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Radical Open-Mindedness

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Social conflict  is a part of any relationship on the planet between individuals or groups of people. In the age of globalization and media, we are especially attuned to these conflicts and often overwhelmed by the seemingly terrific magnitude of them. 

The question we will focus on today is: How can we make a better effort towards conflict resolution? 

In the 1970s, yes a long time ago, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann developed a model of conflict, describing conflict as “the condition in which people’s concerns are incomparable”. If the things which two people care about are opposed, then there is conflict. 

There are two ways to approach conflict according to the Thomas-Kilmann Model: 

1. Assertiveness

2. Cooperativeness

Assertiveness is the degree to which you wish to satisfy your own needs while cooperativeness is the degree to which you work to satisfy the other person’s concerns. 

Beyond this, there are 5 strategies to employ in any conflict, those of which I hope can shed light and prove useful in today’s turbulent social scene. 

  • Avoiding = sidestepping the conflict
  • Accommodating = satisfy the other person’s concerns at expense of your own
  • Compromising = find an acceptable settlement that only partially satisfies both people
  • Competing =  satisfy your concerns at the expense of others
  • Collaborating = find a win-win solution

We don’t even have to engage but if we do, then we need work to find a compromise or collaboration. They are the only two sustainable methods.

Avoiding will not solve anything. There is no “head-in-the-sand” model for finding solutions. So if you are to avoid, make sure that there is absolutely no way to find a positive outcome. Avoidance is a last-resort. Darryl Davis, an african american musician and activist, converts even the worst of us. He attends KKK rallies and has given countless talks and advice on the potential for even the most indoctrinated among us to radically change their minds. So before you deem someone or something as a lost cause, give them another look. 

Accommodating and competing. Think: Why does someone have to lose? We need to approach every conflict and every situation with a positive psychology. We need to think abundantly and optimistically, not win or lose. Be curious, not competitive. Our approach is often the outcome in everything that we do in our daily lives. If you dread the work day, it will be dreadful. If you are anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll be appropriately filled with anxiety. So if we approach a conflict with an idea of winners and losers, then there will be losers and those losers could be us. If we have an idea that people have to lose when they talk to us, who is really the loser?

Compromise. In Kentucky, there is a famous statesman by the name of Henry Clay. But he had a nickname too, “The Great Compromiser”. Clay brokered some of the most controversial deals in history and is regarded as one of the most influential leaders of his time. There are also many issues in our time as well that need skillfully addressed. Perhaps we should all tap into Clay’s mindset when we approach our conflicts. If we can approach every conversation with the intention to find common ground, we have a better chance of finding it. But if our approach is one of animosity, we will just as easily find that too. It is our moral duty to assume that another person is somewhat justified in where they are coming from. We have to give people a chance for them to give us one too. Compromise often requires a heightened sense of compassion. 

Lastly, the best turnout we can get is a win-win. A win-win situation looks like compassion followed by correction. Human conflict with race or socioeconomic disparity is a long and tragic story in western society. But there are heroes along that journey too.

There are people that led and progressed their relative times to a place of understanding and marked change. They did not do so with animosity or a scarce mindset. They did so with a sense of curiosity, courage and compassion. It takes courage to find a win-win solution where we can find love and progress.

The main problem with conflict, in my opinion, is our failure to delineate our beliefs from our identity. When someone disapproves of our opinions, we are quick to believe that they disapprove of who we are. But this is simply untrue. When someone doesn’t like our social media post, we assume that they dislike us or completely lack respect. Many then act the same in return. The importance of the ideas that we need to discuss are being undercut by immature personal attacks. Which is why we need to solve a lot of our conflict with ourselves before we can solve conflict with others. If we are not forgiving or compassionate towards our own mistakes or ignorance, we are led to condemn others likewise for their own. This cycle creates more conflict!

So the next time someone says something that provokes you, be mindful and analyze why you were provoked. And when you assume someone is so very wrong, examine why it is that you believe you are so right. An admittance of our own arrogance prevents us from being offensive while the mindfulness of our provocations keeps us from acting rashly. 

It is not often you find someone that is a renaissance person or well-rounded genius and expert. Most of us know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little. There is a high probability that they and you are ignorant to some degree about something. It could be race, it could be biology, it could be psychology, accounting, feminism, whales, trees, chess, or 19th century existentialist literature. You name it. There are things some people are familiar with and others are not. So we need to accept we do not have the full story of other people’s life experiences or education, and this disconnect could be the cause of even more conflict. 

