and we're ready to jump in some to some new content today. So what, what is today's. Today's topic?

Today, Today we're going to dive into the concept of conflict.

Conflict concept is like wide.

Is it as deep? Yeah, for sure. I mean circle. The important thing to recognize is that conflict, as we teach it, is not necessarily an interpersonal relationship like argument type of conflict, but we're referring more so to conflict within your lives against kind of, I guess, yourself. I don't really know the best way to explain it.

Well, the way. So there's, there's, well, there's several different types of conflict. We'll cover four of them today, two of which are internal, two of which are external. They can bleed into your relationships, they can bleed into your work life balance. They can bleed in pretty much anywhere if left unchecked. So in a roundabout way, we're just going to cover conflict all in general. Right?

For sure.

So when you hear the word conflict, what do you hear?

Well, I've always heard, and this is where I've always been confused about this topic is I've always heard just like conflict between two people. So, so like an argument or a debate or a fight or something like that, or like a conflict between two nations. But I suppose it could be a conflict between yourself and the world or yourself and, you know.

An issue that you're having that's, that's, that's holding you back potentially, which is I think more along the lines of the way that we teach it so well.

A lot of people, the way I like to look at is conflict can be literally anything that causes you discomfort from moving forward. Right. Alright. Anything that causes you discomfort for moving forward is conflict.

So it's conflict in your life in general?

Yes, conflict. Like I said, the term conflict is very deep and very wide and covers a lot of different areas. For example, I'm trying to decide what type of chewing gum I want to buy. Believe it or not, that is a form of conflict. Very low, very low on the scale of what it should. Like what conflict could be in comparison to the death of a family member or loss of a job or trying to find a new job or anything like that.

So saying that is almost like saying that conflict is one of the main things that keeps you stuck in many ways is just any type of conflict will keep you stuck.

I would say keep you stuck, but it definitely hinders your progress. Depending on how you deal with it, some people will move too fast and dive headlong into it, and other people will put their head in the sand and not deal with it at all. Both of which are not very healthy. Right. So I don't know. We came up with a scenario that I discovered accidentally. So I was doing a keynote presentation for the USO in the Warrior Reset programs about three and a half years ago, and historically they had actually asked me to do a lesson on conflict that dealt with relationships specifically. Right. So a lot of times at the Warrior Resets, they'll actually bring the spouses and bring the kids and they have daycare and some other things. And a lot of times the spouses will actually attend Warrior Reset, like the actual keynote presentations, together on a regular basis. Well, I got to the end of the keynote and we talked about what's the best way to kind of engage with your spouse and work as a team. So we got to the end of that and we had a dry erase board, actually one of those little large sticky notes that you see me use all the time that I think I've got you addicted to now. And I grabbed one and I said, guys, what you need to understand is conflict comes from four different areas. And out of that came the quadrants of conflict. I see. Stumbled on it completely. Because what I realized is there are four areas in life that pretty much drive out the spider web of all the areas that conflict could come from.

Even interpersonal conflict all comes from these four areas as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Wow. Okay.

Absolutely.

That's an interesting way of tying it in, because I was looking for that. I wanted to know because again, I think that a lot of people have traditionally thought of conflict. Like the USO came To you expecting as fighting the trouble?

Well, that's what we started. But I tell you what, I'll tell you what that struck me as odd was during one of the breaks, I did two keynotes for him that particular day. During one of the breaks, this guy, his name was John, he came to me. He was in one of the armed services because obviously these are active duty personnel. And he came to me and he's got tears in his eyes. And he goes, my greatest conflict is, I just want to be a great dad. And I'm like. And the dude's almost crying. I'm like, dude, okay, let's. So I gave him like 45 minutes. We went one on one for about 45 minutes during the break, sat him down. And he's like, proceeding to tell me about, you know, obviously missing his dad as he was growing up and all this kind of stuff, and how bad he didn't want to repeat his father's mistakes, which is, gosh, how many times do you have you ever heard a son say that or a daughter say the same thing about a mother? It happens a lot, okay?

In doing so, he started describing his relationship with his dad, and then he started describing his relationship with his kids. And as he's talking, I'm like thinking to myself, I'm gonna. I'm waiting any moment for this guy to tell me how bad of a dad he is and something he's done wrong. And you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm waiting, right?

