21 May 2025

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Confrontation

I can’t say I would immediately trust anyone who said that they thrived in confrontation. For most people it’s the last thing they want. Many will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation, which can lead to its own problems.

People make mistakes, often innocently. Others make mistakes that might be termed “mistakes of neglect;” that they didn’t get around to x. The problem is that when x is a deliverable, and your company is on deadline, these mistakes often need to be addressed. By you.

Take a deep breath, because it’s not if but likely when we will be in a situation where we’ll have to roll up our sleeves and have a difficult conversation with our employee, or—perhaps more intimidatingly—our co-founder. How we do this can be called an art form. It’s easy to say what we don’t want: we don’t want to blow our top, we don’t want to make outsized accusations (an unfair portrayal), and I’m pretty sure we want to give them an opportunity to explain what it was they were (or weren’t) doing that led to the mistake.

Confrontation requires a steady hand. It requires us to both articulate our disappointment or frustration, while also self-regulating our emotions. And, as mentioned earlier, if we habitually avoid confrontation—to pretend that it didn’t happen, or that the neglect will simply self-correct—we risk a pile-up later on which may be even harder for us to address (or to self-regulate our frustration).

Business therapy can give you the space to unpack what’s going on with your confrontation avoidance, and to better understand what makes it tick. Perhaps it’s a combination of introversion and previously bad personal experiences that are informing your situation. Perhaps you were raised in a chaotic home environment where you ended up internalizing a message that keeping quiet was—in every sense of the word—safe. It’s also possible that a lot of what you’re feeling with respect to confronting someone is your subconscious projecting more onto the situation than what’s actually there.

There’s nothing better than facing our fears, though the road can be unpredictable (after all, it would be naïve to think that what we were feeling was entirely our creation; your employee or co-founder might have their own issues with confrontation—namely being told that they made a mistake—that can make the situation tempting to avoid). The great thing about Business Therapy is that if we can get you and your co-founder in the same room (virtual or real) and hash things out, then the two of you will be on the same road together, and that’s a much better way to go about it than having to navigate this on your own.

It’s not supposed to be easy. But there’s growth to be had in tackling these things!