Confrontation makes people uncomfortable. It requires courage and heart to confront well.

I was talking with a group of parents at a playground recently.

Someone’s child walked up and began to act inappropriately. The parent responded appropriately and confronted the poor behavior by redirecting the child.

The parent exercised self-control, was direct but not shaming and enforced boundaries.

All of the other parents (who all were probably grateful that it wasn’t their child), did something interesting:

They stopped talking. They averted their eyes. They shifted their feet. They started to move away from each other.

It was as if that parent (not the child) had violated some social rule of, “We don’t do problems here.” The problem being the confrontation.

Because while the other parents might have been annoyed by the child, but they were only uncomfortable when the parent began parenting.

Now, that is a problem.

When Discomfort Dictates Your Decisions

I’m nearing 15 years of coaching and consulting. In the thousands of conversations I’ve had with leaders, there is one issue that seems to hold them back more than any other:

Fear.

Leaders feel fear about many different things. But a surprisingly high amount of the time it is fear about making a good decision.

Just so there isn’t ambiguity, I’m not saying fear about making the wrong decision. No, it’s fear about making a good decision that holds them back.

Why?

Very often because a good decision requires some element of confrontation. Some element of challenging the status quo. Some possibility of ruffling feathers.

This creates discomfort. Discomfort leads to apprehension and worry. Which, too often, leads to the avoidance of the real issues.

Because of discomfort about making the good decision, bad decisions are made. Bad decisions often create their own discomfort (so discomfort isn’t avoided) but usually we can blame that discomfort on someone else.

Either way, poor behavior, under-performance, patterns of reactive decisions or unethical behavior isn’t addressed.

Uncomfortable feelings often accompany good decisions

No growth is possible without discomfort.

I couldn’t name a single area of growth in my life, or a time when I experienced something of real value, where discomfort wasn’t a part of the process.

• For me, getting married scared me to death.
• Having kids was terrifying.
• Every growth step in my business was a confrontation with fear and doing something I wasn’t comfortable with.
• In leadership roles, every major growth opportunity required confronting “what ifs” in myself or others.
• Just staying fit requires accepting discomfort.

Leaders Must Get Comfortable With Discomfort

Good parents set and maintain good boundaries for their children. To do this, it requires being comfortable with discomfort. Because kids will make you uncomfortable.

If a parent either gives in (to avoid discomfort) or acts out (in reaction to discomfort) they are no longer leading their child. The child is leading them.

Leaders must be willing to address the issues that need to be addressed. Otherwise, they stop leading. They are just following from the top.

To do this requires courage and empathy or heart.

Courage is the ability to do the right thing regardless of how you feel.

Like strength, it has to be built and maintained.

If you stop doing courageous things, you will become less courageous.

Empathy is the ability to understand and care about the feelings and value of another person.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about. Ed Mylett is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America. In this video, he describes a confrontation he recently experienced.

He was in line, behind a young man and an older woman. The young man was treating the older woman with disrespect. Ed decided to set him straight.

What struck me is his comment at the end, after Ed confronted the young man. He says, “And then I loved on him and believed in him too.”

That was courage with empathy. The willingness to confront but with the intent to also build someone else up.

How To Build Courage & Empathy

I have a few principles here. I don’t know that they qualify as “steps” that will automatically make you courageous and empathic. But they are guidelines or recommendations that I think will help:

1. Cultivate Your Inner Self-Confidence: If you don’t believe in yourself, you’ll assume no one else does either. That’ll throw off your judgment. If you do believe in yourself, you won’t need other people’s approval to make good choices.

How do you develop self-confidence? Well, what builds your confidence in someone else? Usually, two things:

• When they consistently do what they say they will do.
• When they demonstrate skillfulness.

So, that’s what you do.

• Be consistent in keeping the promises you make to yourself.
• Become skillful in an area that you care about.

If you do those two things long enough, you’ll become confident. When you are confident, you are less likely to avoid or overreact when facing a confrontation.

2. Practice Courage: Regularly, do something that grows you, or benefits someone else, but scares you. Take small steps if you need to. But learn to be courageous. Your courage capacity isn’t set at birth. It isn’t just in you or not in you. You practice it and build it.

Most of the great opportunities that I’ve experienced come from practicing courage. Forcing myself to do something that scared me. The more you do it, the bigger the challenges you can tackle.

No other virtue has any hope of manifesting itself in your life without the courage to support it and hold it up. Practice courage.

3. Take Ownership: Most people like to pass the buck. Someone or something else is responsible – but not me.

Courageous leaders don’t. They own their actions. They own their mistakes. They own their options. They own their potential.

They don’t spend time talking about how other people won’t let them do things. Or how “The Man” is holding them down. Or how something is someone else’s fault.

A major growth step for me came when a mentor said, “You always try to explain everything you say. Just say it.” I realized I felt like I needed to justify everything – good or bad. I wasn’t comfortable saying, “I did that. Good or bad – it was my choice and I made it. I own the consequences.”

Once I started to do that, I was able to start breaking through in areas of my life where I had been held back. I had been robbing myself of my own power by not just owning my own choices – even when they were poor choices.

If you spend time focusing on what you can do as opposed to what you can’t do – you’ll find that you are far more honest. When you are more honest, you see that you also are a mixed ball of good and bad motivations, decisions, choices, and behaviors.

When you own that, you can choose not to accept everything that’s there. But you know it takes work to change. That makes you empathic towards others. We’re all on our way towards growth.

4. Prepare: If you need to confront someone it helps to prepare. Preparation will give you confidence. It will help you avoid reacting. Here are some tips that will help you prepare for a confrontation:
   1. Separate The Person From The Problem: Confront problem behavior. Know what you want before you confront.
   2. Objectively Describe the Problem Behavior and Impact: “When you do ____it has _____impact on me/someone else.”

• Describe What You Want: If you don’t know what you want, neither do they. Figure out what you want and let them know, specifically.

1. Affirm The Other Person: Build the other person up in some way. You want them to change. Not be destroyed.
2. Get Support: The kind of support you need will change based on situational specifics. But people who surround themselves with solid mentors, coaches and friends grow faster and are more confident. I see it over and over again.

Invest in relationships that help you become who you want to be. Divest yourself of time spent in relationships who tear you down, discourage you or are negative.

Confrontation is Service. Facebook Doesn’t Count

Being able to act with courage and empathy – to confront as needed, when needed is an act of service. But it needs to be real and for the purpose of growth.

It is cowardly to post griping, moaning comments on social media but to not confront poor behavior in yourself or others around you. Those comments aren’t about creating or leading change. They are about you standing on a soapbox hoping to draw a crowd of “likes.”

Actively confront your own demons and issues directly around you, where there is a personal risk. Do it with a heart for growth and improvement. Not to just vent and tear down. This is part of what builds better organizations and communities.

Take good care,

Christian

Want to quickly grow your leadership ability? Contact me to set up a quick call. Together we’ll look at what you want to accomplish and identify the top 2 or 3 strategies you need to do to get there.

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