And out of his mouth comes pretty much the opposite. Well, I get home every day about 4:30, because, you know, in his particular role in the military, I guess he got fortunate. His is like 4 to 4. So 4am 4 o', clock, right? And so he would get home at 4, 4:30. He would take his three kids to the park every day. He would spend time with them in the park, playing baseball, pushing the swings.

Sounds like an awesome dad.

Going around the merry go round and doing all this kind of stuff. Then he would come home because his wife was, I guess, a nurse, either on base or off a base. He would make dinner for the kids, get them all ready together. She'd come home with just enough time to kiss him good night.

Dude, that's a baller dad right there.

Well, that's what I was thinking. And he was like. I remember asking him, keep in mind, this is an internal conflict he's feeling on the inside.

30 externally, it appears that he's doing great.

Well, so here's the thing. I was expecting him, because he came to me at such a broken state to talk about it. I was expecting him to basically say that he know he hadn't been around his kids, or maybe he had spent too much time going out with the guys and been alienating his wife. And I was expecting any number of things other than basically, if I was to quiz your kids right now, what would they say? Right? They would say, my dad is awesome. Yeah, right, for sure. But meanwhile, he was so petrified about not becoming his father, not realizing he was not. Not even close to how he described to me he was being raised. But it was causing internal conflict. So he actually had anxiety about going to sleep at night. That's how strong this need or this want was for him to make sure his kids had a dad.

Very strong.

Right? So the reason I say that is. And it dawned on me that conflict comes from a lot of different areas. All right? So in working with the resets and in the live events we've done, and in some of the other things that we've done, I've met a lot of people with a lot of different concerns, ie, conflicts, a lot of different things that if you dug down to it, let's say the conflict that they said here was.

I'm on my second marriage, and I feel like this one's failing too. Well, when you dig into it, you find out that there's an emotional issue that has to be addressed or hasn't been addressed. So there's always something, there's always a root. Right? Okay. So you can take anything.

I mean, literally, divorce, loss of a.

Job.

Man trying to buy a house.

Trying to raise your kids. Like, literally any kind of conflict that you can possibly think of.

It all comes from one place. And that is when an expectation is not met, all conflict comes from a place where you perceive an expectation is going to happen. For some reason that doesn't happen. Right. And that's where all conflict comes from. Relationships, finances, so on and so forth. Okay. You think it's supposed to be this way, and then what you get is over here, Right? Which creates a rub, creates a little anxiety.

So conflict happens when your expectations don't meet your reality.

That's exactly right.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, exactly right.

In doing so, then I said, okay, well, what's the next step? Right. If this father, for example, has got this burning desire to be this great dad, and on the surface level, that looks like that's driving everything, that's driving the conflict, then what would be the root? Like, there's got to be A root. This kind of stuff, this kind of want, this kind of need, this kind of yearning doesn't come out of nowhere, not at that level. I've never seen a rock star dad be so disappointed in himself as a father.

So when they must have been a super high standard because something in his past, most likely his dad.

Yeah. I mean, it could be. I mean, when we dug into it, his dad wasn't around a whole lot, and it could be that he's still trying to innately earn the affirmation of his father by being a great dad. Wow. Happens all the time. Okay. We chase a lot of time. Like, remember we went back to that influences lesson. So many of us chase our influences and the affirmation of our influences over and over and over and over and over.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

I mean, seriously.

You take someone that's most. In fact, most type A personalities instinctively, innately, are trying to get the affirmation of somebody from their parental past.

Dad didn't accept them, mom didn't accept them, uncle didn't accept them, whoever the parental is. So they instinctively, accidentally, subconsciously say, all right, I'll show you. I'll become something you can't deny, and then you'll respect me, and then you'll love me, and then you'll affirm me, and then you'll want to be close to me.

So. So most of that, I guess, obsessive type A personality comes from a parent or somebody or some group of people in your past who.

Evidence that I have would support that. Not saying it's gospel, but I would.

Say, does it always have to be parental, or could it have been, like a group of people in the past?

It could be a group of people.

It's going to come from a relational style.

Start some sort of initial early relationships.

