"Peacemaking Through Conflict" by Hector Troyer

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Strength to Strength. It's a pleasure to see you all on here. Thanks for joining us this morning.

And we have Brother Hector Troyer joining us this morning to present on peacemaking in conflict, about conflict and interpersonal relationships. And he's coming to us from State College, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and six children, I believe. Is that right?

Yes, that's correct. All right. So before we get started, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Gracious Eternal Father, we come to You this morning. We are so grateful, Lord, that we can call You Father and that You are here with us this morning and Your Spirit is present. I just pray, Lord, that You would bless our gathering here, our virtual gathering. We thank You for the technology and the blessing it has been to share the truth of the kingdom over the past couple of years. I just pray that You would bless Brother Hector as he shares what You've laid on his heart this morning. Give him passion and inspiration and clarity of thought as he presents these principles.

Just be with each one of us. May our hearts be fallow ground for the word of truth, that we can be transformed and cleansed and sanctified by Your word. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right. Brother Hector will share, and then after he is done, we'll open it up for a question and answer period. So think about some questions for him. And yeah, go ahead, Brother Hector. It's all yours.

Okay. Thank you.

So to begin with, I just want to maybe introduce myself a little bit more. I do not like conflict. I really just like conflict.

My conflict mode has always been to avoid conflict. I don't like to fight that well. I love to argue. But what really matters, I prefer not to. But as Bryant mentioned to some of you earlier, I have had this long for quite a while. I really wanted to start a church in Hawaii, and I've been very interested in small churches and starting new churches. But one thing that I've noticed in that is that they very often are derailed by conflict. Conflict is the way that most of them are just it seems like over and over, these small projects get derailed by conflict. And also in my own life, it seems like I'm always surrounded by somebody that wants to there's always conflict, whether it is in my family or in people that are close to me.

And now that I have children that are getting older and they got their love of arguing from me, and it seems like we continue to there always seems like there's conflict in my life that I cannot get away from. And I started thinking that maybe I need to figure this conflict thing out. So I don't come from a point of I'm not like an expert on conflict or anything. I come from a pretty non-conflict background. But I believe the title of this was Peacemaking Through Conflict. And I chose that because I wanted to be able to express that we don't

reduce the conflict in our lives by moving away from it. We can reduce that by moving towards it. So we actually do need to figure out a good way to do conflict. I've listened to lots and lots of podcasts, binged on videos and podcasts and books to try to figure out how can I do conflict better. And so what I'm going to tell you is not from my own expertise, except that I have done a little bit of research to try to figure out why and how conflict can work better.

And neither do I come from a point of perfection because I still don't like conflict. But in Matthew 5:9, we have that familiar verse, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God." And peace does not come from avoiding conflict.

Peace comes from avoiding destructive reactions. So it's not the conflict, it's the reactions that get us. And we have to retrain ourselves to react constructively instead of destructively.

And conflict is misalignment. We're not aligned with the other party, and then the feedback is conflict. So if we're misaligned, we have feedback and it gives information. Something is misaligned and then there's information there for you.

Glenn, can you give us that first picture, please?

So here's an overview of our farm garden here. And if you notice, at least from zoomed out, you don't see very many weeds.

Glenn, can you kick us the next one?

But if you zoom in pretty close there, you can see there's some really, really small weeds growing. And if you want to have a conflict-free, which we're going to call these weeds conflict, if you don't want to have conflict, if you can imagine going out and trying to pull the weeds when they're four or five feet high, it's very, very difficult to approach that. But if you can get the weeds at this stage and next, please, Glenn, we have some special tools that we can use, and we can get weeds at this stage, and we can have the big plants in there, by the way, are not weeds. Those are crop. But there's tiny weeds in there that you can't, like the ones in the former slide there, that are really small.

And if you want to get conflict, if you approach conflict intentionally, you can get it while it's small. Instead of waiting till it's four feet high and 95 degrees and you're trying to pull weeds, you can imagine how difficult that the difference in difficulty is exponential.

So I'm done with that, Glenn.