We are always working on our own knowledge. Learning more, experiencing more, seeking more, earning more, creating more. So let’s seek not to condemn or compete, but to learn and teach with compassion and co-create a newer more positive mindset and achieve real progress. 

Dealing with the Undealt

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Intention is of key importance. Let’s use the example of a murderer.

Imagine you are the murderer.

To start, simply, you just murdered a person. Because they made you mad I guess and, in the raw spiraling emotion of that moment, you murdered them for whatever reason. Now, you feel bad and regret it, but you run from the scene. Uh oh. Naughty…

You spend days rolling inside with guilt, but surprisingly, there is no police knock on your door. Weeks go by and it becomes a cold case. Soon, you are well in the clear. You are the only one that knows what you did. 

What can you do, outside of turning yourself in, that can quell this feeling inside yourself?

One idea might be to throw yourself into community service. Perhaps helping enough people might mitigate the fact you are a killer. Or you could become a vigilante, hunting murderers in hopes that their justice also counts as your redemption. You might even become a cop bringing legal justice to the wrong doing in your community. There is an opportunity for you as a preacher or spiritual leader to bring life lessons of sin and wrongdoing to a congregation of people in your town. You may even just shove it down and become a regular person in the hopes that time will erase the feeling that resides deep in your gut. 

But despite all of these empty efforts, the feeling still comes up. That feeling still rises like a strong acid up your into throat and into your idle mind.

There is not a religious lesson here as much as there is a logical one, a psychological one: That we have to address our feelings straight on. We have to deal with our undealt, directly. We cannot dance around these feelings or they become even more inflamed and undealt with. Much like a garbage bag nobody wants to take out, these bad feelings begin to swell and smell and become more of a problem than they ever were originally. 

Dealing with the undealt has become a staple of fields like psychology and coaching for years. Unconscious forces as they are more familiarly known. Carl Jung, the famous early 20th century philosopher and psychologist used the analogy of our “shadow self”. He firmly believed through his experience that if we don’t accept all of us, we don’t really accept ourselves at all. 

So what are your shadow forces? Your undealt? How do we free those suppressed feelings and let them go?

Here are some ways that have worked for me, maybe they’ll help you too.

Talk to someone that you trust.

It is important to talk to someone that you can confide in like a best friend, family member, a coach or trainer or a therapist. This allows you to get it off your chest, and it is also to help them really help you and deal with root causes. Honesty out loud can be the cure itself. 

Gain some perspective.

There are plenty of books and movies that hit on these feelings. There are also adults that have lived these “scenes”, you could say. One of the hardest things that I have ever done is to devote some level of faith to the lessons I have learned from art and older people. Life is short, and older people know this, let them help you so you don’t make the same mistakes that they have. 

Find a way to talk to yourself.

This is the most important and the easiest step to take. It requires courage to ask questions or meet people, or to be vulnerable in front of others. Being upfront with yourself, though, is between you and you. For most of us, this is a required first step. Find a journal, take time in the park, go on a walk, sit down in the shower, turn off the radio in the car. Wherever you can be with your own thoughts, make it a point to understand yourself first. 

Make sure you are not doing good deeds to make up for a bad feeling you have inside. 

It is hard to build your future if you are always filling the holes of your past.

Live abundantly, discover your true intention, leverage others for progress and become more.

Immortal by Intention

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I believe that anyone can go from nothing to something. But I also know this is possible only if we are brave enough, at every crucial moment, to come to terms with our infinite process of becoming. Once we accept that we are in a state of constant transformation, we can transform into someone better. I have found that it is typically at this crossroads that we take pride in our weaknesses, find comfort in our limited strengths– that they start becoming who we are more permanently. Seneca once addressed this paradox in his epitome, On the Shortness of Life, by stating it this way:

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and immortals in all that you desire.”

Perhaps we begin seeing our fears less permanently today. Unfortunately, we can all recall aspects of ourselves or someone we may know who maintains a sense of identity from their flaws. “I am just a bad test-taker”, “I have trouble focusing”, “I struggle with commitment”, “I just have no self-discipline”, “it’s that sweet tooth of mine”… typically followed by the worst of all sayings, “That’s just the way it is.” If only we peeked ever so slightly into the abyss of history or an old high school yearbook– we could recognize that the way it is never was anything, really.