Now, throughout the course of your life. There's several areas that. Well, there's actually four areas that I've identified that I think where all this comes from. Two that are internal, meaning they happen within you, and then two that are external, which means they happen outside of you. All right, the first of which we've been kind of tiptoeing around, which is the emotional. Right. So we would say that Quadrant. Quadrant. Quadrant one is the emotional quadrant, and.

That'S one of the internal ones.

It's definitely internal. Okay. If you think about it, emotional awareness, emotional security, intelligence, all that deals with your attitudes, your awareness, your responses, your level of empathy, your level of concern, your level of greediness or perseverance or Resilience, Right. All of those are elements of an internal ticking inside of you that comes from your emotional well being. Okay. If you think about self worth, self loathing, identity crisis, being inauthentic, lack of purpose, lack of significance, lack of connection, lack of affirmation, suffering, relationships, you could take all of those items. All are individual conflicts within themselves that sometimes will layer on top of one another.

And they would all fit in the emotional bucket, every last one of them.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

It does make sense, yes.

So I like to look at it like this. So the emotional covers attitudes, states, relationships, meaning and overall sense of significance. Okay. Now that's not the, the only thing it covers. But at a global level, that one bucket would control those areas. Okay, let's jump to one of the externals for a second. All right. So the one thing that I get their most requests for on social media is loans.

Loans.

People ask me for money all the time.

That's sad.

It's unfortunate. Yeah. And many of them are fishing. Right. And we'll give you the worst sob stories they can possibly shake a stick at. It's a pretty interesting thing, but once or twice a week I'm asked for money. Now, part of that is because people think I have a ton of it, that's disposable, that I should just be.

And you're such a good person, so you're just going to give it to them.

Well, and I do give a lot, but I give a lot within a certain level of giving. A certain avenue like mine and Karen's giving is actually decided on before the year ever starts. Right, Right. And we do that instinctively on things that we believe in and whatnot. So the reason I say that is because one of the external quadrants is the financial quadrant, if you think about it, where the two people struggle the most in life, either will come out of the emotional quadrant on the inside because it's how they. It's how, it's their lens, it's how they see the world, it's how they see everything. Or their financial quadrant, which is essentially how they provide for themselves and what they think their expectations are. So in the financial quadrant, it's obviously money, roi, savings, provision, are they making progress? What types of planning techniques are they using or not using? What kind of legacy are they going to leave? You know, I've already told my kids that don't expect a dime unless you show me that you know how to manage money. Right. Because most people that develop a level of wealth that just leave it to Their children and their children's children. It's spent. By the second generation, it's gone. Yeah, right. Because there's no appreciation for the sacrifice and the work and everything that went into earning that capital to begin with. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So the second generation goes out and buy sports cars and jumps out of airplanes and, you know, put on. Puts on social media, see how awesome I am. Which if you go all the way back to emotional, that means they got a low self worth.

Really?

Yep.

Always.

Almost always.

What if you just like cool cars?

It comes from a need to show off because most people want to get in the cool car so they can show off somebody.

I still want a cool car. That makes me have a low emotional. A high emotional conflict level.

Oh, well, I've already given you the ratios of when it's okay to buy.

I know, I know, I know. I gotta make a lot. So I'm working on it.

Yeah, it's gotta be less than 1% of your income. So anyway, moving on. All right. Because most people go, they'll get $100,000 job and they'll buy $100,000 car, which means, well, that's.

I mean, now they're in debt. So anyway, yeah, you obviously don't want to go into debt.

So at any rate.

Financial is one of the external conflicts. Okay. The other internal conflict. I'm going to use the word spiritual. And the reason I'm using the word spiritual, because it has to do with your internal spirit. Some would call it a soul, some would call it a consciousness. Right. If you want to get super floaty doty, you might call it some other thing. Right. But what I'm talking, when I say spiritual, I'm thinking level of faith, I'm thinking level of resilience, how you replenish and your level of connection. When I say connection, something. Connection to something greater than yourself. So even people who don't share my faith that maybe lean more towards mindfulness and yoga and some other things too. If, if they feel like they're connected to something greater than themselves, then there's an anchor and a security there that allows them to have a level of resilience. So when adversity comes, it's not just.

Them versus the world. It's okay, it's me. But I also have in the universe.

