How To Avoid Personal Conflicts

by Lester Rennard

Can you really avoid conflict? Is there any value in doing whatever is in your power to avoid anything that may cause conflict? Can conflict ever be positive?

Your definition for conflict will have a significant influence on how you go about addressing the issue. If you have a negative perception of conflict, you may be one who will go out of your way to avoid it at all cost. If you consider conflict as not necessarily negative but an opportunity for growth and to resolve legitimate issues, you will choose not to avoid it but to confront it proactively in a positive way.

If you still insist that conflict is negative and should always be avoided, here are a few suggestions as to how you may live completely without conflict:
1. Run off to a deserted island where you will be the only living creature there.
2. Go to sleep and never wake up if you live alone and have no connection with anyone else whatsoever.
3. Become humanly perfect and interact only with other perfect mortals like yourself.
4. Breathe your last breath since you will face no conflict in your new state on this side of eternity.

The reality is, if you are alive and well and must communicate and co-exist with any other living creature, you will have conflict and the ideal is not to focus your attention on trying to avoid it. Since there is such a prevailing universal negative view of conflict, most conflicts we experience do have a negative effect. The simple reason for this effect is attributed to the fact that our attitudes have a way of determining and influencing our outcomes.

Conflict, when viewed positively, may provide an opportunity for growth. It challenges us to think outside the box and to find new ways to meet the challenge before us. Growth happens when we are forced to draw upon internal and external resources, hitherto undiscovered, to meet the demand posed by the conflict in order to resolve it.

When you are faced with a conflict, your character is tested and your true self usually has a way of rising to the surface. The ideal virtues of patience, tolerance, forbearance, grace and forgiveness are given an opportunity to either flourish or perish. The outcome will give you a clue as to whether or not you have been growing in these areas of character development. If the result is less than stellar, you may then need to make the necessary adjustments for change and improvement or a complete make over or transformation.

So whenever you're faced with your next conflict, whether it comes through your spouse, children, other family, boss, co-workers, creditors, debtors or anyone with whom you interact, why not seize the opportunity to transform what may be coming across to you as negative verbiage and attitudes to generate a good outcome for you and your stakeholders!

Next time - How to Prevent Conflict