So conflict is misalignment. It's this feedback that's giving us information. When we see the small conflict weeds pop up, we need to begin to engage immediately instead of waiting and to see what happens, to keep aligned.

And we need to approach the other party with the idea of collaboration. If we go with the now, the weed analogy no longer works here because we don't want to go destroy the other party. We just want to get rid of the conflict. We want to align.

So most of us don't lack an interest in collaboration. If you talk to everybody anywhere, everybody says they want to collaborate. But what we don't realize is most of us don't have this desire not to collaborate. Most of us have a desire to collaborate.

But what we lack is skills. So my challenge is to hone our skills to become a peacemaker. And it starts with you. You don't have to be a leader or in a leadership position to be a peacemaker.

Generally, we don't even need to know who's at fault or who's to blame to be a peacemaker. We can resolve a conflict without knowing who's at fault because many times it's not a single person or party that's at fault.

And we also need to move beyond sandwiches and other manipulative techniques. We have a lot of techniques that have come up, especially in the sales world, to try to influence the other party to agree with us. And the conflict resolution is not necessarily to get other people to agree with us. It's more about aligning with other people. And maybe we need to change our minds. Maybe we need to think about how we're going to we need to think about their position. Maybe they have a valid position too.

So our goal should never be in a conflict should never be to manipulate the other party. It should always be to collaborate. And so, Glenn, next slide, please.

So I hate conflict. I'm usually more of a kind of a person that is going to be quiet if I feel like there's a lot of conflict. And I am going to avoid that. But the question is, how can I serve the people that I care about and the churches that I care about?

What can I do to reduce the amount of conflict in this? How can I become a better negotiator for the common good? Now, this is the picture of some chickens. And there's a researcher by the name of Jim Tam, and he's also written a book. And they took two groups of chickens, put them in, and divided them up. And the goal was to see why some chickens laid more eggs than others.

And so they made this experiment where they had a bunch of chickens that laid every time the chickens were laying all the eggs, they would separate them out. But what they discovered was that these high-production chickens were also laying more eggs by suppressing egg production in other chickens.

So they took a year to divide these chickens out. And the high-production chickens were very, very, very adversarial. They would suppress the other chickens. Now, this is a picture of the chickens that at the end of the year, this is the picture of the one group of chickens that as they separated out the high-laying chickens, the ones that laid less eggs actually started laying eggs. And by the end of the year, when they separated these out, they ended up outlaying the high-production chickens by 260% because instead of trying to suppress each other, they just laid eggs like chickens are supposed to.

The red-zone chickens, these are called the green-zone chickens. He called these the green-zone chickens. So this is a picture of the green-zone chickens. Can you go to the next slide, Glenn?

And the green-zone chickens produced more eggs, a lot more eggs.

Can we go to the next slide, Glenn?

There we go. Now, these are the red-zone chickens. And at the end of the year, half of them were dead, and they laid a lot less eggs than the green-zone chickens. They were highly competitive. They were always trying to suppress each other. But when they got all these chickens that were suppressing each other in the same pen, they no longer had an advantage.

And so they ended up killing each other and laying a lot less eggs.

So can you give us the next slide, Glenn?

So the only thing that a red-zone environment, which these red-zone chickens here, the only thing that this environment of high competition suppressing others to improve ourselves really gains is more of the same. So it just produces more of the same.

So the red-zone chickens were adversarial, highly conflicted, internally competitive, and it spreads like a virus. And this is exactly what happens to humans. It spreads really fast and becomes this thing where you have this mad circle where you can't get away from it.

The green-zone chickens, instead, were supportive, cooperative, and highly skilled at collaboration because they weren't trying to outcompete each other. They weren't suppressing each other. They were just laying eggs. And they outlaid the red-zone chickens by 260%. Okay, Glenn, I'm done with this slide.

Thank you.

Now, the pink zone is in between the red and the green zone, and there's not a picture of chickens for that. And this is kind of something that a lot of us have moved toward as it becomes more apparent, the red zone. You don't want to just be out and out fighting. And I think this is where a lot of us in our circles where a lot of us lie in the pink zone. So we protect, avoid, defend, preserve, evade, hide.

