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How to Do Good When Faced with Conflict

We make our biggest impact, not by our grandest lifetime achievements, but by the little things we do every day.

There is opportunity everywhere and within every moment for you to do good in the world and to feel good about doing it. And here’s a little secret: the impact and the feeling are so much more lusciously intense when your good act comes in the face of conflict.

And, unlike building a rocket ship or an orphanage, you already have everything you need to be the hero of the conflict:

Catch Yourself

When someone wrongs you – cuts you off in line, in conversation – your body will react immediately. It’s okay, it’s your instinct. You still have a chance to get the best of it, but first, you have to notice it’s happening…

Take a Second

You don’t need to have all the answers. There usually isn’t a magic bullet in these situations, but by taking a breath, just one breath, you free yourself from reactive mode, get yourself off a linear track, and open the both of you up to an infinite array of endings.

Lose the Righteousness

You will never bring about goodness in conflict if you live in Righteousness. What is it you really want to do? Be right? Or be good?

See the Other Person

Look over at them. They’re probably yelling or scowling. They’ve become a caricature of who they really are. Moments ago, they were picking out Oatmeal, and before that, they were fixing their hair in the rearview mirror. To truly connect, for you to even *want* to connect, they have to a become 3 -dimensional person. It doesn’t take a long, just a breath.

Fight for the Both of You

They may be wrong. They may be offensive. But you will both walk away pissed off and injured. So here’s the last thing. This may be the hardest part but it’s where the payoff hides: you must deliver your next lines from a place of Love. You can bet they will be surprised. And they will resist. It may take a few attempts, but it will work. It always works.

Hatred in a conflict is like a fire between the two parties. Harsh words come with hot breaths that feed the burn from both sides. Walking away doesn’t work because the other person will keep breathing and talking and feeding the fire and, contrary to what you believe, you will keep getting burned.

If you continue with your righteous argument, you will, of course, make the fire bigger and leave yourself with scars.

There is only one way to get away unmarked: the fire has to die. The hot breaths have to stop from both sides, which means one of you has to do the difficult thing of reaching out over the flames while the fire’s still growing.

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Waimea Bay

There are those moments that are just perfect, the ones you’re always looking for that need no analysis, where all involved feel the same thing at the same time.

Five of us, having been so long apart in geography and time, now treading water in crystal clear Waimea Bay, only our heads above the line, talking excitedly about everything and nothing, as if our chatter, full of an impatient eagerness to connect, could stop the earth from making its way around the sun.

Just for today.

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The Tug of a Child

We are snorkeling off the coast of Hawaii (yeah, life is good), searching out coral, the magnets of the sea for shimmering fishees.

Every once in a while I feel a tug on my flipper and look back to see my daughter, pulling herself up my leg and torso. She holds a fistful of my suit in her hand for a minute and then shoots ahead of me, her flippers nearly batting me in the face every time.

She sees this as her right, which I guess it is.

Each time it happens, I lose ground. I get pulled off course and pushed back by the current. I lose my stroke, come out of my trance.

The cycle of emotions at this point will be familiar to any parent:

What? Aw c’mon… oh… okay… (smile)…. you go girl… I’m right behind you.

As my family will tell you, I hate to pulled out of my trance – when I’m writing, when I’m meditating, when I’m thinking,… but sometimes when it happens and I go through this cycle and I’m done being upset …when I get back to what I was doing, I fall into it a little bit more.

The thoughts and the fishes look brighter but more than that, finding the brightest, biggest ones doesn’t matter as much anymore. They just come.

It’s as good as it gets: floating high over the ocean floor with the sun on my back, the sound of my breathing, and her kicking up bubbles in front of me.

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The Job People Want When They’re Tired of Their Own Job

You’d laugh.

So many people revert to the same fantasy when they’re bummed at work. They say something to the effect of… “I don’t know, maybe I’ll just go away to some tropical island somewhere and become a scuba instructor…”

I’ve had the thought myself. I’ve always been curious why we gravitate to that profession in particular, and then I met a scuba instructor, well, a scuba shop owner, actually.

He was by far the most chill guy I’ve ever met. He had to talk with his chin lifted so he could see you out of his half-closed eyes. His hair was bleach-blonde but he was about 60 or 70, judging by the wrinkles. And the wisdom.

From his dress and his attitude, I would have thought this guy was a stoner who drifted in from the beach — indeed he very well could be — but then I asked him about the goggles fogging up underwater and he dropped a science class on me.

And he wasn’t just smart. He was happy. When I asked a question, probably the same stupid question he gets every day from people going snorkeling for the first time, he laughed a real laugh, like he was actually amused; he opened his mouth wide enough for me to see the gold caps on his molars.

He truly didn’t care if I bought anything or not. I pointed this out and he said, “I want you to dive, man.”

And when I mentioned my wife used to dive, off Australia, he brightened up as if discovering the location of a missing person. “Bring her in, man. We have a meeting, a bunch of us, once a month.”

In the end, I gave him $10 for a week of snorkeling gear, actually 8 days. Whatever.

I know I will think of this guy when I’m enjoying the waters of Hawaii floating on the surface and looking down into another world that he lives in part-time. I’ll think of the scuba instructor closing his shop, walking off the beach into the waves, swimming around down there somewhere with the fishes, big smile on his face as his hair moves around in slow motion.

Maybe all of us are right. Maybe we should quit our jobs and just go to some tropical island and become a scuba instructor.

Or, maybe we should find a way to be like the scuba instructor in our own jobs: super knowledgable, amused, humble, eager to intoxicate people with what we know, and full of a secret we keep rediscovering deep down after we leave for the day.

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Our Algorithms Are Failing Us

Our echo chambers are only getting louder.

