We’ve all got to work with people. But some relationships just aren’t’ worth it.

Looking forward to the long weekend? I know I am.

But I hope you’re not looking forward to it just because it gives you a chance to get away from all the bozos at work. (I heard someone say that the other day!)

Making productive relationships work is hard. Really hard. But it’s something we’ve all go to do.

And as we transition away from working for others and start running our own games, it becomes all the more important.

So today, I wanted to talk a bit about how manage conflict in your productive relationships?

The short answer? Don’t.

No seriously. Don’t bother. I’m going to show you why it’s not worth it. And then I’m going to give you five reasons why we all find it hard to just ‘walk away’.

Quick to Fire

One of my early business mentors used to have a saying: “Slow to hire, quick to fire.”

The idea was simple enough. Put a lot of time into your hiring decisions. Take the time to find the right person for the job – someone who fits with the culture of your organisation and has the skills you need.

Take your time.

But if things aren’t working out, cut and run. Just cut your losses and let them go. Don’t try to patch things up. Don’t try to find a way to make it work. Don’t go into mediation or dispute resolution or performance management programs. It’s just not worth the effort. Let them go so you both can move on.

Slow to hire, quick to fire.

I really like this. It’s something I still run my business by.

And I know I’m going against the grain here. This isn’t the touchy-feely ideology the world seems to be embracing these days.

A lot of people really like to think that the whole world can be brought into harmony if we just love each other and use the right gender-appropriate pro-nouns.

And those people have never been in management positions.

The truth is that in a business setting, some people are just problematic. Maybe they’re hopeless. Maybe they’re aggressive. Maybe they’re anti-social. Maybe they have trouble respecting other people’s personal space.

Maybe they’re just living by a different moral code to you.

And the reasons why people express problematic behaviours are always complex. It is very rarely because they are not being shown enough love or that they are not getting enough cuddles in the work environment.

The reasons are complex. And unless you’re willing to dive into that complexity, then you’re not going to be able to engineer fundamental change. 

I mean, if someone is exhibiting problematic behaviour, there’s a good chance it’s coming from some deep and ancient wound. Maybe their father never offered enough praise. Maybe their mother was unavailable when they were an infant.

Unless you’re willing and able to take things to this sort of level – to open up the Pandora’s box of all their past hurt and anguish – then there’s no guarantee that any sort of process is going to bring you into alignment.

And really, is it even your place to try and do that? Is it even appropriate to make that a condition of employment – You must have a willingness to explore old wounds and rewrite your old patterning.

That’s not for everyone.

And are you really going to try and take that work on anyway?

I mean, if someone starts working for me and it becomes clear that their computing skills need to be brought up to speed, I’m totally willing to do that. I’m totally willing to send them on some sort of course.

However, if someone starts working for me and it becomes clear that their passive-aggressive tendencies are due to abandonment issues cemented in early childhood by a distant mother and the early death of their father, what am I going to do with that?

Provide mandatory psycho-therapy?

And the truth is we all have issues. I don’t want to pretend that my work-life is just a string of messed-up losers coming to work for perfected Saint Jon.

I have as many issues as the next person.

And most of the time conflict arises when the coping strategies one person has developed come into conflict with another person’s strategies.

So to do this kind of work honestly, you have to be willing to look at your own wounds and your own problematic coping mechanisms.

Yeah… So what? Now you’re doing mandatory psycho-therapy too?

Seriously, who has time for all that?

What business has the capacity to invest in a long and expensive personal development agenda when there is no guarantee of success?

It’s one thing when someone doesn’t have the skills for the job, but when you realise that what you’re talking about is someone’s fundamental nature – when you find yourself saying things like, “You know what his problem is? He just gets triggered by authoritarian female figures” – you’re into territory where it is just not worth it.

Just walk away. Cut your losses.

Slow to hire. Quick to fire.

And I think this keenly applies to people running a business, but we all have productive relationships. We all have tradies we use, or joint-venture partners, or accountants and mortgage brokers we engage with.

The same rule should apply to all our productive relationships.

Slow to hire. Quick to fire.

But, many of us find it difficult to do this. Many of us want to hang on to the grim end. We find it difficult to walk away, even though the writing is clearly on the wall.