And then we avoid conflict and uncomfortable feelings. We say, "No, everything's great. Nothing's going on." And that's kind of where we end up landing in that zone. That is actually just as destructive as the red zone. It's just not as obvious.

So I'm going to go through some common destructive reactions to conflict. And there are active and passive reactions to conflict. The active reactions are winning at all costs, blind anger and rage, demeaning others, retaliating, avoiding, accommodating. Hang on. Retaliating. The passive are avoiding, accommodating, hiding important emotions, and self-criticizing.

So these are all destructive reactions to conflict. Constructive reactions to conflict. And the active mode are perspective-taking, creating solutions, expressing emotions, and reaching out. So perspective-taking, creating solutions, expressing emotions, and reaching out. Or passive constructive reactions like reflective thinking, delayed responding, not necessarily avoiding, but just waiting to not lashing out right away, and adapting.

So we can adapt to some of these. So bad conflict styles.

The most common bad conflict style is avoiding. And avoiding is ideal in some ends. And sometimes avoiding is ideal. So when issues are trivial, when there's a 0% chance of a mutually satisfactory resolution, or if someone needs time to process the conflict before confronting it, avoiding is okay.

But it tends to be lose-lose. When we avoid conflict, everybody loses. Nobody wins. Nobody gets what they need.

There's also the dominating conflict style. And it is necessary when there's a clear and understood power dynamic. If it's unbalanced between the boss and employee or the parent-child or the teacher and student, in a relationship like this, you're not really in a conflict resolution.

It's more about doing what the superior says.

But if you use this dominating conflict style in a peer-to-peer relationship, it becomes a win at all costs, burn down the house to kill the spiders kind of conflict style. And we know how that goes.

So accommodating is another bad conflict style. But it can be honorable when the issue is significantly more important to the opposing party or someone is in the wrong. What if you realize you're in the wrong, then sure, accommodation is good.

So it's a lose-win. If you accommodate someone because when you're in a conflict style and when you're in conflict with them, then you just give them the win. Now, some people do that consistently, and they consistently refuse to fight for their goals or desires. This can be a very, very unhealthy, damaging conflict style.

Because what happens is most people don't do that, and definitely, eventually, they blow up.

So compromising conflict style, everyone loses and wins a little bit, but at least we're all upset together.

Now, better conflict styles, the best conflict style is actually collaborating. So what happened and why did it happen? We can use conflict as an opportunity to make relationships better. So what really matters to each party?

And is there a solution that works for everybody? And if we come at it with this angle, thinking about collaborating, thinking about working together, we can build trust so that each party can feel safe being vulnerable. So we don't have to if we're truly looking for a solution that really matters to each party and that really works for everybody, we can be more vulnerable and actually look for ways to work together.

But most of us don't lack an interest in collaboration. What we lack is skills.

And skills are hard to develop. But the number one skill to help us be more collaborative is to manage our own defensiveness. So most of us are quickly triggered and become defensive when somebody stomps on our emotions. We have something going on, and we think it's good, and somebody comes along and talks about it and gets in our way. And then we just get triggered. We get angry, or we just maybe go into one of these unhealthy conflict modes naturally. So managing our own defensiveness is our number one

way to be able to build collaboration. So I'm going to do a little experiment with you here, and I'll see how it works on our technology.

I have this nice green piece of paper here.

And it's kind of I ripped it out off the roll here, but it's nice smooth green paper. And stand back a little bit so you can see this thing better.

And I know most of you probably consider yourselves to be highly conservative Christian people. But if you'll think about this piece of paper a little bit and how nice and kind of greenish it is and kind of take a deep breath and think about maybe in your mind, if you could think about how this probably feels kind of smooth to the touch, and it would be a nice thing to write on maybe. You could write a nice note, hang this on the wall, do something with it creative. So I want you to take a deep breath and just kind of maybe lean into it and meditate a little bit and think about how this try to become one with this piece of paper.

