The Calculations

After the often arduous task of knowing yourself and knowing your opponent, and before entering into the conflict, you must analyze the conflict. Situation, resources, capabilities, motivations, all must be taken into account to determine the likelihood of success and the most efficient way to achieve goals.

Conflict in the self poses challenges that require great care in understanding as much of the conflict as possible. Knowing yourself and the nature of the opponent is critical to success. Knowing yourself is one of the most difficult paths a person will ever walk. Even as you are learning about yourself you are changing. Keeping up with those changes and choosing who you want to be at every particular moment can be very absorbing. One must try to keep the main Goal always in sight: respect for life. The specific goals you are achieving can then be realized. The bad habit or perhaps the inability to focus on studying can be approached and converted to more effective living.

Conflict with the environment is challenging because often, since you are in the midst of the conflict and trying to adapt, you do not see the conflict but the side effects. Poor health, depression, stress, etc. are indicators that something or things in the environment are preventing you from achieving harmony in your life. Only through knowing yourself can you understand what harmony is to you. Then this knowledge can be applied to determine what is upsetting your personal balance. Examples of environmental conflicts that can cause imbalance are: a teacher that teaches poorly or seems to have a personal agenda that does not include the students he/she is responsible for, or a stifling job environment. These can be overcome by applying leadership skills in changing the situation to the benefit of all.

Conflict with another is usually easy to perceive. The calculations usually point to compromise that allows and facilitates growth. Success in resolving non-negotiable conflict with another usually results in permanent change in the relationship. The resolution should be inclusive of the goals of both.

Conflict among leaders or organizations is all too often viewed from the perspective of beating or vanquishing the opponent. Only unskilled leaders work out their conflicts on the battlefield. The skilled leader rarely allows the conflict to progress to the courtroom or the battlefield. Skilled leaders achieve their goals through positioning well in advance of a confrontation, thereby avoiding the waste of resources that confrontation requires. This is where analyzing the conflict is so important. The goals of each opponent must be clearly understood so that the resolution answers both needs. Only in this way can a leader create a lasting triumph that is embraced by both sides. Conflicts in the Middle East provide an example of some of the most challenging conflicts. Where religion and tradition inform leaders instead of respect for life, the leader is unwilling to know his opponent sufficiently to create a lasting resolution through compromise and change. There can be no triumph (harmony) when leaders refuse change. Living things are flexible, and change and adapt. Old and dying things are stiff and unyielding: forces around them tend to break them, while the young and flowing simply bend and move with the change.

The next post will address the Five Fundamentals of Strategy, which will bring us to our focus: the Four Leadership Skills. These are the skills that we use every situation to develop . Before learning and using these Skills, you must be on a path of knowing yourself, and acquiring the ability to evaluate your situation and the nature of the conflict.

Know Yourself!

We have now acquired some ideas of what leadership is, and why we ALL need leadership skills. Let me recap a little here. We need to understand and implement leadership skills because we all have some types of non-negotiable conflict in our every day lives. Non-negotiable conflict leaves only three choices: change/resolve the situation, accept the conflict as-is, or leave the situation. Each of the three choices is a valid answer depending on each personal situation.

Take, for example, a conflict in the self. This can be a “bad ” habit. What is “bad”? Whatever presents an obstacle that prevents meaningful growth. This is a fancy way to say “bad” is anything that prevents or interferes with life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

Let's take something fairly obvious, like smoking. Smoking causes various types of sickness, including things like colds and cancer. The greater frequency of colds can be an obstacle to happiness, unless you enjoy the symptoms and the lost time that could be spent on something more fun. Cancer can certainly prevent meaningful growth and cause negative feelings in the self and in others. Let us apply the three choices here. Acceptance means sickness, death, negative feelings and the destruction of harmony. Leaving the situation means quitting. In this case, this is the same as changing/resolving the conflict. This means health, happiness, and restoring harmony. So how do we leave/change/resolve the conflict? By quitting. Can we use the implementation of leadership skills to solve this non-negotiable conflict? Yes!

The application of leadership skills here can empower you to get rid of the habit that causes the conflict. This is more involved than it sounds on the surface, because the root cause of the habit may be complicated and deeply ingrained. Rather than accept the habit and letting it take over your life, you can formulate a strategy to defeat your inner opponent and restore harmony in your life. Of course the same principles are applied to conflict with environment, conflict with another, and conflict among leaders.

How is this done? We will start with the most important and most basic requirement in formulating a winning strategy. Before anything else, before formulating the strategy, you must KNOW YOURSELF, and KNOW YOUR OPPONENT. If you do not know yourself, you cannot know your goals, your strengths, your weaknesses. No winning strategy can be formed without knowing these things. Harmony cannot be restored in your life if you do not know what “harmony” means TO YOU. Not to someone else, not to your friends, family, mother, father, adviser. TO YOU. You and only you can know yourself. There are some excellent systems for doing this. You can find, experiment with and choose the best one for you. (If you need help with that, please contact me because I have been of some help to many people on this path.)

Let us briefly discuss choosing your perspective. There are not problems, only challenges. There are no enemies, only opponents. Changing and choosing your perspective and perceptions is an effective tool to help overcome conflict. Choosing to see enemies and problems as opponents and challenges allows you and your organization to approach leadership skills as a way to understand, accept, tolerate, and facilitate. This is the way to create lasting triumph and harmony.

If you do not know your opponent, the same applies. You will never know how to resolve the conflict in a way that can create harmony for your opponent (and yourself) if you do not know the goals (motivations) of your opponent, the things that make your opponent tick.

Applied to the habit, knowing yourself means finding out why the habit was formed in the first place. You must come to a deep understanding of what triggers the behavior. Knowing your opponent means knowing why your inner opponent craves the habit. These things, among others, will help you to formulate a strategy that will effectively and permanently refocus your energies and change your situation, resulting in elimination of the habit and its negative influence on your life (harmony). Knowing yourself and your inner opponent will help prevent you from initiating the change when you are not strong enough to overcome the challenge. Losing the conflict will only strengthen the inner opponent.

Here we have advanced the idea of leadership, why we are all leaders, and the concept of knowing yourself and your opponent. The next post will present the Calculations, and discuss some central concepts of the Art of Strategy.