How to handle "on-the-spot" conflict

This episode is about dealing with conflict, but it’s not about conflict with the people in your life, it’s about on-the-spot conflict that arises out of nowhere and makes your blood boil instantly.

When you know you should say something but you don’t because you’re too scared it will lead to being punched. The alternative of holding it in isn’t much healthier. 

 Listen to find out how to handle on-the-spot conflict, so you walk away at peace with yourself.

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Transcript

Welcome back to the You Are Worth Knowing podcast.  We have officially reached 2, 500 listens. That is huge. So, I wanted to take a second and thank every single one of you who listened and shared, and sent me messages regarding any of the podcast episodes that I have posted. thus far. It's been an incredible journey and I'm excited to continue this with you.

So this week I want to talk about conflict. I have a feeling that that is something that you also try to avoid as much as possible. Conflict and social anxiety do not go hand in hand by any means ever.  We are the types of people who will just leave. Ghost, do anything in our power to avoid getting into a confrontation,  which is why today I want to talk about how you can do that and still feel at peace with yourself.

It's not easy. It's a process. It's a journey. It takes effort, but there are some things that you can do. So my whole life, I, again, as I said, did everything to avoid conflict. 

I've avoided uncomfortable conversations because I just didn't want to upset anybody. I'm okay with being upset and disappointed at others, I am not okay with others being disappointed or upset with me,  for fear that they wouldn't like me anymore. 

I mean, how dare I speak my truth and my opinions, right? I instead, for many years of my life, have allowed other people's truths and opinions to rule over mine. Even when those were damaging to the general well-being of society.

I stayed friends with people whose moral values I did not align with, just because I did not want to confront them with what I heard or saw from them. All because I was personally afraid of someone confronting me.

Now, these past few months, I've paused, reflected, and concluded that I can no longer hold my silence to avoid conflict. And this is something that I have aspired to for an entire decade, probably even more. 

And this was the last remaining piece of my personality, of my struggle, that I've wanted to work on so that I can grow into who I want to be. And I'm not talking about walking around and aggressively throwing punches at people when I disagree with them, but it means being confident enough in myself to not only say what I think but to also feel empowered to walk away from someone whose values are not aligned with mine foundationally.

I'm sure you have people like that in your life as well. But if we are to make a positive change in the world, we need to join the fight, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us.

And it comes down to just learning how to speak at the right moment in time properly. It's not about, you know, challenging people every single day and putting them down. It has nothing to do with that, right? It's just about standing up for what's right, especially when you see something, that doesn't align with your values.

While yes, it's uncomfortable, conflict does create the change that we all seek. So, let me tell you a little bit about what conflict meant to me, and how I've always approached it. Maybe it's my INFJ, highly sensitive personality, but I used to do whatever it took to just keep the peace.

I hated conflict so much that I tended to apologize even when I knew I was right, just so that it would go away. The conflict does not go away. It continues deep within us.

The internal dialogue gets so revved up that we can't stop overthinking the situation. We replay the discussion over and over and over in our heads with logical and reasonable comebacks, right? We always know what to say after the fact. When we've calmed down, we're like, Oh, I should have said that. Said that I should have known to reply with this.

And we end up hating ourselves for not having the courage to say those things at the right time. And it's been like that my whole life.

To be honest. I've never argued with a friend. Sure. I have put friends on. a shit list or I've ghosted them for a few weeks until I process the situation, but they were never aware of that. And for as long as I know, I've avoided every possible conflict at my own expense. The only exception is my family, my partner, my kids.

Those poor people have seen the worst of me,  but with anyone else, especially strangers, I usually backed off the moment that I felt the tension in the air. But recently, I came across this quote.

 📍 If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.

 And when I read that, I was like, whoa, why didn't I see this sooner? I thought I was the queen of self-awareness. Because of course, conflict doesn't magically disappear. It needs to find an outlet and we become that vessel. We become the outlet.

While this episode is about dealing with conflict, it's not about conflict with the people in your life. It's about on-the-spot conflict that arises out of nowhere and makes your blood boil instantly. When you know you should say something, but you don't because you're too scared it will lead to being punched.

But the alternative of holding it in isn't much healthier. So, I wanted to address, like, there has to be a balance between those two, right?  I want to walk you through how to handle on-the-spot conflict. So, you do walk away at peace with yourself.

