Startup Blabber #003: There shall always be conflict!

Dear Steemians,

How was your weekend? As a father of two young children, I usually spend my weekends having fun outings with my kids. Went to a kid's concert on Saturday and went to a grille on Sunday. They had this cool rotating design piece right outside of the grille and thought I would share.

Thou Shall See Conflict!
Anyways, I talked about having a team in the second piece of my startup blabber, but as you guys and gals all know, once you work with people for more than 8 hours a day, every day of the year, there is bound to be some tension and conflict. There will always be all of the stories of glory and conquest from startups, but what people won't tell you is that while glory and conquest happen only some of the time, tensions and conflict between your core team will happen at least once 100% of the time.

To be a little bit more honest about myself, I hate conflict with a burning passion and I really am bad at confronting conflict. There have been times when I didn't want to deal with it anymore and just hung up the phone on my colleagues (bad idea guys). I think the biggest issue comes from me not wanting to acknowledge any weak points of myself or any mistakes that I have made. It potentially has become somewhat of a defense mechanism to just ignore the situation and not confront the conflict and tension. This is something every one of you guys must avoid. This is also something that I try day in and day out to try to make better, but still struggle with at times.

My Personal Solution
You need to just confront this outright, or you will spend hours and days wondering what could happen. Usually, it's not as bad as you imagine it to be. You may not feel comfortable during the confrontation, but you have to do it. What I have done is that I found some sort of outlet to always go to after a bad confrontation. For this post, I won't talk about the confrontation itself, but more of what I do after the confrontation.

My wife makes fun of me all the time, but I bought myself a small aquarium and after a confrontation, I will just go to my aquarium and silently gaze into this small aquatic world for a few minutes and reflect upon myself. There's just something so peaceful about staring into a world that has no stress on living. Having some sort of outlet that you resort to is very important, and something I realized only recently.

While it's usually better reflecting with someone else, I try to reflect with myself. You are usually much more honest with yourself than with others. At the end of the day, if you are wrong, you need to go about correcting yourself. I am thankful that my colleagues don't go out of the way to continually go back in spoken/written words on my mistakes, but usually see it resolved in my future actions. Likewise, if it was the other way around, I try not to hound my colleagues on the matter as well.

Anyways ... ... ... I think today was literally just a blabber, but hope you guys got something out of it. Tomorrow, in Korea, it's Buddha's Birthday, a national holiday, so for all of the Buddhists out there, have a wonderful time!

Cheerios everyone,
Chris

More about myself:
Steemit Introductory Post

Startup Blabber Series:
Startup Blabber #001: Communication Within a Team
Startup Blabber #002: Most Important Aspect of a Startup