Just meditate yourself into this piece of paper. So I'm just going to give you a few seconds here to just meditate yourself into this piece of paper, kind of look at it and just feel like think of all the good things. Think of everything positive you can think about this piece of paper. I don't know what comes to your mind, but just in your mind.

Go ahead.

So how did you feel about me messing up your piece of paper?

And that's the way conflict often comes to us. It's something that we care about, we love, and somebody else comes along and just smashes it. And we think, "Wow, what did we do to deserve this?"

Hopefully, you can forgive me pretty quickly for messing up your piece of paper, but it is this thing of empathy, something that we cared about, something that really deeply mattered to us. If someone comes along and it feels like they're attacking us, the first thing we need to do is just calm down, take a deep breath. Because when we get triggered, when we begin to feel vulnerable, and we get defensive, our IQ lowers by 20%. So you get a lot less smart just in that instant of when you decide that or when you get triggered, when things go bad for you and you're in a conflict. And as soon as you get defensive, your IQ drops by 20%.

So that leaves us really, really in a bad place to try to figure out how to negotiate conflict in a good way, in a healthy way.

So we begin to have fears about our significance, our competence, our likability, and we blame others and feel misunderstood.

So we really need to get away from our own defensiveness. And if you're using fault or blame to decide how to solve a problem, then you're making it a you-versus-them problem. So generally, we do not need to know who's at fault or to blame, just resolve a conflict.

So we want to stay away from defensive things in our own heads. We don't want to try to figure out, "Well, is it their fault? Is it my fault? Whose fault is it?" And we naturally go through those things that decide who's at fault and who's not. But the more we can minimize the fault-finding, the better we can enter into a collaborative mode.

And if we blame someone, then we trigger them. They begin to feel attacked, and you are begging for a negative reaction or for stonewalling.

So the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. So we're not trying to get away from another person's point of view. We need that other point of view. So sameness is not oneness. So in a relationship, just because everybody's the same doesn't mean that we are one.

That would never work in a marriage. We see people trying it, but it doesn't work. Uniformity is not unity.

So unity or oneness is complementariness and not sameness.

Nature teaches us that it takes two very different people working together to create offspring. And we can apply that to churches too. We do not need everyone to be the same. And sameness is uncreative and boring. And Stephen Covey says, "The essence of synergy is to value the differences."

The essence of synergy is to value the differences. So if two people have the same opinion, then one is unnecessary. And several years back at the Church Planters Forum, this term was being thrown around called homospiritual, which I think might have been invented on the spot. But it means everybody being the same in their spiritual views.

And it feels good at the moment, but it can be unhealthy.

So we don't need two fathers or two mothers. What we need is diversity. So if we value diversity, then we're in a position to collaborate with the other party. And we need to have collaboration.

So when we approach conflict in a collaborative mode, then we just need to know what happened, why did it happen, without blaming anyone. And then we can use conflict as an opportunity to make relationships better.

We need to know what really matters to each party. Is there a solution that works for everybody? And then work on building trust so that each party can feel safe being vulnerable.

And there's one quote I came across. Often, there's people in this space. When we get into conflict, there's often someone that is just triggered and determined to derail any attempts at collaborating.

And the fastest way to lose your best people is to not deal with your worst people. So if you really want to lose your best people, then don't deal with your worst people. And we have Paul versus Peter in Galatians 2:11-21. I'm not going to read that, but Paul there went to Peter and said, "Hey, you cannot do this. You can't be

kicking out the Gentiles or not eating with the Gentiles because you know better than that." And he basically spends the rest of Galatians talking about this, about how you should not

be taking the side of the Jews.

And Paul didn't go there and just say, "Hey, Peter, you shouldn't do that." He went there and really kind of more or less set him straight. But it seems like Peter listened and straightened up and behaved. So we see Paul taking this conflict directly. He didn't beat around the bush, and it appears like it worked.

So the fastest way to lose your best people is not to deal with your worst people. So if there's someone that is out of sync, then sometimes the path to peace is to go straight for the conflict, to go straight to the basically straight to the throat.