Now, if you Google how to handle conflict, there are many, many articles, and they're excellent ones. And they all revolve around one core component. Whatever you do, do not bottle up your thoughts and emotions. Let the other person know, or else you will implode.

And that's something that can be very hard for most of us, especially if you have social anxiety. So this advice never really worked for me, because I always chose to bottle things up and take the hit.

So while there's a lot of good in those articles, don't take everything at face value. You need to assess your temperament, and your personality, and see where it fits. Um, but yeah, do not hold it in. That's the one consistent thing. But while I was going through the articles, I realized that none of them address on-the-spot conflict where you only have a few seconds to address the other person, or else the opportunity will be lost forever.

And it's not about making a good impression, especially if someone is doing something malicious or unjust. But it's about making sure that you say what you want to say, and you go home without feeling like you bottled things up and that it will eat you from the inside.

So the kind of conflict I'm talking about is not between you and your friends, family, roommates, or coworkers, but the one that's like a one-off and leaves you feeling wrecked and miserable because you weren't able to express yourself the way that you wanted to.

 📍 Hence the terminology on the spot conflicts. 

And yes, I just made it up. I think I'm not sure I didn't Google that, you guys can let me know if someone else came up with this term.  But personally, there's nothing worse for me than to walk away from someone and feel like I didn't put anything on the table or wasn't true to myself.

Simply because I wanted them to like me or not have a bad impression of me. Ugh. Yuck. Here are three immediate things you can do to give your brain space to think and react accordingly. I said accordingly because the first order of business is to make sure that your anger isn't on display.

You do not want to be emotional. You do not want to come off angry. People shut down at people who come at them. So, let's say you're being reproached or reprimanded for doing something that you think is within your rights, or that isn't disturbing someone else's peace, there are a few initial reactions, right, that can come out of this.  Maybe you're going to freeze and you're not going to know what to do and you're just going to hope that, you know, they're going to stop talking and everything is going to end and you can just go home.

Um, or you could go back on the offensive and yell at them and just not understand their standpoint.

Or have empathy for what they are saying because you're so, you know, you're trying to defend yourself. So you're just going for the attack. So that's, that's another reaction that you could have. But what I want you, to think about is to avoid both of those things. 

 📍 Instead, smile.

 Yes, it sounds counterintuitive, but think about it for a second. You're probably feeling anger, resentment, shame, embarrassment, you know, mostly negative emotions. You need to somehow push back against those. And it's hard to rationalize and to mentally walk yourself through things.

So smiling. Will center you it will help you stop for a second and it will also trip the other person up Because they're expecting a very different reaction from you They will not expect a smile and I don't mean it's sarcastic or evil grin More like a peaceful like try to calm yourself down and come back into your body. After you put up that smile and you've deflected their words, what do you do? 

 📍 You repeat what they said.  

Sometimes we need time to assess a situation and how we're going to respond to it. So, try to buy some time. You never want to say the first things that come to mind. Those are usually the ones that we regret the most.

Try to repeat as much as you can, as a statement, what they said to you. Level with them, so they hear what they told you. Some people will realize how unreasonable they are. In any case, once you say it back, I can almost guarantee you that they'll say more than just yes. 

They'll keep going. They'll give you more information. I assume that they have a lot that they want to say to you. And this buys you even more time to think about how you want to respond.

Okay, so now at this point, you've collected yourself, you're in a much more stable state of mind.  So now you can assess properly before reacting, right, before saying something. So the moment that the on-the-spot conflict arises, 

 📍 Make sure that you have talked to yourself first.

Ask yourself. Did I do something wrong? If yes, then explain what your thought process was in simple words without any emotional outbursts. So let them know this was your thought process that led to you doing something or saying something. If you didn't do anything wrong if you conclude, no, I didn't do anything wrong, go to the next question.

 Ask yourself, why does this person feel this way? Right, we're great observers, and we're very self-aware, so we can easily put ourselves in someone else's shoes. We can immediately figure out why this person was ticked off. 

Once you pinpoint what they're pissed about, address it in the way you would with a five-year-old. When my son has a full-blown tantrum and is coming for me, I immediately deflect by stating what he's feeling and why.  By defining emotion and labeling it, the person will feel immediately understood.

And usually, people back off when they feel understood. Usually, there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Someone is pissed, they feel violated, they're emotionally triggered. The best course of action is to make sure that they feel heard.