I had a sit and think about it, and I reckon there are five key reasons why we stick it out in toxic work-relationships much longer than we should. Let me give them to you.

Reason #1 – The need to be right

We all want to know that we’re making good decisions – that we have a clear and accurate assessment of the situation and a good strategy for response.

We all have that desire. But for some of us, it’s something our ego gets caught up in. It’s something we need, just to feel ok.

So a toxic work-relationship challenges us in two ways. First, the prospect of having to let someone go forces us to admit we made a bad decision when we got into bed with them. That can be hard to swallow.

Second, if we find ourselves in conflict, a ‘need to be right’ can have us fighting the same battles, over and over. We keep the toxic relationship alive because we hope that it is a theatre where we will ultimately be proved to be ‘correct’.

Don’t bother. Suck the fart. Take the ego hit. Move on.

Reason #2 – The need to be heard

Sometimes a toxic work-relationship might leave you feeling stomped on and abused. You may then feel a need to be heard – a need to be witnessed and understood.

Nothing wrong with that. But save it for your wife/husband/therapist. Don’t’ push out a toxic-relationship in the hope that there’s some process that will ultimately validate your feelings.

Save it for the people who love you, not the people you work with.

Reason #3 – The need for resolution

There’s a personality type in psychology called ‘conflict avoider’. These people hate having conflict in their lives because it taps into a deep sense of insecurity.

When these people find themselves in a toxic relationship, that have a deep biological need to ‘fix it’ – to make everything peaceful and harmonious again.

This will make you stick out a toxic relationship much longer than you should, and what’s worse, it puts you in a terrible negotiating position. If you can only tolerate one outcome, then you’ve got no leverage.

I think Trump said something like, “If you can’t walk away from the table, you’re a price-taker.”

Same story if you’re in some sort of conflict resolution process. If you’re not happy with any outcome where the conflict isn’t fully resolved, you’re in trouble.

Reason #4 – The need to heal wounds

Some of us are real Florence Nightingales. We need to save the world. When we see people hurting and acting out of their hurt, we feel triggered. We become uncomfortable, and we need to save them from their pain so they stop reminding us of ours.

So you might find yourself thinking, “If only he stopped being so insecure and dishonest… He’d be so much happier.”

Stop it. If you want to save people, go to Africa. Your productive life isn’t an operating theatre. It’s not a place where you can ‘save’ people.

Reason #5 – The need for a collaborative reputation

Some people take great pride in their ability to collaborate and work well with others. And they are judging of others who are not able to build productive working relationships, through whatever wounds they’re carrying.

For these people an unresolved conflict freaks them out. They worry that it portrays them as a person who can’t work well with others – and they worry that it signals to others that there are some serious wounds beneath the surface that they’re trying to hide.

(Which is probably the truth).

So don’t worry about it. If you could have a productive working relationship with every person on earth, you’d be a freak. It’s just not possible. It’s an impossibly high standard to set for yourself.

Where there’s people, there’s going to be conflict. Don’t take it personally.

Just walk away

All of this comes down to just checking your motivations for trying to make a toxic relationship work.

I’m here to say that most times, it’s just not worth it, and there’s a good chance your need to fix things comes from something going on for you – not because it’s what you or the project actually need.

Slow to hire, quick to fire.

Just manage your time well. Be careful where you’re investing it. It’s the most important resource you have.

I learnt something this week about how the physical universe works. And now I think about success differently.

I was thinking about entropy the other day.

Ah! Listen to me. Like I just sit around pondering the rules of thermodynamics, puffing on a pipe.

I don’t. I heard someone talking about it on the radio. I understood a fraction of what they were saying, but it was enough to send my mind off on some misguided folly, like some drunken rabbit barrelling into the woods.

But still, I think it ended up somewhere interesting. So take these reflections on human nature and the principles for success for what they are. But for my understanding of the physical universe, give it as much weight as you’d give the babbling of a baboon, puffing on a pipe.

Anyway, thinking about entropy, I really like what this person was saying about it.

I always understood entropy as the idea that things naturally tend to maximum disorder. Systems collapse, structures dissolves, heat dissipates, things slow down and stop.

We have order and structure in the universe now, but that is a temporary state of affairs. In time (in a really long, long time), all of that structure will break down and disappear.