I appreciate recommendation engines and suggested posts as much as anyone but they only feed me more of the same. The machines, they claim to know me, to have me pegged by what I do and say online or in a store or to a speaker sitting on my TV cabinet.

But those are only parts of me, the parts that speak and act. I’m constantly looking for ways to be more whole, to complement the things I already have with something different, not fill myself up with more of the same.

Those intelligent machines, even as they become smarter than humans, they shall only draw lines over the lines I’ve already drawn. They’re neglecting the parts on the inside, below, and before. When it comes to sending me things I truly need, they bring me an outline of myself. And who wants to see that.

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The Fall of the Liberals

It was a mass extinction. Self-inflicted. Or you might call it mutual homicide by neglect.

From the sky looking down, the pattern of the bodies scattered across each other almost looks beautiful, a mutated end goal, a patchwork quilt of every color imaginable, all types of bodies, all types of possibilities… now expired.

Great ideas trapped in brains, hearts full of blood, their heads propped up on each other’s stomachs, hands across each other’s chests, as their still-open-eyes look to the clouds rolling in.

From afar, it would appear to be a choreographed final act of love, a legion of selfless soldiers looking out for each other. They called themselves warriors.

But if you were to witness the world in the last moments before the silence, you would hear a chorus of voices giving breath to a single inquiry:

Who is hurt the most?

Who is hurt the most?

Who is hurt the most?

Who is hurt…

And as the song of the liberals disappeared into the stormy air, most, if not all of them, will have died with their hands raised, and pointing in different directions.

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“I’ve Always Thought About Doing That”

“I’ve always thought about doing that.”

I hear this from clients a lot and my response is always the same: Go do that!

This is not necessarily about your calling. It doesn’t matter if this thing becomes your career or not. What matters is that you scratch that itch. Trust me, after having tons of conversations with people who haven’t done the scratching, I can tell you it will haunt you forever. You’ll always think about that thing, particularly when other things aren’t going so well.

No need to dive in too deep. No need to disrupt your current life. Just take a step toward that thing, and not a passive step, an active one – meaning, it’s cheating if you just watch a video or read another article on the topic; go a bit further than that. Take an online course, join a group, go to a meetup, get a part-time internship, volunteer, go to a conference…

Go deeper. Save yourself the wonder and regret at age 30, 40, 50, 60, etc.

Do the thing. Just a little bit.

Scratch scratch.

And watch what happens to you.

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Love for You

Love is a lifeboat.

Love is a bunch of balloons taking you up up up.

Love is a formidable shield and the arrows that pierce it.

Love is a mother’s thoughts wrapped around you like a blanket, wherever you are.

Love is a perfect beach day when you almost can’t tell the difference between the water and the air.

Love is whatever you need when you need it, the perfect puzzle piece well within reach, the instructions to the game, the hands to hoist you to the monkey bars.

It’s our only resource that will never run out, flowing under us like an underground stream, created not by Science, but by the space between hands and hearts, and what we choose to put there.

If you feel yourself sinking below the surface, don’t despair.

Love is there for you right now, streaming in from all sides, finding your feet, crashing at your ankles, splashing up your legs and torso, and tickling your cheek.

You needn’t do anything more.

Just stand. And be loved.

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With Dizzying Thoughts – Our Place In the Flock

Companies are founded on epiphanies.

It’s usually a single idea from one person or a small group of people. This idea is raised up, cleaned off, and put in a glass box.

Then that same group of people focuses on convincing: convincing each other, convincing engineers, convincing investors, convincing customers, convincing partners…

This convincing part is the most exciting, a time where everything is possible because nothing has been fully built yet.

The convincers, they’re trying to convince everyone that their idea, in its unique angularity, will fit perfectly into a mold that’s out there in a place that they’ve yet to discover. And so they begin to look for the right place and the right mold and it’s highly unlikely that they will find it so they argue over whether to change the mold or change the epiphany.

It’s much easier to change the epiphany since that’s what’s in their control, so they take it out of its box and begin to play with it to see if they can make it fit into the places they’ve already seen. Trimming and bending and twisting to get the contours right, they work quickly, afraid someone else in some other building will get it right before they do.

Some workers are more enthusiastic than others about making these changes.

Everyone has different boundaries for what they’re willing to change, and with each change, the people change too: their interest level, their commitment, their efficacy in fulfilling their role.

They’re like a row of birds leaping off a wire and flying in unison but as they begin to question the decisions of their leaders, they each follow a different bird without telling anyone. The flock fractures but still tries to fly together, meandering between chaos and uniformity, with the ambitious goal of finding a place to build their home and put their epiphany. All the while, they pass the epiphany around in their claws, still making changes.

It is a difficult task, but the sky is filled with these birds, swooping and spiraling together and apart, tired and hopeful, squawking with delight and quietly wondering with dizzying thoughts whether they’ve made the right choices.

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The TV Show We Want to Be On

The problem is the show we want to be on and the one we want to watch are two completely different shows.

The show we want to be on is a romantic comedy, the one where missed connections and happenstance lead to weddings and babies and new jobs. We already know the ending before it starts: the good characters win what they deserve, the city comes together holding candles and singing anthems… These shows make us feel good, which (I’ll go ahead and make the leap) is the kind of life we all want to live, yet this is also the most openly made-fun-of genre of movies there is.

The show we want to watch, the one we put our attention on, is a very different story. In fact, there’s rarely any story, more like a menagerie of train wrecks and red faces. It’s more about finding strong personalities and letting them launch into each other repeatedly, watching people throw other people into pools and then laugh the star-quality laugh of a winner as others weep their way off the show.

We call the first type of show fantasy and the second one reality.

That says a lot.