Surely there are many reasons why we tell ourselves this story…

It feels good. It it lets us off the hook, allowing us to circumvent the guilt we feel for being mediocre. Which we all feel in some aspect of our life from time to time. There are times when we are killing the game in one way and we are down in a ditch somewhere else, but we shouldn’t make excuses for our shortcomings or even go as far as to make them permanent parts of our identity. Expecting failure grants us the comfort of being right when we don’t get what we want.

Mark Twain put it like this, “It’s better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right.”

Our fear is impermanent, so it might as well be faith.

Imagine you are on the beach and you are tasked with building a sandcastle of any kind. Now, you know the tide will rise and take the castle away much later in the evening. Knowing this, what sort of design do you build? Do you have fun and make a magnificent design? Or do you build something small and insignificant?

Whether you choose magnificence or mediocrity, it will be washed away.

Now this is not an original play on the old adages of “castles made of sand”. However, there is something we can do that is uniquely human and profoundly impactful to the world. We can choose to build the magnificent castle anyways. With artful design and creativity. One that inspires others on the beach. One that lasts in memory.

Our lives are not much different. Surely you can live a safe and conservative life. But there are no laughs to be had in that, there are no lessons to be learned, no memories made, no story worth telling.

I think that our immortality lies in the decision we make at these trivial crossroads: The choice whether to live trivially, or triumphantly in spite. Whether we choose faith over fear, magnificence over mediocrity, triumph over triviality.

Chaos: A Catalyst for Change

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Chaos is a catalyst for change. You are the inhibitor of that change if you let yourself miss out on the opportunity to be uncomfortable. Our lives have changed dramatically over the past few weeks. Our work, our interactions, our daily routine… it has all changed. The situation around us is incredibly serious and it is everyone’s duty to do their part in keeping themselves and the ones around them safe and healthy. Keep them moving forward. With that being said, I am a firm believer that every moment we have a decision. We have a decision to define the moment or let the moment define us. How can you define this moment for yourself instead of letting this chaotic moment define you?

The way that I imagine the majority of people go through life is like a fully completed puzzle. I am sure after reading that sentence you may have a “puzzled” look on your face but stick with me here for a moment. We have every piece of our life that comes together to create the picture of our life. We have our family, our friends, our work, our health, and our personal well-being to name a few that come together to create the life that you are living. We all want to grow and develop and better the “pieces of our puzzle.” Our growth and development seems to never be at the pace that we desire. Why is that? It takes a lot of energy to remove a piece of our puzzle, change it, and put it back in place. It is a meticulous task. A task that requires a plan and dedicated action to change a piece of our life. It can often seem daunting when we have multiple pieces of “our” puzzle that we want to change. We have to carefully remove one piece, make adjustments, and put the piece back in place, without disturbing any of the other pieces. Then do the same thing for another area of our life. This requires a great deal of energy and can often seem daunting.

Let’s look at going to the gym as an example to really set in place the puzzle analogy. The piece of your life that you want to work on is going to the gym. Now, you barely go to the gym. Whether it is what you want it to be, that piece of your life is a piece of the puzzle. You want to start going to the gym in the morning before work. It was difficult to make this happen because you were not willing to get up early enough to go before work because changing the “going to the gym” piece of your puzzle would be disturbing another piece of your puzzle which is getting enough sleep on work days. If you change when you wake up on a work day then you must change when you go to sleep to keep the same amount of sleep, thus disturbing another piece. When our puzzle of life is complete, and we want to change a single piece, it often disturbs many other pieces of our puzzle. 

Why is “chaos” the secret here? Why is it the catalyst for change that so many of us could leverage as the momentum we need? When chaos hits our lives, whether it slowly creeps in or hits us all at once, our “puzzle” is no longer put together. It is as if we are starting the puzzle over again. You grab the box and you dump the puzzle on the table and the pieces are everywhere. Some are upside down, some even fell off the table, but the important thing here is they are easy to move around. They are easy to change. They are not all attached to other puzzle pieces. What does this mean for us? Chaos created the time to make the changes to the pieces of our puzzles that we have so desperately wanted to change. Now this is exaggerated compared to many of our situations of course. Some of  us have pieces of our puzzle that are still connected together, but some of them have been shaken up. Use this time now to make the changes to those pieces you have always wanted. If you don’t have to commute to work now, use that extra time to make the meal at home you have been wanting to make. Do you have less school work? Double down on connecting with the relationships you have let slide. Chaos has jumbled up the pieces of our puzzle. When things get closer to the normal we were accustomed to, are your pieces going to look the exact same and fall into the same place? Is the puzzle of your life going to be the same finished picture? Or are you going to let this be the catalyst for change you need. Are you going to define this moment for yourself or let this chaotic moment define you? The choice is yours.