And there, again, not in attack mode, but in decide what really matters to each party, what really needs to be done, and see if there's a solution. And sometimes it's not the way it seems. Sometimes you go to have a conflict, and you go and you think there's something wrong and discover there's something totally different. So conflict is misalignment. It's just some little weeds popping up. It gives you information. You realize something's wrong, and something is misaligned. Something's not aligned there. And there's information there that is coming to your radar, and then you can deal with that.

So again, your number one way to manage conflict is by managing your own defensiveness. If you can approach anything, any kind of conflict without being defensive, you can easily find a way to work with the other party.

And most of us do not lack an interest in collaboration. What we need, what we really lack, is skills. So hone your skills, become a peacemaker. It starts with you, and you don't need to be in a leadership position to be a peacemaker.

Thank you.

Well, thank you, brother. You did a really good job of basically kiboshing my perspective of conflict resolution. I see through this that I have some unhealthy views of conflict and how to resolve them. So thank you for doing that. We are going to open it up for questions. One question I had was accommodating. I was a little surprised that that was in the pink zone or the passive.

Can you talk a little bit more of that? I know you did touch on that, but how is I guess I don't know. I guess I'll just put it out there. I thought accommodating would be a is it a Band-Aid solution, or what are your perspectives there?

So accommodating is only a good solution if we are in the wrong or if the issue is significantly more important to the opposing party. So I'll try to unpack that a little bit from what I can remember.

I know accommodating is what we do is we say, "Well, we don't want to we don't want a conflict with the person, so let's accommodate." And when we accommodate, we just internalize the conflict. We move it away from we move it off the table into our own hearts. And then as that person does something again down the road, and then we're expected to accommodate again because we did last time.

And sometimes the second conflict is related to the first conflict. But if you start that snowball of accommodation, it can become this internal conflict in a person that can lead to very, very unhealthy emotional mental state because we just always accommodate. Accommodating is actually very common in wives because men are usually more dominant. And so rather than expressing what she wants, she's going to be more likely to just say, "Yeah, whatever."

And that can be dangerous long-term because it can come up. Very, very small things can become a problem. And often, the dominating partner, let's say if we use a husband and a wife, often the husband may have no idea because with the accommodation, you don't actually lay out you avoid the conflict, but the small conflict that may have happened by not saying the way you actually felt.

And then that can snowball and become a especially in a long-term relationship, that can become dangerous. Now, if there's somebody on the street that pulls a gun on me and says they want my wallet, I'm going to accommodate.

That's no problem because that's not a long-term relationship.

Yeah. I appreciate that. So there would be a time for accommodating, but it would take an awareness of ourselves and realizing that, "Oh, no, I'm wrong. I need to back down here." And if we realize we're wrong, then we can resolve the conflict by accommodating. But I think it's been my experience anyway that I can relate to that. If you're accommodating too long, then eventually that's going to come out anyway. And the other person is going to actually feel blindsided because you're going to start pulling out all this stuff from way back. And they're like, "I thought we got past that when that was a conflict." But if we're over-accommodating, then that can be bottled up in there.

Yeah. That's good. All right. Anyone else have some questions or comments about this? I know we all face conflict, so. May I say something? Actually, just make a statement. I've been dealing with I'm like a steamroller in a lot of ways, and I'm learning that the damage that I did to relationships in my church and just people around. And lately, I've been convicted by something called implied ownership. If I do something a certain way all the time, then I have implied ownership. And because somebody is a conflict-reducing person, they let me do it. And Hector just talked about it. At some point, you just start retaliating. But that implied ownership that I took created a mess.

Am I making sense to you, Hector? I'm not quite following you. Keep going. Okay. Implied ownership is when you let me do something and you don't confront me in the beginning, and I just keep doing it the same way over and over. I've been going through I'm watching other people do it to me, and then I'm also looking at myself going, "Boy, I've been doing this." And I've created this mechanism where people just leave me alone. And it's not healthy on both sides. And I'm learning I sent you a text.

I want to continue conversation with you because I'm trying to learn to not be somebody that pushes your boundaries and asks you. I'm learning to I know I'm struggling here. I'm learning how to resolve that conflict prior to it happening in my life because I'm tired of doing this to people. It's strong-arming people into things.