Nothing lasts forever. Like, literally. There will be nothing, and it will last forever.

Anyway, I’m probably not expressing that right, but I think that is the basic idea.

But I never thought about ‘how’ entropy did that.

I found it really interesting to start thinking about why everything naturally breaks down.

Why can’t my iphone exist, for all eternity, in it’s current form?

(I should probably delete some photos…)

The way this guy described it, it was a question of probability.

So take the arrangement of atoms in a pen for example. There are billions of billions of atoms there, each one in exactly the right place to collectively make a shape we call pen.

That’s another way of saying that the pen is a one in a billion, billion configuration of atoms.

Statistically, it is incredibly unlikely.

It is, theoretically possible, that in the great soup of the cosmos, those atoms might spontaneously take the shape of a pen on their own accord, but it is incredibly unlikely.

Or watch what happens when you pour milk into tea. It mixes through completely. Always.

But that’s not the only possible result. It is possible the atoms of milk stay together and don’t mix through.

However, that’s just one arrangement of atoms. There are billions and billions and billions of other possible arrangements that all just present as mixed milk and tea.

So the reason why things tend to disorder is because disorder is just a far more probable state of affairs. For every arrangement that gives us something of structure and interest, there are a gazillion different arrangements that are totally unstructured and uninteresting.

So entropy is probability in action.

At this point you can probably tell I failed high-school science. But still I love this idea of entropy as probability in action.

Because I like how it makes me think of my creative work in a probabilistic sense.

To create stuff, to give our lives particular structures and to fill them with a particular order, is to bet against entropy.

And to do that we have to flip the rules of probability in our favour.

Our job, is to maximise the chances for our success.

That is, it is not to create success directly, but to maximise the chances of success.

So if we do the work, if we invest in ourselves, if we take action and keep on keeping on, then we increase the odds of success.

We can’t control the outcome. There’s too many factors at play. But we can increase our chances.

And the road to success is simply making victory more likely than not.

I like this. It makes me feel more relaxed about things. I can let go of the need to control everything. I’ve only got to influence the odds, not the result itself. And against entropy, the great destroyer of the universe, maybe that’s as much as we can do.

The maths has changed. This is why I’m looking out for myself.

It occurs to me that most of us treat our bodies like a rental property.

Most of us know the stories about horror tenants who don’t pay rent, turn the laundry into a meth lab and burn down the garage.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about renters who do a decent job of looking after the place, but aren’t really incentivised to care too much.

They maintain the gardens, keep the place neat and tidy, but that’s all they are there to do.

They’re not going to repaint the exterior. They’re not going to re-do the decking. They’re not going to re-oil the timber benchtops.

And that’s fair enough. The house is the owner’s asset. It’s their responsibility to look after it.

And by looking after it I mean getting on top of little problems that are going to become long term headaches – like getting those leaky gutters fixed before the water starts rotting the walls.

And so most of us should be treating our bodies like owner-occupiers. We should be keeping the place immaculate – partly because we want the neighbours to ohh and ahh when they see us naked, but also because we want to get on top of any problems before they get out of hand.

But that is not what most of us are doing. Most of us treat our bodies like a rental. We do the basics – we eat food, we wash regularly, we trim our toenails. But that’s about it. We’re not thinking about the long-term value of our asset, and how to preserve its value and utility.

And even those of us that do treat our bodies like we own them, do it in a way that’s a bit half-arsed.

You know those owner-occupiers who are like, “I should really fix the roof on the deck before the sun and rain start weathering the decking… ah, maybe I’ll do it next year.”

Generally, we let problems run and then just hope we’ll find a builder/doctor who can patch us up.

We don’t treat our bodies like they’re the most important asset we own, even though they obviously are.

Now, I know a lot of you are going to be hearing this and thinking, “yeah, you’re kinda right… but it’s a lot of effort for what might only be an extra ten years on the end of your life. You’ve got to die sometime.”

And to that I say, yeah, nah, bullshit.

It’s easy to be a bit whatever about 10 years of life when you’re 30 or 40, but I bet you won’t be thinking that way when you’re 75.

And the maths has changed. It just may not be true that “you have to die sometime.”

Medical science is advancing at an incredible pace. My bet is that sometime between now and 2100, the world will give birth to an immortal generation.

They might already be here.

