Do you avoid conflict at work and in your life like it's the plague?

Today we're going to break down why we don't like conflict, what we can do about it, and how it can actually help us win big.

Let's go.

Helping you win in your work life so that you're winning in the rest of your life, I'm Ken. This is the Ken Coleman Show glad you're here.

Okay, let's dive into this. I think this is a counterintuitive thought for a lot of you. I think some of you're going, Ken, I think you're off your meds.

Why in the world should we like conflict? Why should we embrace conflict? How in the world can conflict help me win in my work life?

Well, let's take a stab. Give me a few minutes. Let's see if we can make the case.

So first, why is avoiding conflict a bad thing? How does that hamper us? I think most people want to avoid conflict and we're going to get into why in a moment.

But let's just first take this on to say that it is a bad thing and it seems to be good. It seems to be healthy. It seems to be right.

But it can be a bad thing. So here's why if you are constantly looking to avoid conflict, you are constantly suppressing your emotions, your opinions, you're just constantly pressing things down.

And that means you're not being authentic. You walk around avoiding sharing emotion, sharing opinion. Now here's what happens. When you bottle that all the time, you essentially will begin to resent everyone else and resent yourself because you don't like who you are as you're constantly tamping something down.

Did you know that bottling up your emotions increases your risk of premature death and even cancer?

It leads to bitterness, resentment, negativity. It also causes feelings of loneliness or depression.

You become a fraud, you know you're a fraud, even if no one else knows that you're a fraud. And this begins to truly eat away at your mind, your emotions and folks, our body,

reaps the negative benefits. So just understand there are real health implications here. Not just a mental health side. I think everybody thinks about well, I'm dealing with this, this and this and this. I'm thinking this all the time. And I don't share it. But it has physical effects on our bodies as well.

So why do we avoid conflict? Especially when the stakes are actually high. Now let me be the first to say that I used to be a guy that would jump into conflict on anything, anytime, anywhere.

But if the stakes are high, that causes us to want to invest our thoughts, our feelings and dive in. If it doesn't matter five years from now, don't do it. That was one of the great lessons my mother and I shared with Stacey and I earlier in our marriage.

She was talking about their relationship and said, you know, we got to pull realize if this that we're arguing about isn't going to matter five years from now, let's stop. Let's get over it. This is nonsense.

Now that I agree with. But if the stakes are high and we still avoid conflict, why is it? I think one is the fear of disappointing others.

We want to be liked. We want to be loved. We want to be respected. And so we don't want to disappoint others. That's one key reason why that we will avoid conflict.

The second is a fear of being rejected. There's a lot of emotional pain here when we got right.

I'll use pickle balls and analogy because I'm obsessed with pickle ball.

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