How to feel comfortable with confrontation

Dealing with confrontation is a very important topic to survive in our everyday society. We can be faced with confrontation in different daily scenarios, regardless of whether this is at work, at home or even with strangers in a social setting. The word confrontation is often associated with an almost passive aggressive tone, instead of being regarded as a normal occurrence that we need to address and learn how to deal with. 

In this post I want to share with you and help you navigate confrontational conversations based on my personal experiences. Because there are certain tools around confrontation that would help you do that in a better way and allow you to gain more understanding around it, especially if this is something that you’re struggling with. 

What is confrontation?

Let’s first of all talk about what our understanding of confrontation is. The type of confrontation we will be discussing today is the ability to confront the way you are feeling in different scenarios and feel comfortable in it. For example, this could be at dinner at a restaurant, deciding not to complain if there is something wrong with your meal or not acknowledging receiving bad service over the phone. You get the idea and I am sure that at some point in your life you have been faced with a situation where you have decided to go down the spectrum and avoid ‘confrontation’ by not bringing up your dissatisfaction. 

These scenarios can really vary, including when it comes to business matters. Depending on how far along you are in your business journey you may struggle with confrontation on a different level. For example, you may struggle to turn down your best friend or tell them that you can’t work with them in a certain way when you have before because truthfully you are not as comfortable with it now, it may not serve you or may negatively impact your business. Similarly, some may struggle with quoting friends that you have already done favours for before and you know they would expect a discount or, in some cases, even expecting your service or product for free! When your business is still small and growing, and your experience with dealing with these situations is fairly limited, then it’s likely that you would feel conflicted and confused at times. After all, you want to avoid confronting your friends and the idea of potentially damaging your relationship, but at the same time you want to remain true to yourself and your business and stand your worth. 

How avoiding confrontation is going to make you feel resentful

However, due to these fears, a lot of times you would just agree to whatever your friend is asking you for, especially if you have the tendency to either consciously or subconsciously be a people pleaser. Accepting a bad offer for yourself because you just don’t want to deal with the implications of confronting that set friend. But as your business evolves with time and you keep making the same compromises, you start feeling resentful and annoyed that you are doing extra work for no reward. Eventually, you go into this cognitive dissonance of making yourself feel like it was your decision in the first place.

I did this for a very long time, especially as someone who has been in business for a while and has been in quite masculine environments. I have experienced being around very aligned people that don’t have a problem with confrontation or speaking their truth fully without people pleasing, you start feeling that not being okay with it is a sign of weakness and you just pretend that it’s all okay. Or even feeling as if deciding to express your disagreement and confront your friends or business partners would be seen as a weakness. Think about this and dig really deep down and have no shame about the way you are feeling, find how you truly feel about the times you have decided to turn a blind eye and just avoid confrontation. I’m sure this will resonate with a lot of people, and if you dig deep enough, it would probably resonate with you as well. This as mentioned is a few examples, which can be applied to so many scenarios day-to-day and in business.

The best way to deal with confrontation

What my message to you today is that you need to learn and understand that it’s okay to say ‘no’. It’s okay to have your boundaries and it’s okay to turn down suggestions that don’t align with yourself or your business. And I promise you that doing this will actually serve you more and learning how to deal with these situations will help you get more in from the things that you really want. Learning when to say ‘no’, knowing what you want and why you want it is crucial for your personal and professional development. The first thing I want you to realise around confrontation is that if you struggle with it or you notice that you procrastinate making decisions that involve confrontation, all of this evolves from a place of fear. The reason is that because we haven’t acted on it before and we weren’t feeling aligned with confrontation at the time, we don’t feel like we would be in control if we decide to do it in the future and also from a place of fear possibly that we will be then rejected or gaslit. We feel like our inexperience in dealing with confrontation is going to make the situation worse and eventually make the matters worse than they seemed. This would then result in us feeling that it would have been better if we just said nothing and just accepted whatever we were asked to do in order to avoid the awkward situation again. 

But the truth is that unless you try to stand your ground and get yourself into these confrontational situations, you are not going to get any better at it. It’s literally like growing a muscle. Unless you embrace it and be very vulnerable with it, you will remain in a constant struggle with the discomfort of it. Embracing the circumstances and giving yourself the time to just try to figure it all out and navigate it, while giving yourself compassion and sympathy, is key to evolving and becoming better at dealing with confrontation. Especially if you are a very deep thinker or feeler, give yourself an hour or day to come back to something. I have definitely struggled with this a lot in my life but with time everything can be overcome and evolved. 

Be compassionate and patient with yourself

It’s key that you really give yourself compassion in the sense that it’s almost like you are training your ten year-old self. The reasons why you may have felt that you haven't been able to be confrontational before, or just confront your feelings, is because you could have been gaslit in your life. What I mean by that is you could have maybe had the courage and have been brave enough to express the way something has made you feel but instead of being met with understanding, you have been told that you were wrong about feeling like this. Perhaps you have been told that that wasn’t the intention or that you are overreacting and you shouldn’t be feeling the way you do. At that moment you are being gaslit and your experiences have been invalidated, which is not okay in any way. 