I've got a support system. Got it right now. I've tried it a few other ways. I've anchored into my faith for a variety of different reasons that we don't have time to cover today. But when I say the word spiritual, I'm thinking replenishment, resilience, faith, connection. Those are the things I'm thinking about. Okay, I'll give you a perfect example. In 2012 or 13, I had everything that I needed, Money that money could buy. So my financial life was. Was good. I was in an emotionally healthy place. I had a pretty good sense of identity. By that time, I was basically had been divorced and had spent some time alone. Okay, so I was in a pretty good place there. I was in great physical shape, but I felt empty. Empty. Why?

Because one of your other pillars was lacking?

Yeah, because one of the quadrants was missing. So what I like to do is there's a lot of different ways to use the quadrants, but the easiest way I know to use the quadrants right now is first to identify them. So we're working through that now. The second idea is to actually rate them. So we'll get into that in a second. So the final pillar or pillar quadrant got me saying pillars. Now. Shame on you.

But can physical be health as well?

Well, that's what I'm getting towards. So when I say the word physical, it's only because I try. I hate to try to spell the word physiological.

Okay, but these are your physiological needs.

Physiological needs. So physical health.

Shelter, food, water, utilities, housing, sustenance. Right. These are the items that your body needs just to survive.

So if you have a really crappy diet and you have low energy all the time, that will be a physical quadrant issue.

One of the things that Steve Myrick said on his deathbed to my father was very interesting to me. My dad was. My dad was talking to him and he said, you know, you've built all these houses, you've earned all this money, you've helped all these people, blah, blah, blah. And he said.

What good is having a million dollars when you don't have any health?

How many people get to the end of their road like Steve did, to have an aha moment? Now, Steve was a good man, and I know he went to a good place, but how many people would actually have the ability to dig in deep and discover the fact that, hey, I can't take it with me? The Egyptians tried, failed. They did. That's right.

You see, I mean, I guess there's no way to know for sure, but.

Well, it was still left. It was still left in the. Still left in the tomb. So it was there, right? Yeah. It's kind of like trying to put a ball through a crack in a elevator. Door or something. You're only gonna get a little bit on the other side.

So I guess the gold didn't disappear when they got put in the top.

Not at all.

Right.

But Steve told my dad, he said, what good is it to have a million dollars and no health? That's always stuck with me. And that's actually the time, the point in time. And it changed my perspective on what it is I was actually pursuing and why I was pursuing it. Right. When I was coming out of homelessness, I needed to get shelter, I needed to get food. That's what I needed. Right. What I wanted was just to be stable. Right? And then that want turned into a new need, and that need turned into a want, and so on and so forth. So it's repetitive nature. So going over them again, internal, emotional, spiritual, going over the external, physical and financial. Out of those quadrants, I would dare say that all conflict comes.

Identity struggles, financial struggles, health struggles, relationship struggles. All of them come. All of them come out of one of those four quadrants.

So conflict is a very, very important lesson. See, I see now why you've been telling me that for a long time. You're like, dude, conflict's a pretty important one because we have, like, like eight lessons or nine lessons on conflict. We have the quadrants we're going through right now.

We have.

But then we also have, you know, filters and ways of dealing with conflict and all these different things. And to be honest with you guys, like, as we were going through the curriculum, when we first started planning all this content, you know, I was looking at that, I was like, why do you have so much stuff on this conflict thing? I don't even really understand it. And I don't understand. You know, I've always thought of it as like an interpersonal thing, but I'm starting to grasp now, like, especially as we talk about this, why it goes so much deeper. It is a pretty fascinating topic.

Well, conflict, if you think about, it's a lot like taxes and dying. There's no way around it. You're not going to be able to avoid it. You're not going to be able to overcome it without a technique or a thing. And I find if you'll look at the top 1% or the top producers in the world, all of them have become flexible and proficient at overcoming, challenging, and building away from conflict. All of them.

So the source of the majority of your struggles in your life are arguably all going to come from conflict, which is when your expectations do not meet your reality.

That's Exactly. Right.

All right. That's a pretty succinct way of putting it.

