My last blog article was about helping you to resolve conflict in your relationships when it comes up. This time, we’re going to explore how to prevent the conflict from occurring in the first place.
As explored previously, conflict is caused by a number of underlying factors. Once we learn what these factors are, and deepen our understanding of them, we are able to see a potential conflict building and do something about it before it occurs. But in order to do that, you must first adopt the principles of healthy relationships. The first of these principles is that you must give your partner the benefit of the doubt.Understand that your partner experiences life from a different point of view than you and therefore may feel differently about certain things. Trust that they are always doing their best for the relationship. With this attitude, when a conflict may have arisen in the past, now you will seek to understand your partner more deeply.
The second principle is that you must work as a team. If you are working as a team, rather than two individuals working for themselves, you will seek to understand the other in order to co-operate with them. From now on I want you to think of things this way: There’s three entities in your relationship. There’s you, your partner and then the relationship itself. The role of the relationship is to be a solid foundation upon which you can both lead extraordinary lives. It’s the place where you can feel heard, unjudged, feel respected, understood and supported and most importantly, safe. And because of this gigantic role that relationship plays, you have to look after it. The relationship has needs of its own and if they’re not met, then it’s less able to support your needs. And you can’t fight for the relationship until you work together as a team. When you’re a team, you don’t ask “what’s wrong with them?” Instead, you ask “How can I support them, so they can support the relationship and therefore enable me to be supported?”
In order to work as a team though, it’s incredibly important to know what it is you’re working towards. This is where common goals and values are so important. Not many couples have the conversation about values early on in their relationship. They figure that because they have a lot in common now that they always will and that they couldn’t possibly have a difference of opinion that they can’t work out. Well, it’s time now to talk about it.
Everyone’s familiar with what a goal is. But I’m pretty sure most people don’t quite have their head wrapped around what a value is, specifically. And then there’s the relationship between goals and values. So here it is. Values are the emotional states we want to experience on a regular basis. They include, for example, joy, kindness, adventure, wisdom and so on. Your goals then are the activities that enable you to experience these values.
You will have your own values as an individual. And this is fine, but the relationship itself needs to have values, and it’s up to you and your partner to meet them. I encourage you to Google “examples of values”. You will find a list here from which to choose values for your relationship. Then, go about designing goals to achieve these values. Then, instead of one or both of you being triggered by something, you can instead ask “what behaviour can I now choose that’s in alignment with my values?”
As touched on in the previous article, the cause of a lot of conflict is unmet needs. If someone in the relationship feels that their needs are not being met, and this can absolutely happen on an unconscious level, they will find any excuse to kick up a fuss. And if the individual doesn’t have a lot of awareness around this, the thing they pick a fight over may have absolutely nothing to do with the need that’s unmet. They just know they have something to fight for, and so they look for any opportunity to express themselves. Once you understand needs better, you’ll be able to consciously go about fulfilling those needs, and then there will be no reason to conflict.
As individuals we have a variety of needs, but they all come down to 6 Core Needs. And if you’re familiar with my work, or the work of Tony Robbins, you will have come across these before. There are 6 needs that every human has. The role of the unconscious is to satisfy these needs no matter what, even if we’re not aware of how we’re doing it. They are:
1. Certainty (comfort, safety, stability, security, protection)
2. Uncertainty (variety, risk, adventure, fun, fear, change, entertainment, surprise, crisis, drama)
3. Significance (pride, importance, standards, achievement, performance, perfection, discipline, competition)
4. Love and connection (insignificance, passion, unity, warmth, tenderness, desire, togetherness)
5. Growth
6. Contribution
The first four needs are needs of the personality. Individuals will stop at nothing to satisfy these needs whether they’re aware of it or not. Growth and contribution are spiritual needs. By becoming aware of them consciously, we can control the way we satisfy them in a positive, resourceful and sustainable manner, rather than negatively, un-resourcefully and unsustainably. For example, you may have a strong need for uncertainty. You may choose to satisfy this need by changing to a job that keeps you on your toes (this is a resourceful way to fill this need); or you may choose to constantly argue with your partner (an unresourceful way to bring uncertainty into your life!) It’s a great exercise to sit down with your partner and ask them how you satisfy each of their needs and share with your partner how well they satisfy each of your needs. And be sure to identify and share which need(s) is the most important for each of you. Then you can go about designing and implementing strategies to help satisfy one another’s needs. As you can imagine, this is going to drastically reduce the amount of conflict you are facing.
In order to prevent future conflict, you must give your partner the benefit of the doubt, work together as a team by setting common values and goals and make sure you understand one another’s needs.
Things to think about this week:
- Do I always give my partner the benefit of the doubt or do I tend to jump to conclusions rather than trusting that they’re coming from a place of good intention?
- Do my partner and I work well as a team? What are our common values? What goals can we set to reach these values?
- What are my Core Needs? Do I meet my partner’s needs? Does my partner meet my needs?