Axiom #12: Confrontation

As you may or may not know, I am originally from the south. I was born and reared in North Carolina where I lived the first 22 years of my life. It is where my heart still lies quite often. I then lived 18 years in Tennessee. Having been in Pittsburgh since 1994, I have seen one or two of the summers up here. Since I grew up and lived forty plus years in the south the heat in Pittsburgh does not bother me as much as it does a lifelong Pittsburgher.

You know how it is with humans. We adapt to what we have in our environment. That is why humanity is able to live and thrive everywhere from the bitter northern arctic cold to the heat and humidity of the rain forest. It is one of our strengths as a race of humans. We adapt quite well. Some might say that adaptation could potentially be the flip side of a negative. How so? Let me explain.

While we adapt to our surrounding climate, the core of the reason is that we know we can do little to change it. (Let’s avoid a global warming discussion here. That is on a larger scale than I am discussing.) We know that the weather is like the old adage, “everyone’s talking about it, but no one is actually doing anything.” Well . . . because in the short term, we cannot change the weather. It is beyond our ability. So in one way you could say that we sort of become anesthetized to our surroundings and just adapt to them.

Here is the rub. We do that in our relationships also. We just become numb to it all. We say “it doesn’t matter.” We pretend we do not notice. We get busy with other things. We find diversions. We ignore issues that really matter to us. We do not risk a difficult conversation with those we care about. We simply adapt.

Granted there are times to adapt. There really are times to simply let it go because it really is not that big of a deal. As I have said countless times in leadership discussions, “Choose your battles. If you die on every hill you just end up dead. Some deals are just deals.”

But, and it is a big one, there are also times to draw lines and take a stand. There are times to say, “This should not be and we ARE going to talk about THIS! We are not sweeping this one under the rug and ignoring it.” It does not and should not be this way. At that point it takes work to get to the core of the matter. Once you start to peel back the layers you may, and probably will find, that you have had a hand in the matter and you are not totally innocent. That hurts. And it hurts a lot some times.

Why do we not do it? The reasons are varied and multifaceted, ranging from learned patterns in the relationship to family of origin training to abuse or the threat of it to insecurity to this being uncharted waters to numerous items on a long list. It is like Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty sang, “Baby, you could never look me in the eye. Yeah, you buckle with the weight of the words.”

These things ought not to be. We all need to take stock of our relationships and the issues we are suppressing and addressing. The risk is high, but the reward is even higher.