Avoiding Conflicts
Are you the sort of person who turns and goes in the other direction whenever a conflict is encountered?
I am that person. Most of the time I treat it with silence or plain indifference. I don't try to explain my view or show enough curiosity to understand the other's perspective. If the other person wants to leave the scene, then I leave it like that. There are rare cases when I tried to confront the elephant in the room rather than ignore its existence. It was mostly because there was no other way or my anger was uncontrollable by then.
Avoiding conflicts is my forte. But does it do me any good? Does it have any positive impact on anyone's life?
I remember my manager shouting at me about a year ago because he was so much frustrated. When I tried to have a conversation about his grievances about me, he simply said he didn't have the time for such a discussion. And that conversation ended there. I am in the wrong here. I should have asked for a convenient time to discuss this issue with him. But you know, our one-on-one discussions went on without ever touching this topic again. Both of us are masters of avoiding conflicts. But this is something that had a more adverse effect on me than him.
It is during these times that I realize how unskilled I am when it comes to human interactions. There are those with whom I gel instantaneously and then there are people with whom I cannot even make a casual conversation. It is something that I need to work on if I want to survive longer in my career.
There will always be new mistakes to learn from and hopefully, I will not repeat those. Sometimes it is difficult to see the progress I have made so far and extremely easy to beat myself up for making the mistakes. But today I am trying to forgive myself for all the mistakes and see everything in a new light. I am not there yet. But I will be.