Yeah. Right. So what happens is you're probably a I don't know what they call that, type A, where you're dominant enough that people are going to quickly or easily just go to the accommodating because, "Hey, yeah, Patrick's got it.

There's no point in we don't want to go to that level of conflict." You're willing to go to a deeper level of war than they are. So yeah, let's not do that.

But I mean, that can right. And I'm not sure how to approach that from your point of view because you, being the more dominant person, leaves you with some maybe much less willing to speak up people, making it more difficult for them to speak up. And there again, I don't think the fault entirely lies on the dominant person, for sure, because some of us are more dominant than others. But we need to learn how to make that work with everyone, and it's tricky.

I'm learning how to cause less conflict by being quiet and learning to listen. I'm looking to do what you're doing, and I'm struggling from a different perspective. So you did a really good job on this, and I really enjoyed what you said. Now, I'm going to shut up and not be the dominant person on this.

Patrick, do you end up in sort of a lone island position with that, where you kind of you're dominant, and then you end up driving people away, but then you end up resenting it?

Yeah. You gave you a thumbs up there, Jacob. Yeah.

My wife's family struggles with that. They have this domineering thing, but then they push people away. But then it's like a project. They can be overly dominant, push people away, but then be resentful that they don't have people participating. And there's a fine balance in trying to maintain that.

It's a cycle. It's a cycle you get in. You just don't realize what's happening, and it's a vicious cycle. And I sit back and watch it happen over and over again, wondering when they're going to learn.

I have a question, but Kent has his hand up, so I'll let him go first. Thanks, Philip. Hey, Kent here, first time. Hector, thanks for this. This has been really good, helpful. I had a question for, and I don't know maybe if others have experienced this at all either, but in certain circles, it seems like folks are very averse to even engage in conflict. They look at conflict in and of itself as bad, as un-Christian even, that we shouldn't have conflict.

A long time ago, somebody told me, "Proverbs 27:17 is iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpeneth another." And iron can't sharpen iron without striking each other, right? So what are ways that we can engage then others who don't want to be engaged in conflict, right? If conflict is good and conflict is health and conflict can be healthy, how can we engage others more that almost try to refuse to be in conflict?

So you're probably describing the Anabaptist people pretty well because that's been our mode, is to not be in conflict. I mean, although there is a ton of conflict that goes on underground that you don't see, and at least not right away.

And we kind of call it the passive-aggressive side of things. Yeah. Yeah. Pink zone, definitely.

And that's one thing that I've learned in my last six years of church experience is that I failed to mention that, but I'm surrounded by a bunch of people that are very good at conflict, much better at conflict than I am. And so I come from a I come from a background where, yeah, more of a kind of accommodating background, avoiding more you just do whatever.

As long as you don't rock the boat, you're good. And that's not necessarily healthy. There's definitely a place for conflict. Now, I would say tone it down. A lot of times when we go for conflict, we bottle this up until we're so mad that by the time we get there, that we have our guns loaded and we know who's at fault, we know who's to blame, and we're just going to go in there and burn down the house. Yeah. Guilty as charged.

But it works way better if we can build a bridge somewhere, get that conflict, and maybe start nibbling off pieces of it. Being surrounded by people that do conflict way better than I first thought they were just always fighting, but then I eventually realized, no, they're actually coming to agreeable conclusions that are better than that are synergistic, that are better than either one of us could have come up on our own.

So in a lot of small issues, and I think small issues is a great place to start, just I wouldn't go for the I wouldn't go for the biggest issue first by any means.

Do you have a comment on the split between Saul and Barnabas? That's always puzzled me. And there doesn't seem to be in Scripture any particular declaration of which party was correct. But it's kind of a heartbreak to see these two who started out really ordained by a committee of five, I'll call it, in Antioch, and proceeded to turn the world upside down, and then they could work together.