It kind of makes me want to shake my fists at the gods that I might be born late enough to witness the birth of an immortal generation, but not late enough to be one of them.

For me, I’m looking after my health because the more energy I give it, the greater the chances I’ll still be around when we cross the immortality threshold. And if I am, I want my body to be in the best condition possible.

I don’t want the doctors to be like, “Well, Jon, you maybe would have lived for ever, if only you hadn’t brutalised your liver your entire adult life. There’s no fixing that one.”

Right now, investing in your health is a lottery ticket for immortality. I’m going to buy it.

So yeah, don’t treat your body like a rental. Treat it like it is the most important thing you own.

Because it is.

There are people out there having a tonne of fun.. because they are confident. This is how to get it.

Do you ever feel like you don’t really know what’s going on?

Do you feel like you do a decent job of pretending that you’ve got a good handle on things, when really you’re just fudging it, hoping nobody catches you out?

Do you wish you could hit the notes of your life with more confidence – with more certainty that the choices you are making are the right choices for the right moment?

You’re not alone.

In fact, if you feel like this isn’t speaking to you, my guess is that you are in a vanishing minority.

Nobody knows what the hell is going on.

Even me. I mean, sure, I bring a certain bluster and bravado to everything I do. I hit the notes of my life with everything I’ve got.

But I’m not doing it because I know what I’m doing. My confidence comes from the fact that I believe that I’ll be all right no matter what happens. No matter how wrong I get it – If I launch into an in apporpriate timpani drum solo just as the rest of the orchestra goes into a quiet and sensitive phase, it’ll be ok.

It will be ridiculous, but, I won’t care. It will be just one of those moments where Jon is off beating his own drum, beating himself off over in the corner again. We’ll all be laughing about it soon enough.

(Having an ability to laugh at yourself is a key source of resilience.)

But then what did they expect anyway? I can’t see the conductor from all the way back here.

Can you see the conductor? I thought you did a pretty good job on your obo solo, but is there someone in formal tails giving you your cues?

No, of course not. There is no conductor. No one is waving a little white stick around telling us what to do, so we’re all just improvising the best we can.

Ohh… favourite image of the week.

(Maybe that’s why I’m going on about an orchestra. I actually hate classical music.)

Anyway, nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s all a bit jazz in here tonight.

But this isn’t the point I wanted to make. I wanted to talk about confidence.

We normally talk about confidence like it’s situational.

He’s a confident public speaker. She’s a confident networker. They’re more confident on their forehand than their backhand.

That is, confidence applies to particular fields of expertise.

But there is a broader confidence as well – there is a confidence that seeps into everything we do.

Maybe it’s the confidence of life. Are you a confident artiste in the theatre of life? Are you confident in your being?

Are you doing a good job of being you?

My theory is that most of us aren’t that confident that we’re doing a good job of being us… but the ones that are… they’re killing it. They’re having a grand old time of it.

Maybe they don’t have all the visible trappings of success. They might not be the richest or the most powerful among us.

But I reckon they’re having the most fun.

They’re hitting life the way that you would hit a year 2 spelling test.

“Oh yeah. I got this. Cat? C-A-T. Dog? D-O-G. Boom! Killing it.”

(That’s how I used to approach my year two spelling tests. Right up until I was 14.)

Because with confidence comes a certain level of relaxation.

When you are confident, you are safely within your power, just steadily applying yourself to the task.

When you lack confidence, you’re on edge. A certain level of anxiety creeps into your game. You become a bit stressed.

It stops being fun.

My theory is that nearly all of us have some of this life-level anxiety creeping into our beings to one degree or another.

We are not as confident as we could be, and so we are not as relaxed as we could be, or having as much fun as we could be having.

But I’m not going to settle for that. I want to be having as much fun as possible before they stuff me in a little box and call me worm-food.

And you’re not going to settle for it either, right?

So the question then is, how do we get that kind of confidence? How do we purge that anxiety from our system, and live deeply in our power, exuding relaxation and confidence?

I’m glad you asked. I’ve got three suggestions:

1. You were set up to fail

The first point I would make is that you were set up to fail. The odds are stacked against you.

Being a human in this day and age is an incredibly strange thing. If you go back to pre-civilised tribal times, which is the great majority of our history, it was probably much simpler.