The last question that you can ask is how can you resolve this so you walk away unconflicted inside?

This is the trickiest question to answer, but by now you should feel more calm. And this is a part where you either choose to continue with. whatever it is that you were doing or saying that pissed the other person off. You know, you're standing your ground or you decide to apologize and stop and just remove yourself from the situation.

I often feel better when I apologize, but other times it makes me sick to my stomach because I didn't hold on to my principles. And sometimes I, unfortunately, let my mouth run ahead of my brain.

I don't know if that's a saying. And that's when, and that's what I want to avoid most of the time.

 I want to use an incident in the news to illustrate how this would work in the real world. A man was birdwatching in Central Park when he noticed a woman was walking her dog off-leash, which is against park rules.

So this man confronted her, walked up to her, and asked her to put the leash on the dog. Now imagine in this scenario that you're the woman and someone is reprimanding you on the spot for not following the rules. 

 Let's run through it. So, let's say you freeze, and to avoid escalating the situation, You smile at the man, which is, right, number one, you smile, and then you say, Hi, you want me to put a leash on my dog here in the park, right? That was step number two.

Repeat what they said. The man will probably say that it's against the park rules to have a dog off-leash, and he wouldn't feel comfortable if everyone was walking their dog this way. Now at this point, you should be asking yourself, did I do something wrong? Kind of, yes. You know, even though it's park rules, you might believe that there's nothing wrong because your dog is well-behaved and there's no one around.

In your mind, you're not doing anything wrong.

But you look at the man and you think, gee, he might have been attacked by a dog before that was off-leash, or his dog was attacked, which is why he's uncomfortable with dogs being off-leash. So you reply, stating, They're feeling, and say, I hope I'm not making you uncomfortable. He's an adorable dog and he stays by my side.

I know it's against park rules, but there's no one here and he loves running around.  You know, there's, there's many things that you can do, right? You can just put the leash back on, uh, if you're okay with that.  You can say what I just mentioned.

And, you know, at this point, you're asking yourself if it's worth engaging even more. You either apologize, so you put the leash on the dog and walk further away and maybe take it off again, or you stay off-leash. You stand your ground. So those are kind of like the two alternatives. Whatever you do, you do have to ask yourself, how important is it for you to win?

Is one of your principles threatened? Will you regret not saying anything? Only you know that. And this is like a minor thing, right, just a violation of like park rules, but there are some situations that could like really get you incensed and make your blood boil and it will be harder to be calm, smile, repeat what they're saying, but if you follow this formula, it will ground you and help you calm in a situation, but also stay calm.

But to not walk away with that anger and take it home and then take it out on your family because that's usually what happens. And that's not to say take it out on a stranger by any means. But if you have the tools to resolve it on the spot, you'll be so much better off.

The more you practice these steps, the easier it will be to respond appropriately. 

I tend to find these types of conflicts much harder to stomach than those with people I know. I can give myself time to think, cool down, and get back to someone I know. I can marinate my words for days before sharing them. With on-the-spot conflict, I don't have that luxury.

You don't have the luxury to marinate your words, to put things together in an eloquent way. The words have to find a way out on time, or else they will sit with you, and that is what you want to avoid at all costs. Now, hopefully, you're not running into too many of these situations, but try these steps out the next time and let me know how you feel.

I know this might not be the same on-the-spot conflict situation, but being online and getting a lot of hateful comments, I am so quick to type out immediately what my thoughts are. And I just want to trash them. I want to troll them back. I want to attack because I'm being attacked.  And then I delete the comment.

I walk away. I put it on paper. I don't send it. I sometimes save it. And then usually what happens, like 20 to 30 minutes later, I either forget, or I let out my emotion by writing it down. 

So if at some point this week you run into a conflict like this and you still, you know, have a hard time doing some of these steps, which is understandable, don't hold it in, go home and write your thoughts out. Please put it on paper.

Don't bottle your emotions.  Do whatever it takes to shake it off and just get it out of your body

Thank you for listening to today's episode on not avoiding conflict. Usually, it's about avoiding conflict.  It's also not about engaging head-on with it, but learning how to manage yourself during the process of that. So I hope some of these tips are helpful.

Let me know and I will see you here next week on the You Are Worth Knowing podcast.