So I'm not really yeah, I would say that I feel like they parted ways and they weren't very happy at the moment. Yeah, they probably did conflict wrong. They were human just like the rest of us. But it does seem like that at some point in the future, they were at least blessing each other. And I think if we get to the point where we can't actually work in the same shop, we can at least bless each other as we part our ways. And yeah, other than that, I don't really have a comment on that.

So my question has to do with the Scripture verse, "Agree with thine adversary quickly. While thou art in the way, lest at any time he deliver thee to the officer, and the officer deliver thee to the judge, and the judge cast thee into prison." Sorry, that's my King James English. I don't know any other version.

So does this principle apply to adversaries and not in the church? Is that describing an appeasement policy, or is there more collaboration happening in that implied in that? Just curious what your thoughts are about that verse in relation to what you're sharing.

And thanks for what you shared, by the way. I really enjoyed it.

So I bet we should do a drywall job together and see if we can figure that out.

I'm going to say that that is talking about the times when you are in a back alley and somebody pulls a gun on you. Well, yes, agree with thine adversary quickly. And that happens in churches too, I mean, figuratively. But if you are in a position where you realize that this is not in any way there's no way for you to gain anything from arguing with this individual, then sure, agree with them, or at least accommodate, accommodate, not necessarily agree.

I think there's a provision for that in the, I want to say, in the court system where you can kind of step out of a conflict and go regroup. And I'm not saying that we need to go regroup as in go load our guns, but there's times that agreeing with your adversary quickly is probably the best bet.

That's still my go-to. I'm working on that, but that's still my go-to. And I'm more quick to just say, "Okay, whatever you say." But then it gives me time to think about it. I may come back later and work against you in the pink zone, but that's not my goal. My goal is to try to be able to be more transparent and be more willing to say, "No, that doesn't work."

Thank you. I think that's a good answer.

I think our reason for conflict makes a difference as well.

It's not that I'm trying to prove my point, but just to realize that we can have a good discussion and we disagree, but try to understand each other. And that's just where it's easiest just to shut up and not say anything. When really, we should be discussing these things and learning.

And the comment that Patrick had made, I could see myself in that somewhat. It's really easy when you're the dad or, "So I'm the dad. I'm the boss. I'm the pastor." And you have your ways of doing things that people just take it because you're the boss.

At work, that's what I am. I'm the boss. And to present your spirit in such a way that you're willing to hear, that they're able to bring their conflict to you and to discuss those things.

That's one of my goals, I guess, that I try to work on.

Yeah. That's what Patrick maybe was talking about, is trying to be able to be approachable.

I don't know. I don't see him right now, but maybe he's willing to engage.

I view him more as almost welcoming conflict. I don't know you very well, Patrick, but things like if I was in a fight, you're the guy on my side. Yeah. I heard that a lot.

But somehow we need to, yeah, you're right, need to kind of tone our image down a little bit to where people feel like they can approach us.

One of the drawbacks of having a strong personality is people in my church, in my community, will drop down before they even get involved in something because they feel like it's going to be too much. That's not a good position.

I push more people away, and my goal is to become more like you. And I don't know how to do it because I came from an environment which was different than you did. Conflict is normal in my life. It's how you resolve it that's uncommon.

So, Patrick, I guess I got a question that I'm curious about. Do you, when you're in conflict, does it feel like does that feel bad to you? If I want to put it, do you feel is it something that you enjoy or not?

No. I did enjoy it. It was an adrenaline rush, but there's this heuristic going on inside my head where I'm like, and I always find a way to just suppress it and go, "How do I honor the person next to me?" But there's this circus going on that nobody sees that is completely unnatural to me. But what I find is if I want to take the way of Christ, it's to respond in the way of Christ, which is that's not what I'm used to.

And I don't know how to do it. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, I just wondered, coming from a completely different personality where my personality is an immediately accommodating or avoiding, and your personality is an immediate more of a conflict or has been. That's your natural personality. We'll put it that way.

You're more of a Paul, and I'm more of a Barnabas. Yeah. Barnabas. They didn't even put me in the Bible because I don't know who has that personality in there. But yes, that's right. Getting that conflict is difficult to manage.

