TRANSCRIPT

Being righteous means you have courage to confront yourself and others to uphold the truth. There's a difference between self-righteousness and righteousness, but a righteous man has the courage to be who he needs to be in any moment to defend, uphold and protect the truth.

“Nothing You Do Matters Unless What You Do Matters”
I’m Amadon DellErba and this is “Get Real or Die Trying”

How we doing tribe? Welcome to my podcast. Episode 14 today, I'm talking about confrontation versus carefrontation, effective conflict resolution. I like to talk about this subject because, well one, nobody wants to get confronted. Nobody wants to be put into a situation where they truly have to sit back, take a step back, and look at what they need to change. And we live in a culture where being confronted and called out on the spot doesn’t really happen anymore.

We live in a culture where it’s so politically incorrect to confront somebody, everybody gets offended so easily, you can’t hardly say anything in this day and age or someone’s going to get offended. You’ll talk about the fact that it’s raining outside and it could be literally raining outside and there will be some group of people who take offense because they don’t want to talk about the rain outside. I mean it’s gotten completely out of control to the point of absurdity, in my opinion.

You can't say anything, and we're creating this false culture of fakeness. We're creating a culture of “You're OK, I'm OK, everything's OK.” Everybody's walking around staying on the surface, staying superficial, not wanting to get real, not wanting to get confronted. Now, let's bring this into the spiritual aspect of things, which is really what I attempt to do with everything and I fail a lot, but I attempt. The spiritual reality that I want to be in my life is that I have people around me who hold me accountable and responsible. I talk about this almost every podcast.

To hold me accountable and responsible to live by the principles that I want to live by, I have to be confronted when I'm not. Now, many people have an adversity and a feeling comes up when you say the word confronted – to be confronted – “I'm gonna confront you.” A mental trick is to simply replace that with carefront, because that person cares about you. They care about your well-being. They care about your growth. Confront / Carefront. This person is carefronting me. They're coming from a place of love and concern.

Successful people surround themselves with people who know more than them. They surround themselves with people who, actually help them grow and confront them, point out their flaws, point out their weaknesses - in a loving way – can always show them how to do better. We see this a lot on social media and in the world in a very linear fashion of business and success. “Successful” people who've made a lot of money supposedly, and are successful based upon a simply material standard – they're out there talking about their approach to that success, how they got there, the principles they applied in their lives about not being afraid of embracing conflict, not being afraid of receiving criticism and feedback. Unfortunately, that's all linear based in a structure of corporate-world, business, excelling, improving, making more money, optimizing yourself, etc. You can take all of that and synthesize it into a more spiritualized perspective, into growing yourself in a real way, into improving, maturing, becoming more intelligent in your daily actions and having more self-mastery and control of yourself. That is the trick.
So when you engage in the pursuit to self-mastery, like I am, you have to accept that you're going to fail every day, multiple times a day, and you have to accept and want people around you who confront you when you do, who remind you that you're not meeting the standard, who have enough love to carefront you.

Let's enter in the concept of conflict resolution. People avoid conflict. People avoid, you know, being uncomfortable. People avoid, you know, having somebody point out to them how they're failing. And so they like to run around and, like I said earlier, stay on the surface. When you build a family, when you build a workforce and a group in a community, in a subculture around you of people who do not avoid conflict, but embrace it, you are in a cultural, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual environment that is conducive for growth. When you avoid conflict, you stay stagnant. You stay small, you stay mediocre. You stay simple. You stay uneffective. You stay right where you are in your life not where you're trying to go, where you want to go.

