I Make Others Uncomfortable for a Living

You can accelerate your own growth with “conflict snacking”

For five years I’ve sent an email once a week to a list of corporate professionals who have all signed up following one of my keynotes. Each email was a description of a “game” that they could play to keep their professional edge and challenge the boundaries of their comfort zone.

Making people uncomfortable is not a recommended pathway for engaging subscribers, but hundreds of games later, they keep asking for them.

In fact, engaging discomfort in small doses is one of the most reliable ways to fuel growth and it’s the first thing I do as a professional speaker.

I have a unique presentation where I dress up identically to the serving staff at a hotel or resort and pose as a waiter while attendees are dining at the event. I start by overfilling the water glasses of the guests from a height of 3 feet, just trickling water into the glass, veeery slowly, with a completely straight face. This is followed by equally eccentric behavior each time I return to the table — offering to clear their plate mid-bite, crawling on my hands and knees to retrieve silverware I’ve dropped under the table.

As my waiter character becomes more and more inept, clumsy, and odd over the course of the meal, the guests enter into whispered conversation about what they should do — confront me directly, tell the management, or try to ignore it.

It’s a fascinating piece of social theater the guests don’t even know they’re a part of until I reveal my true identity as their keynote speaker. But it sets the stage for my favorite conversation about human development.

What do we do when our expectations or agendas are not met by others and we can’t navigate through our lives on autopilot?

That’s the moment when we have to leave our knowledge behind and rely on our competencies.

Knowledge prepares us to engage with known circumstances and situations.

A competency, on the other hand, is adaptable knowledge. It’s a wealth of experience that can be applied creatively in the face of new challenges.

Examples of Competency in Action

The moment I reveal to a dining audience that I’m actually their keynote speaker and not their waiter, two things happen.

First, there’s a wave of relief that the “problem” server is not someone they have to worry about any longer.

But the second phenomenon is watching a room of several hundred people rewind their behavior from the last hour to determine if they need to be embarrassed by how they reacted to the staged bad service.

Those who have competency don’t show the same concern. They’re relaxed, delighted, and sitting tall because they were present with the tension of my theater (before they knew that’s what it was) and they responded according to their values and principles, rather than their unconscious fears.

I’ve had attendees give me instruction on how to pour water, right then and there, since I obviously needed it.

I’ve been playfully greeted with notes and messages in the middle of professional development sessions.

I’ve had attendees correspond with loved ones and colleagues to share their predicaments.

And most recently a group of roofing contractors in British Columbia came out of the conference room after I finished speaking, to feign interest in what I was offering at my book table. As I waxed distractedly about my professional development material, they all pulled out forks and started eating the lunch that had been saved for me.

When individuals apply competency, everyone is delighted, because it’s an intelligent and skillful response to the present moment.

And each one of the examples above is an example of moving toward a conflict with a creative and engaged response.

Avoiding Conflict Doesn’t Move Us Forward

For a while, I experimented by posting some of my Games for Confidence to a YouTube channel. Out of all the videos I listed, the one that gets the most views by far is titled “How to Confidently Manage Conflict.”

I suspect that those who click on that video are hoping to find tips for making conflict go away. We’re all trying to avoid conflict. But, in actuality, that is precisely the problem.

Our desire to avoid conflict at all costs backs us into a corner where we’re unable to successfully navigate conflict when it arises.

Embracing conflict situations is how we become skilled at handling them, and even at using them to our advantage. That’s where the practice of conflict snacking comes in.

How to Conflict Snack

If you’re interested in learning how to conflict snack, try this.

At least once during each day this week, move toward a situation, person or circumstance that generates conflict inside of you.

Please notice the word “snack” next to the word “conflict.” Conflict takes up a lot of space in our attention. Neurologically we’re designed to keep our eye on it. But the idea here is to take a small bite of this conflict substance and learn to digest it. So getting into a huge fight in a bar, filing for divorce, or telling your boss what you really think of him or her at full volume is not what I’m suggesting.

Here are a few examples of conflict snacks:

• You might spend a short time around someone you’re jealous of.
• You could buy something you know you shouldn’t eat and look at it in the fridge or cupboard each day without consuming it.
• If you need to go somewhere, you could just get in your car and drive without doing anything about the temperature in your car, whether it’s too cold or too hot.
• You could stop in the middle of a movie, a shower, a meal, or a conversation and walk away before you are “done.”

“Why would I want to do such things?” you may be asking.

In her book, Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work and What Does, author and researcher Susan Fowler describes the three psychological needs of a human being and how — when these needs are met — an individual enjoys a perpetual, free-flowing source of motivation for living his or her best life.

The third psychological need she addresses is competence. In Susan’s words,

“Competence is our need to feel effective at meeting everyday challenges and opportunities. It is demonstrating skill over time. It is feeling a sense of growth and flourishing.”

Developing competence in relation to conflict and becoming effective at meeting everyday challenges is fundamental to the process of growth.

My Games for Confidence project high-lighted practices for moving toward minor discomforts and bearing low-level stress.

So how do we attain competence under stress?

The same way our children learn to walk: by stumbling forward with incompetence, learning from our direct experience and mastering one challenge at a time.

If we throw ourselves into intensely challenging circumstances, where the stakes are high and our competence is low, we’re setting ourselves up for anxiety and failure at the task.

What we’re looking for is a challenge that activates our learning spirit without overstimulating our emotional alarms. If we manage this kind of training properly, we can actually lift the threshold of our conflict capacity and expand our freedom to engage in more demanding and fulfilling challenges in life.

Start learning to create some worthwhile games for yourself that allow you to conflict snacks throughout the day.

Success and happiness require us to make intentional investments in small disturbances that prepare us for an ever-increasing degree of competence.

If you want some innovative ideas for how to do this, subscribe to my email list (below my bio) and stay tuned as I plan to start sharing some of my Games for Confidence on Medium.