Right? I mean, it's. It's about as clear as you can as we can make it now. At the same time, when you deal with conflict well, you get rewarded with opportunity. When you deal with conflict poorly, you get rewarded with a second chance to go through the same conflict all over again. Right? So what we want to do is we want to identify where conflict comes from, which is kind of where the quadrants even come from. Then you want to identify what's going to be the best solution for you based on your personality style, your experience, your mentorship level, meaning people that are mentoring you to begin to learn how to deal with conflict. If you think about it, on one of the last episodes we talked about how we had a conflict, that I was really mad at you because I wrote. Spent two days writing content on conflict. On conflict, ironically. And then only to find out that I wrote two days on conflict and content on the wrong stuff that we were doing for the following week. And so I get to start over. So then you and I have. And then kudos to you. Hey, man, I really want to talk to you. Can you give me a few minutes? We get on the phone, and the first thing out of your mouth is before you say a word. This is. This is you. Before you say a word, I just want to tell you I'm sorry. And I really wanted to be mad, and I couldn't be mad because the more and more you talked, you were like, look, it's my fault. I should have. I should have sent you the right stuff. I know that you look at things in a very, like, snapshot format. I sent you a snapshot. I sent you the wrong one, or I wasn't clear about it. That's on me. I dropped the ball and I really wanted just like, oh, I want to rip your head off, but I can't because you're being too damn mature.

You see what I'm saying? Yeah, but that's. But you doing that two years ago wouldn't have been possible. Yeah, like, it wouldn't have been part of your DNA.

I wouldn't have known any better.

Well, yeah. And then because of that, you would have unfortunately given me the opportunity to want to rip your head off.

Well, right, because I would have. I would have. Right. Instead of me coming at it from a perspective of accountability and. Okay, how did I help? Cause this issue, which is where I came at it from two years ago or four years ago or whatever, I would have come at it from. I'm so pissed that he did this. He got the wrong content. Why did he go and which honestly, still, yesterday was my first knee jerk reaction. I was, I was like, I'm so frustrated. He's wasting all this time. But then I was like, all right, how did I contribute here? Because there was clearly something lost in communication. And so I was like, okay, you need to come at this from a standpoint of accountability for what you did wrong. Because the truth is, is if you had made everything clear to him, that then we wouldn't be sitting here right now. Exactly. And so I've learned over the last.

Few years that's where dealing with conflict allows for growth. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? The vast majority of the people would not come at it from that angle, from that way. They wouldn't have come at it from that direction. Which shows growth within you from previous conflicts and previous things that you've learned and all the different conversations we've had about other conflicts between you and girls that you've dated, you and your parents, you and me, you and your little brother. Like, you see what I'm saying?

And I had a big history of just. I'm a very naturally quick to just debate and attack and be like. Be like, dude, you did this wrong. It is my natural tendency. So I've had to learn how to, like, get that out of my system by myself while I'm isolated and, you know, yell at the air instead of the person and then take a step back and say, okay, take a deep breath now let's figure out what I did wrong. Because there's almost always you had a part in it. And if you go, matt, even if you didn't, if you come at it, attacking the other person, it's almost never going to end. Well, yeah, it.

Just to be sure, obviously I'm, you know, in this particular situation, I'm not going to want to create content that's not being created. In fact, guys, I'll give you a heads up on how we actually create content. A little behind the scenes action. Yeah, sure. So this is how we create conflict.

Content.

Content. We create content and conflict, apparently at this moment in time. But at this rate, you as the audience, you as the person who has a need, a life mastery need from any of the eight pillars of life that we've talked about several times on other shows, submit a question. That question typically gets filtered through Connor. And then he'll typically come to me and say, hey, look, here are five or Six concepts that the audience is asking about or the tribe's asking about. How can we best, like, facilitate that? Or these are questions that came up at previous live events with previous coaching sessions or previous life strategy sessions. And we take that information and that turns into conflict, Right?

Not conflict, because we have. One of the things I really like about working with you because before I worked here, I was doing a digital marketing agency working with local businesses. The thing I like about working with you is you have just this robust curriculum and there's a lot to pull from. So from as a content marketing minded person.

It'S very easy to come up with and plan a lot of content. Like we have the podcast that we can do two days a week. We have the three separate YouTube videos that we do, whiteboard lessons, face to face and Q and A. You teach so many different concepts that even right now, where at the time of this recording, we're in the very early stages of building our tribe and building our audience.