People, I think people don't realize in my own, when I'm accommodating, I may appear on the surface to be just fine and dandy with that, but there's a lot of inner turmoil that goes with accommodation too. Yes. Yes.

I think the circus that I'm describing in some way inside of me because I struggle to be more I struggle with being more Christ-like because you can be strong and push your way through and strong-arm people into things, but you lose.

I want to find a way my neighbor came up to me, and he wanted to beat me up. And I told him he could. And I found strength in that because three years later, two years later, he's eating breakfast with us.

And so I had a win in that arena, excuse the expression, and now I'm encouraged by it. But there's other people that want to talk.

Yeah. Thank you, Hector, for sharing. So just had a question for you. It seems a lot of times people that are very accommodating try to respond with something like, "Well, let's just agree to disagree." And I want to engage. I don't want to just agree to disagree. How do you respond to that when people say, "Let's just agree to disagree"?

Wow, that's a tricky question.

So it depends on how important the how important the conflict is. So there are things that we need to agree to disagree about, but then there are things that we shouldn't agree to disagree about. And it really ends up being which one matters the most to you.

In your own self, in your own church, if you feel like something is damaging enough that it needs to that it needs to be addressed, then you can't agree to disagree.

Sometimes you can wait to discuss. I've participated in some delayed discussions, and I think it's worked in ways. But I don't think there's a perfect answer to that. I mean, it's a good question. It's a very good question. When should we agree to disagree? I think there are times when we should, but it's definitely not always and probably not usually.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

Hey, another comment there, Brother Hector. Can you share with us some helpful tips about negotiating in a conflict?

Wow.

Be less defensive.

That's the only one that really pops to the top of my head right now.

The quickest way to derail a negotiation is to come across as being, "I'm going to win this," versus, "Can we work together?"

And yeah, there are ways. Jim Tam, his book is definitely worth reading. I'm trying to remember the title of it.

Is it Radical Collaboration? Yeah. Yeah. I believe that's correct. Yep. Yeah. Definitely worth reading. And he talks about building bridges there, I believe. I think he's saying a team of get a team of hostile or if there's conflict in an organization, sometimes you get them together in a room with a bunch of Legos and build Legos on a table and build something together. And just that action of building something together that nobody cares a ton about often makes the meetings go better.

So just a completely aside, maybe that's where working together in a working together on a project or something can actually build more of a rapport with someone that it's easy to hate somebody that you don't know. But as you know someone better, there's more opportunity for conflict, but there's also more opportunity for collaboration.

Yeah. Thank you for that.

I guess I've experienced the 20% IQ drop a time or two in my life. Me too. Yeah. That's good. And that idea that it's hard to hate somebody you know, I think that's a good thing to take into church relationships is make sure you know your brothers well and have a close relationship with them because it'll definitely set you up for some better conflict resolution.

Yeah. That's right.

Can I add something more? Go ahead. I found that I wasn't being confronted by the church that I was going with in some aspects. They got me to a certain point spiritually. But with this conflict thing that I've been involved in my whole life, I felt the need to open a halfway house and invite convicts into my life. Jacob just sent me something.

He sent me a thing that I'm thinking about. I created this mechanism where I have convicts confronting me in this life. And what I'm trying to show them is the way of conflict is not to dominate, but to do it in a Christ-like manner. So I'm in this split right brain, left brain thing. I come from an environment which grabs people by the throat, but I'm trying because of the group of people that I pray with, they will rather hug you. And so I created this system or I'm helping create a system where these men will challenge me and teach me to honor them in the moment, not to dishonor them with conflict.

And there's a lot more to it. I'll shut up. Yeah.

Make sense?

I think the thing that makes conflict bearable or good or workable is when we have commitment. And if I'm scared that if I say this, I'm going to chase you off, then I'm going to just shut up because I want you to stay here.

But if I know that we're in this together, we're in this church together, we're not leaving, then I can say what I feel I need to say. And you can do it in a loving way, but I know I'm not going to chase you off or you're not going to chase me off. And I think commitment is a big part of what makes conflict workable.