Trouble In Paradise? These Five Tips Can Help You Tackle Conflict Head-On
It took me quite a while to figure out why the block button was my best friend: I hated conflict. Difficult conversations made me uncomfortable, so I tried my best to avoid them. Even if that meant blocking people and leaving them for dead. It wasn't right, but it was how I coped and it left me wondering how many relationships could've been saved through effective conflict resolution.
That thought alone made me want to be better, if not for others, then certainly for myself. So, instead of running—and blocking—I committed to facing things head-on. It was rocky at first; I took things personally, was wildly defensive, and kept stumbling back to my old ways.
But the more I kept at it—confronting issues and actively listening to others—the more I realized that conflict is normal. In fact, it can be healthy. What makes it effective and most meaningful is how we handle it. Dealing with conflict in the following ways has helped my relationships flourish and has taught me about myself.
1.Understand What The Real Issue Is.
Have you ever been (what seems to be) irrationally mad about a minor offense? Are you ever confused about why you're so sad or upset about something your friend or partner did? Truly, the most frustrating part about addressing conflict is being angry but not knowing or understanding why.
Is it that you weren't invited or is it that you feel neglected and you need more attention? Is it that the text offended you or is it that it triggered an insecurity that you hadn't yet resolved? Is his behavior that offensive, or does it remind you of someone you have a bad history with?
More times than not, the problem you're upset about isn't the actual problem—it's a trigger. There's something deeper that lies within. Taking the time to think through things is critical for addressing whatever the real problem might be. The clearer you are about the problem, the better you can communicate and resolve it. Don't fly off the handle just yet, take time to actually dissect your emotions and come to terms with what the real problem is.
To start, try asking yourself the following questions:
- Why does this upset me?
- What other feelings am I experiencing from this? Why?
- What about this offense affects me the most?
- What will help me get past this?
Oftentimes when I've reflected in this way, I realized the problem was me, not them. But in the case that it is them, understanding why you feel the way you do—and what the true offense is—will help you communicate it. And we all know that communication is key.
2.Speak To The Person Directly.
The first thing I say in response to someone complaining about a friend, loved one, or lover is, "Well, have you told them yet?"
Speaking directly with the person who hurt you allows them an immediate opportunity to clear up the infraction before internal thoughts and outside perceptions begin to cloud your judgment. I know some people just need to vent, but I also know how unconstructive those vent sessions could be if you never find time to address the problem with the offender. I always recommend speaking directly with the person first to limit interference and further irritation.
3.Ask Questions.
When we're heavy in emotions, it's easy to assume the worst intentions. But before you start pointing fingers, try asking questions. This helps to alleviate loads of miscommunication and misperceptions. It also allows them a chance to respond to your inquiry without feeling attacked and becoming defensive.
- "I realized you didn't invite me to the group happy hour, did you mean to do that?"
- "[Name] told me you were speaking badly about me, is that true?"
- "You promised to help me with my project but didn't. What happened?"
A simple question can change the course of the conversation (and conflict). Reducing assumptions is the saving grace for many relationships and can also keep you from getting wound up about something that was not intended to harm you.
4.Don’t Let It Fester.
While it's important to think through the emotions and establish your best course of action, it's also important to not let it sit too long. Don't dismiss issues that bother you. Don't wait until they build up. It's OK to think about how to best approach the situation, but don't downplay the offense so long that the other person doesn't realize it was an offense in the first place. Honor how you feel, explore the root of the problem, but then address it—sooner rather than later.
5.Aim For A Solution.
Conversations with no end goal or solutions can be frustrating. There's nothing worse than going to a meeting that doesn't offer next steps. Similarly, venting to a friend and ending the conversation with no sound advice can be equally annoying. After addressing the problem, talking through the slew of emotions, and hearing each other out, it's so important to attempt to resolve the problem. This might mean providing tips for how they might be a better friend for you or how you might approach the conflict next time. Whatever the solutions are, be sure to think through and present them. After all, it's called conflict resolution for a reason.