As someone who is really aligned with astrology I believe that our signs really have something to do with our personal quality of being a people pleaser. I have had a lot of detailed readings from Eastern astrology, which is not quite the same as what we see in the Sunday paper. There are actually 14 different houses about understanding how the universe fully aligned when we were born with who we are in lots more senses instead of just one that our personality is meant to be based on. In my readings, I have a big prevalence of water signs which means that I am naturally very empathetic and nurturing. What I want you to know about this is that people with this kind of struggles have their strengths coming from a different quality. Their strengths come from a place of how we will be very good at reading people in such layered emotion. I relate to this so much as I read so much in emotion especially as I mentor people, I feel very deeply and I feel chaotic in emotion. I am a very outwardly confident person, arising in Scorpio. I'm a go-getter with my moon in Leo but at the same time I am birthed in water with my mercury in Cancer and with my sign being Cancer. Just a side note and as much as I also believe in ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ when you look into the depths of ancient astrology I for sure believe it has influence in people.

Learn to use the strength in your weaknesses

The truth is that my superpower is intuition and I've never really understood it before in my life. I've only understood it in the last year and actually started owning that about myself. But I have the ability to mentor all my clients in a way that I can read everything they are going through and all their emotions and provide them the technique on how to deal with that scenario to get the best outcome for themselves. That’s the benefit of me feeling so deeply and very sensitivly at times. Earlier in my life I didn’t understand how to utilise this to my advantage and it has probably done me a disservice as I have been influenced with societal opinions of ‘being sensitive and emotional’ as a woman to be a weakness in business. Being full of emotions when it came to arguments or confrontation or just standing in my power or my truth, I almost felt myself feeling that I couldn't really control the emotions. I would end up crying or tearing up or even feeling like I just lost my thought pattern. I didn't know what was coming next and therefore I then banked that in my toolbox. But when you realise that neglecting your feelings isn’t going to serve you in the long run, especially if you're in a journey of growth or you are a business owner and you are growing it, you really have to challenge the growth in these scenarios.

And with time as you are growing and as you understand yourself, you are going to stop feeling the way you did when you were 10, 15, or in your twenties. The reason why you feel like you just divert from confrontation could be because of previous trauma, or it could just be your personality and how you are and how you're made and that's also okay. But what isn't okay is if we constantly people-please and we have all this expectation of why did they take advantage of us? Why did they do that and why didn't they realize that that is your expectation of how they should behave now in that moment. And that's where I would ask you, are you expecting them to believe something that we actually haven't portrayed, while in our previous behavior we haven’t managed to portray our boundaries?

How do we move forward and evolve from a place of complacency?

So the answer to understanding how we move through this is firstly by accepting it and being okay about it. Secondly by educating ourselves, read books on the topic and really do the work around understanding. Journaling is another powerful tool that I would recommend for this and I always get my clients to journal as well as part of their development. And with time, by growing that muscle, you will start seeing how being in certain scenarios gets easier.

For instance, taking a top back to Zara is no issue now, or talking to a brand new client about your rates seems a lot easier. Things like sharing with your best friend about the way that they have hurt you is one of the harder ones but sometimes that is because you care so deeply and that the outcome has more weight on it.

So in reality it all comes from a place of fear and you are scared that if things don’t go the way that you would love it to, you might lose that person or damage your relationship with them. That is generally the human nature around confrontation. It isn’t so much about the in the moment situation, it is about the outcome that we are frightened of. So be kind to yourself on the journey and keep going, when It feels harder you just are growing into the next level for you but stick with it.

Here is a very important thing I want you to understand is that the people, clients, customers, family, friends, partners, that truly are willing to listen and not gaslight you, and accept your feelings and your opinion, boundaries, those are the people that are meant to be with you, they're meant to be in your life.

And I think the more that you align to yourself and to your worth, confrontation gets easier because you truly know that you can walk into a situation and that if you end up crying, that is not a weakness (which actually often goes the more you build the muscle). It's just who you are and that's okay.

The more you do this the less and less you will need to have these conversations with people that are close to you, because you have already set your boundaries. You won’t need to explain anything else and you won’t need to reiterate this again. There are no gray boundaries, only black or white and that's okay. And oddly you’ll find people with your best interest actually appreciate that and they love it when they know where they stand in your life. Clients love it when they know where they are with you.

Humans in general want to be heard, seen and understood, so if we keep procrastinating around a conversation, that's a detriment to the outcome of it. Because in those moments, you are not serving what that person needs either, regardless of whether they are a friend, a customer or family member.

Of course do take the time you need around it but always make sure that you are working out of your heart, and really try to remove fear, ego, and your old back up computer (past experiences) out of your decision making. Try to take control over it and don’t let it drive you into thinking about negative outcomes that could occur from the situation.

Speak from your heart because there is no negative outcome when you are working from your heart as all you are doing is being your true and honest self, in your true and beautiful way. Speaking your truth about what you need and what you see in others. And beyond that the outcome is that anyone who is meant to be with you and loves you, or understands what your skill set and your gifts are and appreciates them, they will still be with you. You've got this!