So there's not enough people, not enough voices in the media, in the world, telling the masses, “Hey, go find your elders. Go find someone who can help optimize yourself.” There's a lot of emphasis on life coaching, which is great on some level. There's a lot of emphasis on, finding a workout coach, a personal trainer. And if people would just take that concept of having a personal trainer and, again, move it over to the spiritual spectrum. We human beings, we live in constant duality: human nature, spiritual nature – bench pressing the weights to get bigger pecs or bench pressing the spiritual weights to get more humble, to get more pure. It's the duality of our existence, human and spiritual, animal and spirit coming together. If you would take that same approach, you have a personal trainer, they set you up with a course, they're teaching you every day how to be stronger, you have a strict program. You have discipline, you follow it. You have goals, you have weights you’re trying to attain, lift more. Do this. Lose weight, whatever it may be. You have it. Take that same discipline, that same tenacity, and apply it into your spiritual life, into your emotional life into healing into growing. That is the culture of growth that you can attain by welcoming somebody in your life, a spiritual elder, that can carefront you, that can confront you, that can come face to face with you and tell you, just like your personal trainer would, just like your coach would, “You're doing it wrong. Do it this way.”

If you're out there and you're working out and you're doing some aerobic exercise and you're doing it wrong and you're going to strain your muscle, your coach is gonna say, “You're doing it wrong. Do it this way. You're going to hurt yourself. That is not effective.” Now you accept that and you welcome that because you want to optimize your physical body. Why not adopt a conscious of accepting that type of correction all the time in your life from people to help you grow? So when you start speaking non-truths, when your actions start becoming hurtful to yourself and to others, you welcome that coach saying, “Don't do that. You're doing it wrong. You're going to hurt yourself and you're going to hurt others. Your unregulated behavior is hurtful. You're unregulated speaking is hurtful. Your selfishness is hurtful. Your small-mindedness is hurtful.”

Our country is so small minded, people walk around almost becoming, you know, professionals at thinking in a box, because they want to be comfortable, they want to be safe and they want to be in control of their environment. Now, what does that have to do with being confronted? Well, being confronted takes a mindset and an emotional acceptance of being vulnerable of surrendering and being approachable. Think about being approachable. Are you an approachable person? Can your wife or your girlfriend come up to you and ask you to park your truck differently in the garage so that she can have room? Or are you going to get mad at her, or I have an ego trip? Now of course that's a very basic standard silly example, but believe me, there are millions of men out there who have too much ego to be corrected on how to park their truck differently in the driveway or garage to make room for somebody else or something else other than themselves. Believe it or not, it's actually the truth. That's how silly human beings can be.
Now, do you welcome that type of... most people would actually consider that a conflict actually, when that person comes and says, “Hey, move your truck over. There's no room for my car,” or, “I've asked you if you can move your... park your truck on this side so that the kids can play over here.” Whatever it may be. You know, that's considered conflict when it's actually just communication. Replace the word, also, confronting with communication. We live in a society that does not promote deep, meaningful, clear communication. Everybody wants to stay on the surface, a little eight letter text, instead of sitting down, having a conversation and going deeper. Why do we have a communication issue? Fear of vulnerability. Fear of being corrected. Fear of being real. Fear of having to take your mask off and look at your ugly face. Hey look, I have an ugly face when I'm being an ugly person. When I'm acting in lower traits, I'm ugly. I can accept that because I want to be beautiful. I want to be loving, fair, just, humble, all of these virtues and things that I strive for. I can accept that when I'm not doing that, I'm an ugly person. And so having a level of acceptance and approachability and welcoming somebody to come into your life and confront you is important for your soul growth, for your spiritual growth, and for your emotional growth - intellectual growth.

You know, if you're, let's just say, let’s just pick an archetype in America. You're a married man. You got a wife, you got three kids. You got your parents who live a few blocks away and you live in the same town. If you start with your nuclear family, you own a small business, let's say. You have a coworker, a couple of coworkers. If you made it clear to all of those people in your life, your wife, your parents, your coworker, that you are approachable and that you want feedback, you would be blown away by the feedback you would get. You'd be blown away by what your wife may tell you, what your girlfriend may tell you, what your own child may tell you, what your mother may tell you, that your coworkers certainly would tell you, but to this point has been too afraid to tell you because you don't have a welcoming presence. You don't have a desire to want to know. You don't welcome the feedback, the correction, the confrontation – you don't welcome it.