The Suffering Letterman

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“…sometimes you can’t resist throwing on that old worn out no-good set of beliefs about yourself before you leave the house.”

What keeps you from moving forward?

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned from my mistakes is that they are mine. They belong to me. I guess it is deeper than that though. Not quite as simple. Ownership is more of a process than just talking to yourself in the mirror like everyone wants to tell you. 

I want to talk about the dark side of ownership. Celebrating failure proves there is a bad way to own our failures and carry them around with us. You know the feeling. Think about that person at an event or a bar or party with that negative sort of energy… usually a fearful insecurity. Think about when you have been in places where you’ve noticed it in yourself. 

So, why did you take it with you?

Whether it’s a networking event, a business proposal, a date, a bar, a party… Many of us wear our best clothes, we smell great, wear some nice shoes, pack the classic phone, wallet, and keys. But sometimes? We can’t resist throwing on that old worn out no-good set of beliefs about ourselves before we leave the house. I call this the “Suffering Letterman”. 

When we face failure, our brains are wired to remember it. Our amygdala and hippocampus are closely linked. Fear and memory, memory and fear, back and forth. Helps us recognize that guy from the news that’s wanted for murder, the music from that horror movie we hated, or that smell of food we got sick from that one time. But does this primal wiring control our lives?

If you let it. Sure? But it doesn’t have to. 

Gordon Willard Allport, one of the first American psychologists to take a look at personality, took a biological approach to our behavior. Challenging Freudian concepts, he believed we are not ruled by our unconscious forces. He argued, if we choose, we are not slaves to our past at all. That we are NOT prisoners of childhood conflicts and past experiences.

Instead he proved over and over again, we are inclined to be hyper-focused on the present. We are oriented towards growth and opportunity. It is really the undealt-with fears and insecurities we choose to retrieve from our past that hinder our growth. 

Why we choose to throw this suffering on ourselves has a lot of philosophical speculation. Why we bask in the suffering might be plain attention-seeking, brain chemistry, ignorance, an attempt at creating an identity and so on. But I know one thing, this practice doesn’t serve anyone. 

So I ask you, what unfinished business do you have on the inside that’s holding you back from bolstering your business out here? Do the grudges, regrets, grief, insecurities, or fears that you can patch on mean more to you than winning? I doubt it! Take that jacket off.

Own those fears and insecurities and start accelerating your vision today.

Aspire to Inspire Greatness.

Using People

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Being a good individual is important to all of us. 

Being unique, authentic, “one of a kind”. 

But how original can any of us actually become?

Now, we all know the more cynical line, “There are no original ideas”. However, I argue that maybe what we are really saying is that there are no original words or phrases to describe something. We have reinvented the way we use timeless knowledge for thousands of years. 

Musicians, scientists, philosophers and other artists struggle the most, finding a balance between using the weight of their influences and discovering their own style. It is hard to escape the what is and the what has and to step into the realm of what if and what else. But every innovator, groundbreaker, and pioneer can easily list off who helped them, inspired them, educated them, mentored them over their lifetime. 

Steve Jobs would have told you that it was Bill Cambell who coached him through his time at Apple. Using his expertise to create phenomenal company culture and driving ambition.

John Mayer might list off a variety of blues artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, and BB King, Eric Clapton. Some of which he was able to directly learn from and derive his modern phrasing of blues and even performance technique.

Ryan Holiday, owner of the Daily Stoic and renowned author, is notorious for his distillation of past stoic writings and stories from the autobiographies of this world’s most influential people. 

They were all honest about where their inspiration, technique and writing came from. Yet it doesn’t seem to dull their glow as brilliant artists and creators. 

My point is, if you look around you and you are looking for it, these people are not tapping into some mythical land of creativity. They are innovating, however brilliantly, old dusty ideas. They are studying and emulating the past behind closed doors and then presenting a sometimes unrecognizable modern product. 

“Successful people get credit for the work they do behind closed doors”- Tony Robbins

Whatever you are trying to achieve, it has been done before. The process of tapping into that part of yourself, the planning, the strategy, perhaps even the exact timetable and half hour itinerary. So how do we find it? Books, podcasts, friends, here with us at Kykeon ;). 

But seriously, anyone, anywhere, with anything. Use the infinite knowledge that is surrounding us and start putting it into action. And most importantly, find someone that has failed and succeeded at whatever endeavor you are about to start. 

Aspire to Inspire Greatness.