First, your culture would have given you strong guidance – when it’s this time of year, harvest these berries. When this flower is out, hunt wildebeest in this area. When a woman’s husband dies, his nephew has to look after her or pay a three cow penalty.

Your culture would have given you confidence. When you were in alignment with your lore, you could be confident that you were doing the right thing.

Secondly, the tight weave of tribal society would have given you confidence as well. You would have known that if anything went wrong, there was an extended family and social network that had your back.

And everything you needed in life would have either come from the ever-generous land, or come from someone who you had a tight social relationship with. If you needed some beads, you’d be like ‘Hey, I know a guy.’

We didn’t have economic relationships. We had social relationships with an economic dimension.

I’m romanticising this for sure. There would also have been a good chance you got TB or got speared in the back of the neck, but my point is that many of the things that we would have traditionally drawn confidence from are no longer available to us.

Our culture is still in a state of reconstruction, as the overly-rigid Victorian rules continue to be torn down. Have you watched music videos lately? It really feels like anything goes these days.

The demolition works continue.

And that’s a good thing. Personally I’m happy to live in a world where a women’s ankles are not considered indecent, but without anything to take the old value system’s place, we live in a cultural vacuum.

And if anything goes, how do you know that you’re living the right way? Where do you draw confidence from?

Likewise with the tight social relationships that we no longer have. We have broader, but looser social connections these days. I mean, I have over 2,000 facebook friends. That’s more people than many of my ancestors would ever have even laid eyes on. But how many of my so-called “friends” could I rely on to help me out if I got bitten by a sabre tooth tiger?

What, like 12? Maybe?

And our economic system now puts distance between us as well. I used to know the guy that makes beads. Now it’s some faceless company in China. My material needs are no longer met by my social network. Instead I have to rely on having enough money to get what I need, and the global economy not coming to pieces.

That’s all out of my hands.

So the point is, your biology was calibrated for different times. And many of the things that used to help us find our place in the world – that helped plant our feet on solid ground – our culture, our social network, our economy – these things have been taken away from us.

So of course we have this base-level anxiety creeping into our lives. Of course we’re not as confident as we could be.

The first step is recognising the challenge, and understanding that it’s completely natural to feel a little uncertain in times like these.

You can feel relaxed about it.

2. Accentuate the Positive

The second tip I have is to make sure you have things in proper perspective.

Confidence comes from experience. The more successful deals you pull off, the more confident you become.

Unfortunately, we’re not very good at recognising the victories that we do have.

Our biology is primed to focus on the negatives. Our social media is primed to make us feel like we’re falling behind. Our media system is primed to make it feel like we’re not even in the running – nothing but an insignificant spectator to the Brangelina spectacle.

So our confidence is based on a faulty evidence sample. It is heavily biased to our failings.

But if we can tackle this bias – if we can make sure we’re celebrating our daily successes – I mean, sometimes just getting out of freaking bed is a massive victory.

So celebrate your victories and change the story you are telling your self. You are not falling behind. You are kicking goals off every boot and doing a fantastic job of being human.

Look at you go.

3. Laugh at yourself

As I flagged earlier, if you can laugh at yourself – if you can happily fail – then things become a lot easier.

The anxiety we’re talking about is tied to a fear of failure. So while you can reinforce the narrative that you are a person who tends to succeed with one hand, you can also attack the fear of failure directly with the other.

There’s probably a few strategies on that front. Maybe I’ll write about it one day. But at the end of the day you have to make peace with projects failing and looking like an idiot.

If there’s one resiliency tip I could offer its to become ok with being the fool.

Be ok with seeing yourself as a strange comedy skit. Those weird things you do, the inappropriate things you say in social gatherings, your quirky hopes and aspirations.

It’s kind of funny, right? … when you look at it.

But if you can each failure as just another slap-stick gag in the RomCom of your life, failure loses its sting.

… and we stop making an inroad for anxiety.

Be Unflappable

So these are my three tips. Recognise that you’re starting from behind the 8-ball. That’s ok. Then make sure your perspective is balanced and you are properly celebrating your victories.

And then, be ok with being the fool and learn to laugh at yourself.

From here, we open the way into an unflappable life confidence.

And everything just becomes a whole lot more fun.