Even for right now, we have a lot of things to draw from and we just want to teach that in the best way possible. Yeah.

And we've been trying to organize it the best way we can. I just want to mention the fact that, like, even this one concept, this one concept we're spending, really, by the time you dissect it from everything we've already shared on this particular podcast.

This particular lesson is a two day lesson.

Well, right. And that's why the majority of conflict, like we said, we have like over 10 lessons on this. This is actually, I'm pretty sure, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a core part of what we actually teach at our live events and in our online school.

It's unique to us. So out of the curriculum that we have, there are an abundance of modules and a bunch of concepts. We organize them in a step by step nature. So you do step one before you do step two, and you do step three before you do step four. Right. Okay. And we did that intentionally because I want to be able to lead somebody out of where they're at to where they're going, period. Okay. There are things that I've learned along the way from other folks and other books and other resources and other mentors, and we give total credit to those folks that I learned that information from. There's other concepts that I've learned from those folks that I feel like at the time I learned them, they were pivotal. But as I matured, I felt like that they could be strengthened or improved. And so we did that. And there's other lessons, like the Quadrants of Conflict. That is uniquely a concept from the journey principles and from myself that came out of my own life and trying to filter out something.

I just like that we connect all of these concepts that all the mainstream influencers are talking about and all the high level things like mindset and the stuff that already has tons of books written on it. But then we also have the concepts like this, like you're saying, that are original. Our goal and our mission is to distill life mastery into the most simplified yet robust curriculum possible so that we can literally give you a step by step from A to Z to get to, from where you are today to where you want to go. So I love it. I'm huge on everything we're doing here.

Yeah, I mean, we're building this curriculum and content, stuff like that. We're trying to make sure it's actually beneficial. I don't want people to waste time. I'm not a scholastic guy, so I don't believe in big thick manuals and stuff like that and a glossary of definitions and terms. And I believe in practicality. I believe. Can I actually apply this? Right. And speaking of that, one of the interesting things that actually happened at that live event that I did with the Warrior Reset years ago where I met John and met a bunch of other people, where I uncovered using the quadrants there, it turned into something that I didn't even expect. And here's the assignment I gave everybody in the audience. I said, look, I want you to take these four quadrants and I had them listed on that sticky pad. Emotional, spiritual and physical, financial. And I said, do me a favor because you know I love them.

I'm sure you're ranking on a scale of 1 to scale of 1 to.

10, how well do you think you're doing in that area? In other words, how well do you think not. How much conflict do you have in that area? 1 to 10. But how fulfilled or how successful are you in that one area? Okay. And here's what I stumbled on by accident. So I went around the room and I said, well, my emotional pillar even right now. So I'll do this, we'll do this on air. Here, grab a pen. There's a pin. All right, for those of you guys on YouTube, I just throw my highlighter because he can look in yellow. And for those on podcast, I just throw my pen.

I will say, last time, last time we did an interactive thing like this, it wasn't necessarily so well, Received. So we want to make sure that it's. We're sticking to the content, but go ahead.

Yeah, no worries. So you're on a scale of 1 to 10, you look at your emotional and you say how well am I doing there? So I'm going to put an 8. I feel like I'm doing pretty well emotionally. Okay. On my spiritual quadrant, I feel like I'm doing a nine. I feel like I'm doing pretty well there. And on the physical thing, I'm in pretty good shape. I got a couple, couple pounds I'd like to shred off and that's just me being super picky. So I'll put a seven and then I'll do financial. On the financial, I'm doing pretty good. Okay, now what numbers did you come up with?

Not good.

Okay.

Not good in any of them.

Alright, so you have a. What I see across from me is a 4, a 2, a 5 and a 3. Without going into which ones they are. Let me ask you this question.

Do you ever struggle with anxious thoughts or anxiety?

Yes.

Okay.

Quite a lot.

Right. So here's what I stuck. Here's what I stumbled on by accident.

I actually said by a show of hands, who got X number? You know, I think I did it like 3 times x number in each of the quadrants. Like, you know, who got a 3 in this quadrant? Who got a 10 in this quadrant? I did that.

