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Ep. 305 | Handling Conflict in the Family · The Family Teams Podcast

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  what it means to grow and mature into Christ, it really hinges on speaking the truth in love.
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  All right, guys, welcome back to 5-Minute Fatherhood. So one of the things that happens, of course, in families is conflict. And every person has a little bit different approach to conflict, a little bit different, I would say, skill set when it comes to conflict. Jeff's got a good skill set. Jeff doesn't mind conflict. He's like, bring it on. That's right. Let's have it out. I love it. My skill set's a little bit weaker, I would say. Really, one of the things I struggle with a lot is that when I sense a conflict,
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  needs to happen. Like, oh gosh, like we got to have, we got to have a conversation. I don't think we're going to agree. Like my first reaction to that, the feeling I have in my gut is fear, fear that this will actually damage the relationship. Like by, by bringing up this topic, by having this conversation, it's not going to go well. Things aren't going to be better on the other side of it. And this has been something I've had to really work through. And I
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  sort of stance when it comes to conflict or the need to have a hard conversation with your spouse or with one of your kids or maybe even with your parents or something is there's got to be deep in your soul or your gut in approaching these, a feeling of hope. Like, I think things can be better. And that helps you not give way to anger, not give into fear, to say, hey, a normal part of
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  And actually conflict is important. It's important to learn to be good at it. It is a skill. And so one of the things I like, for example, I struggle with a lot.
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  is that I will avoid conflict. And then when I'm forced into it, I'll often do something in the course of those conflicting conversations that sort of sets a bad tone, gives way to anger, like does something that will lessen the likelihood
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  that it'll have a good outcome. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because now all of a sudden, see, see, that's what happens when you have conflict. It's bad. Relationships are damaged. Conflict is to be avoided. And I've learned that that is really just a bad pattern of thinking. And that if I were to really be honest with myself, I would just say it's a skill problem.
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  I'm not good at it. I need to learn to be better at it. I need to learn to fight well, have conflicts well, hang in there, not give way to anger or not give way to exaggeration or not be too agreeable or too disagreeable. And so I've just learned that's a skill problem. I got to mature in that area, but it is really important to embrace this. And the verse that's
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  sort of centers me in this area is Ephesians 4, 15. It says, Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. And Ephesians 4 is one of my favorite chapters in the whole Bible. It really is talking about what it looks like to mature as the church or as the body of Christ. But right in the center of this chapter, Paul sort of drops this incredibly important sort of thought bomb, which is,
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  is that what it means to grow and mature into Christ, it really hinges on speaking the truth in love, right? And that is a popular phrase sort of in all of the world, even the secular world today, but it really comes from this verse, and it's really important. That is what gives me the hope,
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  that even if I lack some of the skill of having hard conversations and that that's something I have to grow in, but this is the only way you do grow as a family. You have to learn to speak the truth in love, which is almost by definition a conflicting thing. When you have to say something hard, when you have to speak the truth, and you have to remember to do that in love—
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  That is always opening the door to a potential conflict. And you've got to wade in. You've got to. So Jeff, you're way better at this than I am. Help us out. Like, how do we do this?
• 4:21
  No, I mean, I think you nailed all the points. One thing I would say that is, yeah, is that you have to normalize conflict in a family. You have to, two things. But when I say normalize, that doesn't mean do it wrong either, right? Like I would say normalize conflict, but then always be debriefing conflict, meaning always be saying, how did we do it that? Were we kind? Were we gentle? Did we grow, right? Not just like, oh, we hash it out and box each other. That's not helpful either, right? Yeah.
• 4:48
  And so, yeah, always. So make it normalize it and then debrief it. One last thing I'll say, too, is I've been kind of thinking through this this what's the word? Merit paradigm or model of kind of these two buckets of a lot of parents are either coaches or their babysitters. And I've been kind of sitting and stewing on that a little bit. And one thing I want one big difference between a babysitter and a coach, I realized is babysitters.
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  are almost terrified of like the ice cracking around any issue, right? You're kind of just like that shows that like a babysitter's job is to kind of keep the peace. A babysitter's job is to kind of make these five hours go very smoothly. Now, a coach's job is usually the opposite –
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  A coach inherently believes I can only take this team to this place if there's an immense amount of tension and friction and where I actually see them doing wrong so I can coach them. Right. You know what I mean? Like, like there's kind of like it's the it's the exact opposite belief. If there's there's no like or like weightlifting kind of, for example, that your muscles don't grow if they're not actually being ripped apart, you know.
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  And I think coaching is identical to that. And so this is a cousin, a little bit of conflict, like growth. I'm not talking about, you know, but conflict is one aspect of how that growth works. And so I just think, yeah, like it's inherent that teams and coaches, there's a there's an immense friction and there's an immense like, you know, kind of a.
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  dynamic, uh, feeling of the group, uh, kind of, uh, sparks flying per se. Um, when you're a team, when the babysitter kind of paradigm, that's a lot of us default there without realizing it. And so I think we just have to be kind of really aware of that.
• 6:20
  Awesome. That's really helpful. And if you guys are dad and business owners and you need kind of a tribe to hang out with, one of the things that Jeff and I love to do to have some of these really deep conversations and really push each other, coach each other as dads kind of at the next level is through a mastermind group called Integrated. So if you guys are at all interested in
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  Being a part of something like that, we get together twice a year for two and a half days, find a cool location and just hash out hard stuff, good stuff. And it's been a super awesome. We're about to get together next month in Cincinnati. You can check that out over at familyteams.com slash integrated to find out more about that.