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Show of hands -- how many of you prefer to avoid confrontation? Even when you hear the word, it makes you nervous, your heart starts to race, your palms get sweaty, you can feel your muscles contract, and you become hypervigilant and look for the exit? Where's the beauty in that, you may be thinking?
To confront means to face in challenge, to encounter. But many of us experience it as meaning, to argue, to fight, to get bullied or wounded, to barely survive a lose-lose or lose-win situation in which we expect to get hurt. Because the psyche serves to keep us safe at all costs, the natural tendency is to run from confrontation. Unfortunately the cost gets very high if by avoiding challenging encounters we seldom get our needs met.
Over a lifetime of having stronger personalities confront us in ways that have been threatening or hurtful, we've probably never learned the skills of confronting others about what we don't like and what we want instead in a direct, non-violent, and elegant manner.
This lack of skill creates a lot of passive aggressive or stubbornly self-sabotaging behavior as we try to get our needs met.
Recently I've been looking at the Center for Non-Violent Communication's model for elegant confrontation. There is calm and centered beauty in it's two simple parts: empathic listening and honestly expressing. For both parts, the NVC way is to observe without defensive judgment, to hear / speak objectively about feelings and needs, before entertaining / making a reasonable request for a change.
Another way of saying this is to stand gently in your own truth -- to walk in beauty through the fear of sharing how you feel and asking for what you want. Confrontation can be a gift of commitment to yourself, and to a difficult relationship. Living the beauty of non-violent confrontation is to be living in trust. It's a growing trust in our own abilities to recover from others' inelegant responses, and an allowing of faith in the fact that they have their own feelings, needs, hurts and fears they struggle with as well.
How might you stand gently in your truth and walk in beauty through your fear today?
What? What do you mean, fear is good?
Fear is a mind-body-spirit communication intended to keep us safe. Fear tells us to flee from the tiger, fight off the mugger, or freeze all your financial accounts when you suspect identity theft. Those are the right actions for the circumstances. Fear is just the kick start.
Fear is helpful when we respond as it intends us to -- with rapid critical thinking assessment of the situation and our capabilities.
Fear runs amok when we react to it emotionally -- with hypervigilence, panic, unnecessary defensiveness, anger, or hiding.
Long ago a book came out with the title: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. I find my counseling and coaching clients who try to follow that prescription get stuck in being afraid of feeling fearful. Afraid of feeling. As if feeling itself were the problem.
Feeling is only the messenger. The message is: decide what you need to do, trust your ability to do it or get the assistance you need, and take action now. The magic of that formula is that the more we apply it, the less fearful of fear we become.
How's your life going? Got everything flowing smoothly? Getting everything you want or expect from all the effort you're making?
No? Hmmm. When we feel like we're spinning our wheels, hitting a glass ceiling, or running into roadblocks, we need to step back and take a hard critical look at three factors:
- what specifically is not working the way we think is should
- how are our own actions, thoughts, beliefs, or feelings getting in the way
- where exactly do we have leverage (opportunity+control) for making something shift
From a coaching perspective, self-sabotage is simply the application of the least effective tool or process for the desired goal. It's not a moral failing; it's just being in a pattern that isn't working.
But before we can assess the three critical factors, the key to undoing self-sabotage is to let go of all attachment to continuing to do things the way we've always done them. And the attachment to any belief that if we just keep doing what we've always done that someday, somehow, something will magically change.
You know the definition of crazy?
Doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over and over again, and expecting a different result.
Why be stuck in crazy when a little coaching can provide you with new tools, help you customize new processes, and give you enthusiastic support to get your life flowing smoothly, and get back on track for getting what you want.
The essence of coaching, I think, is in helping clients reframe perspectives that no longer serve your highest purpose or greatest need. Often that will call into question ways of thinking and feeling that you have held as true or real. For some, re-ordering these beliefs can be temporarily unsettling.
Truth and reality have many levels and colors. As children, many of us were taught that there is only one Truth, and one Reality. As we grow into adults we learn that what was presented to us as the one Truth or Reality was our parents’ or society’s explanation, but that what was unknown when they formed their truth and reality has since been replaced or augmented by new knowledge.
If we’re lucky to be well educated or if we are naturally open to the process of critically thinking for ourselves, we easily reframe the perspectives about truth and reality we’ve been taught in our early years.
But if we’re committed to sustaining a certain explanation, it’s much harder to reframe old, outmoded, dysfunctional views into new, more growthful, more healthy perspectives.
In coaching, we ask: what belief or assumption are you committed that might no longer be the version of truth you want to invest in? What reality have you been committed to that you now see has to change?
Change itself necessarily implies that there is an old version of reality and a potentially new one, an old truth and a new one. If this were not so, there could never be any change at all.
Growth by it’s very nature is change.
What is the central truth you are committed to right now? How does that commitment shape your choices, your current reality? How might you need to change that explanation of truth in order to have the choices and reality you really want?