Want more stories like this? Sign up for our newsletter here and check out the related reads below:
I Chose Not To Forgive & Everything Changed
Till Petty Do Us Part: How Arguing Changes In A Marriage
How to Fight Fair in Your Relationship
Is Sex After an Argument Automatically a Bad Thing?
Featured image by Shutterstock.
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Zoe Hunter is the writer, speaker, and creator behind the women empowerment brand DEAR QUEENS. She uses vulnerability, storytelling, and spiritual development to empower women toward healthy decision-making. Stay connected to Zoe's work by visiting DEARQUEENS.com or following her on Twitter @zDEARQUEENS.
Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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You Don’t Need A Friendship Breakup. Maybe You Need A Friendship Demotion.
It never feels good when relationship dynamics between friends change. Sisterhood means so much to Black women, and I think a huge factor is that we realize that nobody will look out for us like one another.
My friends have walked with me through some of my darkest moments and cheered louder for me than I did for myself in some of my greatest wins. But as our lives change, not every relationship has stayed the same because life isn't designed to work that way.
Life has a way of turning the "party friend" into a happily married woman with kids, the "supportive friend" into the friend who moves away because she's tired of putting everyone first, the "wallflower friend" into the main character, and girl boss and the "small town friend" into the friend who moves to the big city and starts a new life.
Evolution can be such a beautiful thing, but it can also be traumatizing to feel disconnected from the very people who were once the center of your world. But does that mean the friendship needs to end?
Friendship breakups hurt just as much as romantic breakups, in my opinion, and at times, they hurt more because we don't hold space for grief the same way we do for our relationships with our friends. That's not to say that there aren't instances where pain aside, the friendship should end due to it being unhealthy, expired, or never genuine from the start.
But what do we do when the love is still there but we might not have as much in common anymore? Might I suggest to you a friendship demotion?
The Benefits of a Friendship Demotion
Demoting a friend allows you to keep the friendship, but it is a friendship reimagined. Maybe you had a best friend, and you talked daily; you used to hang out often, and all of a sudden, you talked much less due to life circumstances or just plain ole not having anything in common anymore, but you still love one another. Allowing yourself the friendship demotion still keeps the friend in your life, but in a more minor role where you hold space for the times had, the bonds made, and still leave the door open for new friendships to blossom for the person you are now.
The friends I have demoted still mean the world to me, but we are no longer the same people. The friends I needed at 20, I don't need at 30 because I am a different person with different goals, desires, and needs in friendships.
I remember going through this phase where I wanted to travel and go on girls' trips, and my main circle of friends was either moving away due to the area becoming unaffordable for them or becoming mothers. Did I wake up and decide, as a single woman, that I want friends who have babies and live out of state with limited availability? No, but the women in my core friend group just happened to shift in life, just as I did with blossoming in my career.
For a while, that distance hurt (and it reminded me of the pain I felt when my college friends and I all went back to our home states after graduation), and I felt abandoned by my friends and resentful because I felt the shift but didn't know how to deal with the change. Allowing myself to still hold space for the relationships through demotion and pursuing friendships with single women who desired to travel the world and go out on weeknights just like I wanted to, changed everything for me.
I gave certain friends in my circle a demotion in my life and everything changed.
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And it allowed my friends to connect with moms who could have play dates and girls' nights at the same time. Now, we connect when we can and still love on one another. So, while they might not be able to hop on a flight or come to girls' night all the time, we meet up for mani/pedis, coffee dates, catch up on Facetime, and always prioritize spending time together for our birthdays.
And then there are those friends who I've backed away from altogether.
Whether it was due to our no longer having any shared interests, no longer feeling safe with them, or realizing that the friendship was seasonal, keeping the relationship didn't feel good to me. Letting them go didn't feel like a betrayal to myself, allowing them to remain in my life did.
Your friendship dynamics might be more complex, but I challenge you to sit with yourself and write down the name of each friend on a piece of paper. Ask yourself if the friendship serves you or not and if it is a reflection of your life or your past, and from there, be open to reimagining what these relationships look like and if maybe, just maybe, you need to demote some friends to make space for the new ones on the way to you.
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