What I discovered was is if you have two quadrants that are below a five, then you're probably pretty frustrated in your life. There's a sense of frustration. If you have two areas that are kind of high, great. You got two areas that are kind of low. I'm frustrated. If you have three areas that are fairly low, then you probably have a sense of anxiety, A consistent sense of anxiety. Okay. If you have four areas that are low, then historically what happens is you probably have an identity crisis going on and there's probably been times where you've actually contemplated not being here any longer in the past.

Definitely I'm coming out of that quickly as I'm growing.

I think you ranked yourself low. But myself personally, but probably I appreciate the example to teach.

I like to be hard on myself because I mean, I look, here's the thing. Financially I like to look at myself as I have a ton of room to grow and honestly, for how ambitious I am, I. I'm practically nothing. So relative to other people, I'm probably higher than I gave myself.

But if you do the principles right.

The possibilities and the opportunities flow they come. They come second for sure. But yeah, no, totally with. That's what I'm getting at. So in this particular live event, we had three Marines who ironically, actually, I take it was two Marines and then one person from the National Guard stand up. And they had tears in their eyes because they had realized that entire time why they had been struggling. And they gave themselves grace in the moment. Turns out one of them had already planned on committing suicide that night.

Wow. This one little impromptu moment from.

So what happened then?

Well, essentially, when you look at your scores, if you see they're low enough.

Again, it brings awareness, and that allows you to go get help.

And it gives you clarity.

Gives you clarity. And it also. So here's the thing that I saw that.

One of the folks learned from it. They learned that it wasn't a them problem. They learned it was a life mastery problem. Right.

Like, I can clearly look at this and be like, okay, I see what I need to fix. I see what I need to work on. It's not just, I suck and my life sucks, which is this vague idea and concept which can be easy to tell yourself that over and over again, like, why won't things get better? Everything's falling apart. But if you. You can actually put a number to it and look at it on a piece of paper, you'd be like, okay, I see where I have work to do here. And I can look at this and say, okay, so if my financial is low or if my spiritual or emotional. Let's say that my spiritual is quite low, which it's the lowest out of all of them. If my spiritual is low, then I can go and study ways to be more spiritual. And that will raise over time.

Yeah. But, you know, look inside that bucket and see what's in that spiritual bucket. Faith, resilience, resources, replenishment, and connection.

So more prayer.

I should probably give myself a higher.

Ranking than more mindfulness. Yeah, right. More sense of peace. You see what I'm saying?

And that's why I ranked myself low because of my relationship with God and my faith with Christianity. I don't go to church really often.

I am a believer, but I don't read the Bible often or anything like that. So I gave myself a two because I was like, I don't really do that much, but I am at least, you know, I do believe in something. I do have that connection. So I. So that's why I gave myself that score.

Yeah.

I just feel like I have a lot of room to grow, and it's not Not. It's not easy, you know, sitting next to you where you're proud. Probably like a 9 or a 10 in that area. What are you, a 9?

Yeah.

Yeah, I figured, because this guy kills it in that area, so.

Well, it's. It's. You got to remember how my transformation happened.

Well, you've also had about 20 extra years.

I've had 20 extra years, and I've had what you like to refer to as thousands of burning bush moments.

Yeah.

I have seen divine things happen that are unexplainable. Right. And that changes things. I don't care who you are or what you believe. It just changes things.

But anyway, you also. You did tell me once then that you were like, dude, I think you might be harder on yourself than I was.

Oh, you are. You're very hard on yourself. But that's that. But I mean, these guys know it. They listen to the podcast on a regular basis. Right. So. But anyway, so this. This one thing, one way in which to do this is to actually just look at it globally and say, hey, look, this is how I'm doing globally.

Am I in a season where there's one item, like, for example, if you're really good in emotional, spiritual, and financial, but your physical life is not so good, your health's not so good, that means that's an area of focus. And you go study and learn up and get mentorship in that area to get you going.

And this is very similar. I mean, honestly, these four are not only quadrants of conflict, but they're also four of our eight pillars of life. And I asked you about that once. I was like, is there a relation there? And you basically said that these four quadrants come from the four pillars that actually cause the majority of conflict, essentially. Right? Something like that.

Yes. So the eight pillars of life that we talk about, the foundational four, are these the foundational? Those are the foundational.

