I felt rejected or attacked if someone turned down my idea or even brought up a different viewpoint. Every conflict I couldn’t handle fed my resentment.
To avoid conflict, I left professional associations and non-profit boards. I walked away from customers and business prospects. I even stopped talking to friends and family members for months or years.
I could become a lone ranger and avoid conflicts altogether.
But I still had my family and the team working with me in my growing business. Conflict showed up there too.
Since I couldn’t run away from everyone, I started noticing how often I avoided it.
I began to see that if I wanted people around me who cared, conflict was part of the deal. By dodging conflicts, I was also walking away from relationships that mattered.
When I was running my consulting and staffing business, we took on a client project. We had a developer working onsite and an architect supporting part-time. At the time, we were busy. There were other projects and client engagements going on.
A couple of months in, I heard that invoice payments were getting delayed.
When I reached out, the client said they were holding payment because things weren’t going well and no one from our side was responding to requests for a call. They said they had raised concerns earlier, but only with the consultant, and those concerns never made it back to us.
We finally set up a meeting at their office. They explained what had been happening. We said we would fix the issues, but asked them to release the payment since we still had to pay the consultant.
They refused.
That’s when things turned for me.
I told myself they were playing games. That they were being unprofessional. I kept thinking we had given them a good deal. I even went further in my own head and painted them as a small business that wasn’t worth working with, especially since we were used to dealing with larger companies where things felt more professional.
Once I went there, I stopped listening.
My architect offered to fix the situation at no cost. I was already angry. I felt disrespected and cornered. We hired an attorney.
Nothing moved after that.
We paid legal fees, never recovered the money, and lost the client.
Only later did I see how quickly discomfort had turned into judgment.
What if I had agreed to disagree with where we were at that moment and tried to find common ground instead?
I still notice the urge to avoid conflict. I just catch it sooner now.
I’ve seen the cost of avoiding conflict more clearly than the benefit of winning it.