Do you ever find yourself stuck in an argument?

In today’s episode, you’re going to learn about why you get stuck in arguments and my top four strategies for getting out of them.

Why do we get stuck in arguments?

First off, you need to understand what you’re actually fighting about.

When you get to the core of it, all of our fights really stand around one simple concept, who is right and who is wrong.

“We should do it this way not that way, you said that when you should have said this, I would never do what you did...

“BLAH BLAH BLAH I am right and you are wrong.”

Here is what happens when you fight about being right:

You essentially kick your partner off of your team and turn them into the enemy.

You become the prosecutor and they become the defense in a world where you’re guilty until proven innocent. You will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, all in the name of justice of course. They must defend and prove their innocence inside of a totally rigged system where you are not only the prosecutor, you’re also the judge and the jury and admit it, sometimes you fight dirty.

You omit evidence carefully crafting the narrative to fit your version of events. You tear them apart like a witness on the stand attacking their character and bringing up their past mistakes. You exaggerate, you generalize and you hammer the same point over and over again.

 Don’t worry, I do it too. It’s a very human thing to do. As human beings, we are addicted to being right. Sometimes we’re more interested in being right than we are in the truth.

Just the other day, my husband and I were having our 7 million fight about money and before the conversation, even begin I knew I was right and he was wrong and the whole point of that conversation was for him to get that.

It didn’t go well.

I didn’t try to understand what had happened, I didn’t ask him any questions, I just try to get him to see how wrong he was.

Most of us run this funny pattern where before we can get to actually solving the problem, we must first make sure that blame is properly assigned and punishment has been applied, then we can get down to the business of finding a solution or creating a new agreement.

So 10 minutes into my cross-examination trying to prove to my husband how wrong he is, I realize that we were no closer to solving the actual problem at hand. I thought, what if we just skip this step just sail right on by the right wrong conversation and get down to problem solving.

Here are my top four tips for choosing love over righteousness and getting out of arguments:

1. Have compassion.

Most people don’t do things to hurt us intentionally. They make mistakes just like we do. Have compassion for them. Give them room to just be the way they are and the way they are not.

And sometimes people do things to hurt us intentionally. Have compassion for them too because these people are hurting even more.

They hurt so much, they can’t shoulder all of the pain on their own. They want someone else to feel it too. I believe that other people are always doing the best they can with what they’ve got at the time, just like I am just like you are.

2. Get curious.

People, generally speaking, are not crazy even though someone made a decision you might find it impossible to understand, it made sense to them at the time. People’s actions are not random, their actions always correlate perfectly with how they see the world.

How they see the world is just as valid as how you see the world so get curious. Find out what were they thinking, what were they feeling. What was the positive intention behind their action.

3. Figure out what is it costing you to be right

Because being right does not come for free. It’s actually pretty expensive. You have got to give up other really valuable things to be right. It comes at the expense of things like your energy, your freedom, your time, peace of mind, love, intimacy.

During my argument with my husband there was no love present. I’m not talking about the concept of love. I didn’t actually stop loving my husband in that moment, but there was no experience of love. I was not being loving. I was busy being righteous, stubborn and offended. To me, when I wake up out of it, I know that is a bad trait.

So figure out, what is it costing you and is it really worth it?

4.Give it up.

Just give it up. Choose to let it go.

There isn’t a lot more to say about this one just recognize that your ego, your identity, the small version of you it really really does not want to do this but you can.

In any moment, you can just choose to let something go and if it comes back up chose to let it go again.

Now I’m not saying that there if it is not an agreement that still need to be workout, or new boundaries that needs to be set, you will need to deal with the circumstances. But when you take who is right and who is wrong out of the conversation, you can actually act like teammates and solve it together.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself – is this really worth being right about? #chooselove