So what do you have to do to welcome it? You actually have to go to these people and make it clear. You have to go to them and say, “Hey honey,” my wife, “please let me know when I'm not acting like this; the way that I want to act. Please let me know when I'm doing this. Hey mom, how do you think I can improve in this and this?” Ask the questions. Go to these people. Then actually make your personality approachable.

Our culture glorifies being non-approachable. No one can say anything to anybody. That's what I said earlier. Everybody gets so offended now. You can't say anything without offending somebody. Remove the feelings out of the way here. The facts are facts. Truth is truth. If somebody is being an @sshole, they're being an @sshole. OK? It's pretty simple. If somebody is a liar and they're going about their lives and they're lying and they're continuing to lie and they lie to people day in and day out and they're causing harm to themselves and others by being a liar, they need to be confronted with love, but with truth. “You're a liar. Your dishonesty. How does dishonesty affect you in your life?” Illustrate it for them. See how they're losing friendships. See how they're losing love because of their dishonesty. ”Hey, you're a super arrogant person.” Let this person know, how does this arrogance and this pride affect your personal life? “Oh, people can't get close to you. People don't want to be your friend. Women don't want to be around you when you're arrogant. Men don't want to be around you.” If no one can say anything to you and you're going to get offended because you're so prideful, no one wants to be around you. Has anyone ever told you that? Have you ever told somebody that? Imagine if somebody told you that?

Wow. Imagine if millions of people started carefronting their brothers and sisters, their husbands and their wives, their girlfriends, their boyfriends, their coworkers. Imagine the world we would live in if positive, constructive feedback was given. But no, instead we get on media and social media and it's just thumbs up, little heart symbols, little this, great work, love, love, love, dovey dovey. It's all surface bullsh*t. Nobody wants to get real and call out somebody.

You know, it’s cool I saw a video last week on social media, of a gentleman who, two gentlemen actually, who were offended by a man. And they went up and they confronted him and they told him why they were offended. This was gold. This was key. This is what needs to happen with millions of people.
What it was was one man was native American, the other one was Mexican. Apparently the Mexican man was pretty, strong looking guy, a lot of tattoos and he had the protective face mask on like we're all supposed to be wearing, the Native American man also had that protective face mask on. They go into a restaurant. Some white guy makes the comment, “oh, it looks like you guys are here to rob the place.” Now, why is he saying that to them? I don't want to get into the whole racial thing right now, what I'm getting into is the fact that these two men correctly confronted this man. What they did is they came back an hour later, actually after learning that this man had 50,000 followers on Instagram and that he had a following and that he needed to be confronted because his actions were not living up to his facade of who he was on Instagram. So they came back and they filmed it and they said, “Look, we just want to share that as indigenous people and as a minority group, what you said was racially offensive, very offensive. You think we look like hoodlums because we're dark skinned and we're tattooed or whatever.” And this guy said, “Oh, I was just trying to make a joke because you have a mask on, you look like gangsters coming in. It's funny now everybody wears masks...” Blah, blah, blah. The thing is, it's all bullsh*t – the guy's defense.

So what I'm getting at here is that these people came back and confronted him; not with ego, not with machoism, they shared from their hearts how it was hurtful to them. This white man had the chance and the possibility to receive it humbly and apologize and to change. Instead, he didn't do that. He wasn't dumb enough to openly, you know, defend his actions. He just acted like he was listening and sophisticatedly kind of danced around and kind of accepted what they were saying, but didn't really take into his heart and apologize and allow what they were saying to change his thinking.
Now, if that man would have had a consciousness of, “I'm open to people helping me grow,” his reception to what they were saying would have been totally different. He would have had a true change in his heart and he probably would have then publicly acknowledged that, apologized. But he didn't, cause his ego's too big. His facade that he needed to maintain... He actually deleted the video and went on a rampage. Anyways, I respected those two men that they confronted him in that way.
Now that doesn't happen all the time. What happens is those two men who might've gotten offended would get in their truck and leave. And then that feeling of being offended would turn into resentment, would turn into anger, would turn into the transgenerational trauma they've experienced of oppression for hundreds of years, as a minority group, as indigenous people and they wouldn't have the Deo, the right confidence to confront again. And so they did the right thing and they helped that man and they helped themselves by doing that as well.