I see. Okay. That makes a lot more sense to me now.

Everything's interconnected, and out of the other ones, like relationships and professionalism and your career and all that kind of stuff out of the other eight pillars all come out of. Which is why I call them the structural.

That makes total sense. I like that I never even realized that before because I had never looked at both pieces of content side by side.

Well, when I thought about how the quote unquote, the evil one whispers in my ear, it's typically in one of these four buckets. These four buckets. Whenever you have negative thoughts, out of those four buckets comes all the outflow and all the conflicts of life, you're not going to escape conflict. So the technique to learn is as to how to not even mitigate conflict, but how to learn to make conflict work for you rather than let conflict beat you up.

So if you're experiencing problems in your relationships, it's probably due to either an emotional issue, it could be financial. I've heard that majority of divorces or married couple fights are financial. Is that true?

I did hear that. Well, I would say that I haven't experienced that myself personally, but I am fully aware of all the marriages around me that have.

Because one person historically is more of a spender and one's more of a saver and one needs more security and one has a higher level of risk. And that's a whole nother show and a whole other topic we're getting into. But one other thing I want to get to the bottom of in the very short amount of time we've got left, is not only can you use that in the global setting, you can also use it in the individual settings. So if you were to draw the four boxes on a piece of paper, emotional, spiritual, under it, physical to the right of emotional. Right. And then financial to the lower part of physical. Okay. That gives you the quadrants. You can take any conflict you're trying to work with right now and actually write it down in the middle. So we'll. I'm trying to think of a conflict that I have. Right. All right. I have to go home and meet my father to look at my attic renovation to make sure I'm ready for my inspection. Okay. That's a conflict for me because I have to get home in enough time to do it and all that kind of stuff while we're recording shows. Okay. Okay. It's a minor conflict, nothing major. Okay. However, is it affecting me right now emotionally? Yeah, I'd say so. I'm kind of concerned about it. So I. So in this moment in time, in this one conflict, I'd rate myself a six. Is it gonna impact me physically? It could because I may get less sleep. So maybe a six or a seven. Okay. Financially, it's not really affecting me. Financially, that kind of stays. Okay. And then spiritually, it's not really affecting me spiritually.

So you're saying that basically any issue or actual real world scenario that you're having in your life right now, you can judge that particular scenario of how it'll affect the four areas and say, how is this affecting me in my emotional area, my physical or Physiological area, my spiritual area, or my financial area. Wow.

And by doing that, it gives you awareness, perspective. It gives you a lot more perspective on how to actually adjust your behavior to best overcome or work with that conflict by not being aware of it. Unfortunately, when you go to work with that conflict, what you're doing is you're just coming at it from a place of response only. For sure.

And we've talked about that. We've talked about why in the grow process, you know, the first thing and the thing that we spend the most time on is G, which is gain perspective. Because most people, they live very reactionary lives. They'll live lives based on habit and they'll wake up every day as if it's just based on their last. And it's very important to make sure that you are basing things on your future instead.

Totally. I mean, one of the things that I love, Ronald Reagan actually had this quote. I'm gonna read it verbatim so I don't screw it up, but I just love it resonates with me big time. Peace is not the absence of conflict. It's the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

Peace is not the absence of conflict. It's the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means. I would go so far as to say that Life mastery is not about the absence of conflict, but it's about having the strategy to deal with it.

That's why we're Life mastery made simple.

That's right.

That's it.

Amen. All right, guys, I hope that gives you a quick snapshot into the quadrants of conflict. Don't, don't fret. We're going to keep. We're going to continue this conversation.

We have a whiteboard lesson on it.

With a whiteboard lesson on it as well. We're also going to continue the conversation in the next podcast. We're going to continue on with the conversation about conflict. So make sure you stay tuned, you stay connected. If you have Questions, questions@journeyprinciples.com if you need any of our free resources, it's Journey Principles backslash resources. Journeyprinciples.com excuse me.com has messed that up, man. You would go for some free ebooks and subscribe and I've been messed up. Anyway, we love you. We're praying for you. We think you're amazing and just keep fighting and keep going. We'll talk to you again on the next Turning Principles. Take care, guys. Bye.

See you guys.

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.