Have you ever felt frightened and scared to approach a difficult conversation? Perhaps, you have a need inside your mind and a burning desires or life requests that you would like from your life partner or family members but you are so scared to even bring it up because you don’t want to jeopardize the relationship.
I have met so many people and my past self included who expected other people to just know how to treat you. We have a tendency to expect other people to also change without us having to have a conversation about it or sometimes, it’s the opposite! You might be on the other end of the spectrum who are making all these confrontational conversation and it ends up in argument that leaves both of you feeling hurt or resentful.
As humans we cannot survive or thrive without relationships, we have relationship with our grab and uber driver, our community, the lady at the grocery store, our boss and colleagues, relationships is one of the strongest pillar of the human life. it’s a leg on the table that we cannot live without and for as long as we relate with others, there’s going to be some points where we disappoint each other, get into conflict and doing things that we basically didn’t mean to.
I believe that at the core of every human, we just want our needs to be met. We just want to be love and accepted, respected and honored. This is why having a care-frontational conversation is so important.
What is carefrontation you might wonder? Carefrontation conversation is a hard, difficult, confrontational conversation done with love and care. As I like to put it, it’s truth wrapped in chocolate because you really want to maintain this relationship or at the very least, leave it with grace and compassion.
Most of the time, we get into argument because there’s a need inside of us, we want to feel fulfilled and somehow, we are expecting either a company, our colleague, our boss, our life partner, our kids to fulfill that.
So much of the energy is put outside of ourselves which is why it’s so important to own it, come back to you and take responsibility of your life and your energy. You can only master you, everyday you wake up not to learn how to master other people but master your own life because you are the hardest, most challenging and most rewarding energy to master. Even as a couple, it starts with you first. When you master yourself, the rest truly follows.
Here are some tips for you to begin your carefrontation journey.
Choose to Be Right or Be Happy
Many people approach a conversation wanting to be heard more than to understand other people. Stephen Covey says, ‘Seek first to understand then be understood.’ This is a great check in for you to ask more questions, get to understand the other person in their shoes and remember, this is not about pointing fingers at who’s right or wrong. When you get into that energy, the conversation often goes down the spiral because we lose touch with win-win attitude.
It’s your choice to choose, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?
Express Your Appreciation
As humans, it’s so easy for us to criticize ourselves and others – for some of you, choosing to express what is wrong in the relationship is much easier than sharing your gratitude and appreciation. Perhaps, this person might have hurt you in the past and so you hold this grudge and this idea and perception of this person quite strongly to the point where every conversation that you have about this person becomes more about fixing things, what’s wrong, criticize and it just has no real deep meaning to it.
Before you provide feedback or request a change in any relationship, remember to first express what you appreciate this person for or maybe what you respect this person for. Don’t keep all the goodies to yourself, share them out to this person even if you feel awkward or you have judgment that they might not appreciate it, this is more about you and for you than it is about others.
Giving Feedback & Making Requests
The next logical step is for you to make a kind request and share your thoughts and what you need. It takes courage to ask for what you want from a space of love & care. It’s easy to ask for what you want from fear, anger and sadness. Make sure to take care of your energy well, think through clearly about what it is that you really want from this conversation and make a request.
You never know how your words can influence someone’s life and stays with them, eventhough you might have this inner voice that says, he or she have spoken so badly to me in the past why do I need to make the kind gesture first … these are some valid inner voice questions so remember your own personal WHY.
Practice this, apply this in your own life because I know you can do it. I believe in you.