That's just one example, but there's so many examples. It's not a hard thing, just start with the people in your inner circle in your life, your partner, your family, your coworkers. You know, it’s really simple. Start with trying to lovingly carefront somebody because it will improve your life. It'll improve the lives of people around you. I'm going to read a quote from The URANTIA Book, which I often bring up in my podcast here because it's a book that is tremendously valuable in my own personal life, providing me with spiritual food, spiritual medicine, and helps me stay on track in my personal religious lifestyle. And religious in that way that I use it is not like the religions of today. Religious lifestyle is accepting and adopting a lifestyle where you make decisions around spiritual principles. You make decisions around spiritual absolutes, not material.

From from The URANTIA Book, I love this quote here:
Righteousness strikes the harmony chords of truth, and the melody vibrates throughout the cosmos, even to the recognition of the infinite.

Righteousness. What is it to be righteous… to be a righteous person? Being righteous means you have courage to confront, yourself and others, to uphold the truth. There's a difference between self-righteousness and righteousness, but a righteous man has the courage to be who he needs to be in any moment; to defend, uphold, and protect the truth, the ideals, the principles that he wants to live by, or she, a woman by.

And so we live in a time where these beautiful traits are abandoned; honor, strength, integrity, righteousness, approachability, humility. Instead, it's ego, materialism, self-aggrandizement, selfishness, dishonor. You know, we don't have to live in a time in the past. It's almost like these virtues are like a past time… like the Knights of the round table, they’re from another era, another point in history where they were needed, but now they're not needed. What's up with that? They're needed now more than ever. And so in order for us individuals, each of us to walk into higher spiritual principles and to live by them, we need each other to help us. We need to be confronted. We need to be open to that confrontation.
I just want to finish up talking a little bit about conflict resolution. How do you resolve conflicts? The interesting thing about conflict resolution for me personally, is you'll never resolve a conflict unless you're open to being uncomfortable; unless you're open to conflict itself. It's a centrifugal process. The more that you avoid conflict, the more conflict you're in because there's no resolution. The more that you avoid uncomfortable realities, interactions, personal associations, the more inner conflict you're in. The more that you embrace conflict, the less conflict you're in. Think about it. The more that you confront, come face to face, go toe to toe with that problem, with that situation, with that inner weakness, with that circumstance, the more that you charge it, confront it head on and then deal with it, the less conflict you're actually in because you dealt with it and got it out of the way. That form of conflict resolution I'm talking about is the conflict that we find in our lives on a more spiritual level. But also interpersonal conflict. If you have a problem with somebody, the more that you avoid it, the more turmoil you're in. The more that you come to them and confront it. the less. It's really quite simple.

It's actually quite amazing how simple it is. It just takes courage. It takes a mindset and an acceptance that you're going to confront it. You're going to go to that person. You're going to work it out. You're going to have the courage. If you come and have humility and you come in love, you'll be amazed. You know, I've had these circumstances happen with perfect strangers in the world where they felt offended. Instead of me being macho, I truly did an about face to whatever it was they felt offended by me. I seeked their forgiveness. Through a real genuine, “I'm really sorry. I didn't realize that I offended you. I blew it there. I spoke without thinking. That was my mistake and you know what, I've learned from this and I thank you for confronting me.” That's happened a few times and then that person in that moment also does a complete change. They go from being angry and, you know, hurt to then valuing my transformation and we both just had a positive exchange.

The other thing is have a little grace and humility. If somebody confronts you and they don't do it perfectly, they might have a little more anger than you'd like, a little more passion because they’re personally offended, that's okay. Accept it. Are you not developed enough in your own personal sense of wholeness and character that you can't deal with a little bit of extra. Get to the meat of what they're saying, the truth, and humbly respond and you'll see that they will recenter themselves. I deal with it all the time and I'm learning and I'm making mistakes.

And so this whole podcast is about encouraging you in your personal life to carefront somebody else and to welcome that confrontation / confrontation in your life. And by doing that, you will resolve your own personal conflicts.

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