Heat rising in your cheeks. Chest and shoulders tensing up. Heart pounding. Nausea.

This is how most of us feel when a conversation starts turning towards conflict, or when we know we need to confront someone and we’re scared they’re going to react badly.

Most of us will chicken out. The few who do confront often raise their voice and get defensive. Same result either way: it hurts the relationship.

This escalates over time.

Either you become conflict-averse – never setting boundaries, trying to please people, avoiding tough conversations. That leads to fake superficial relationships and loneliness.

Or you constantly get into heated dramas, arguing about the same old petty stuff over and over. Every relationship is an exhausting battle, and it seems impossible to enjoy being intimately connected with someone else.

You’ve tried being an easygoing peacemaker. That just feels like fakeness, and you still get into conflict anyway.

You’ve tried yelling and aggression. That just gets horrible reactions and causes relationships to end over small disputes.

It seems like nothing “works”.

And that’s the problem. You’re trying to manage the other person, and there is NOTHING that guarantees control over another person.

Your real issue is that you haven’t learned how to be comfortable, calm, and in control of YOURSELF when emotions start to arise.

In today’s video, I’ll give you a practical framework for how to manage a confrontation from start to finish that will keep you grounded and reduce the chance that they overreact and lose their sh*t:

Watch THIS if you are ready to be more powerful and assertive

While this video will help you assert yourself calmly and carefully, the other issues like taking things personally, trying to win, and seeing the other person as an opponent, are deeper problems that will need to be addressed later too.

NEXT: How to be so confident that you can boldly end a conversation without making excuses