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You are a business owner who wants to prioritize people and planet over profits (without sacrificing success). That can feel lonely—but you are not alone! Join host Becky Mollenkamp for in-depth conversations with experts and other founders about how to build a more equitable world through entrepreneurship. It’s time to change the business landscape for good!
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (00:00.888)
Hi, Faith. I'm good. We're talking about discomfort and conflict because we are doing a whole series on discomfort. I think starting with just some understanding of language is always helpful whenever we're talking about concepts. And I think the difference between discomfort and conflict is not always obvious for some folks. I think they are often treated as synonyms, not cinnamon.
Faith Clarke (00:01.839)
Hey Becky, how's it going?
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (00:29.642)
synonyms. And I'm very excited to sort of parse out what those differences are. Because, frankly, I have a feeling I have some thoughts and clarity, but also I think there may be some murkiness for me. So
Faith Clarke (00:46.289)
And I think, always with language, this is part of what we deal with here in this part of the world. Like language is so contextual and so specific to people. So I can mean one thing and you mean something else. And I do think that part of reducing conflict is about what do I mean? And always kind of sharing that and always building this assumption that
I may not understand what a person means, even though we're using the same words. But anyway, discomfort versus conflict. think just when I think discomfort, I think somatics. Yeah, it's the thing that I'm feeling that is a sensation churning in my stomach. It's my body's potentially it's my body's danger or
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (01:19.893)
Isn't that true?
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (01:29.534)
Mmm, in your body.
Faith Clarke (01:43.729)
pause signal that's kind of showing up in some way and I may or may not even be noticing it and in a conscious way and therefore processing what's going on for me. But it's that, whether lots of us will feel it in our stomach, but it's the tightness in our shoulders, the choking in our throat. I'm feeling something that says something isn't right for me.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (02:13.165)
Yeah.
Faith Clarke (02:13.957)
Fundamentally is discomfort. And I think what tends to happen is with our discomfort, we have stories and depending on the context that we're in and the stories that we have, then we have some kind of meaning making to this body somatic experience. And I think that is then where we start to get into this place where are we telling the same story about this thing and what I make meaning.
A lot of us feel that discomfort means, my discomfort means I'm being harmed. And is that really true? You know, there's a lot that happens in our meaning making around the discomfort, but I'll just.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (02:54.86)
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because so when I'm sitting in my head as you're talking, thinking, OK, what do I see as the distinction between discomfort and conflict? And my head immediately goes to one being more internal and one being more external. And so. I can have discomfort without anyone else involved, right? Conflict. And this may not be entirely true because maybe I can have conflict without anyone else involved, but my immediate sort of reaction to that is conflict is between is between or among.
people and discomfort is my internal feelings. So sort of what you're saying too about that embodied feeling, but it's my internal experience of what's happening in a way that feels unpleasant. So discomfort is unpleasant internal feelings in reaction to something. And then my mind conflict is more the external of there is an unpleasant or a difficult, experience happening between or among people.
That's where my head goes. Does that feel aligned with what you're saying?
Faith Clarke (03:58.033)
Yeah, so when I when I think about conflict I think specifically about the clash in our stories So it is it is yeah, I'm having a thing but the this thing that I'm feeling we don't have car if I'm Uncomfortable and you're uncomfortable and we're in comfort discomfort about the same thing and our stories are lying There's no conflict
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (04:18.318)
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (04:22.434)
We're both going up the roller coaster. We both are real scared of roller coasters. Right.
Faith Clarke (04:26.319)
We're on it and this is a thing, you know? So it's when our stories don't align, we're on the roller coaster, but I think you're holding me there against my will. That's when we have conflict. So the conflict is in the differences in our stories. And I think I make conflict specifically about difference and how we engage difference. And so we don't have to engage difference with conflict. can engage difference and even discomfort that comes from difference. We can engage that with curiosity.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (04:35.054)
Mmm
Faith Clarke (04:55.909)
we can kind of part whatever it is that we have a lot of other choices, but there is something about the meaning making that we have our own difference and the risks associated with that, that will put us in conflict with the other person or the entity that has a different story from what we have.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (05:17.026)
Well, and again, you know, my filter is obviously as a white woman. So this may be a different experience for you than it is for me. But my experience has always been that I have been made to believe that discomfort or maybe even more specifically that conflict is bad, that I should do whatever I need to do to bring down conflict, that conflict is is somewhere I don't like to be. It feels very uncomfortable for me. So I have a lot of discomfort.
with conflict. have discomfort when there is disagreement, when our stories aren't aligned. But I also have discomfort with discomfort. I've also learned that my discomfort is not, probably because I'm so used to as a white body person having my comfort be tended to all the time. So that when I'm not feeling comfortable, when there is this internal discomfort about whatever it is, that makes me feel very
Hence, I feel this need to quickly remove the discomfort. And the same is true with conflict. I feel a need to quickly bring down, to reduce, to eliminate the conflict because I need to get out of discomfort. And I don't know if that's a human experience. I think most people probably don't enjoy discomfort, but I think that there are probably differences culturally and otherwise that have our own individual experiences with discomfort and conflict, how we relate to those.
Faith Clarke (06:42.211)
Yeah. And I think some of that is about power dynamics and personality as well. Because if you have the power, if you have the privilege, if you know that you will be successful in the conflict, you don't tend to avoid the conflict. So there is another story there about your wrongness or your
ability or lack of ability to be effective in it or how you will be perceived. For me, the stories of the angry black woman. So there is the, yeah, will I be successful, but also at what cost to me to be in this conflict with this person when what it will do is cause them to align me with a stereotype that I may not want. Although now I'm coming to say, you know what anger is pretty powerful. Yeah. I align.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (07:24.366)
Mm.
Faith Clarke (07:37.829)
But at the time I would be like, no, I want to be acceptable. And so at what cost? I think, no, I don't think anybody is comfortable with discomfort, but I do think that the more power identities you have, the more you believe you will be successful in navigating a conflict. And so maybe the less you shrink back from it. And then I think also, if you've...
you know, in a case of a lot of black women, if you've been the brunt of people's discomfort, you haven't had the luxury of saying, hey, no, no, center my discomfort, right? You've lived your life, perhaps tuning out of that discomfort, because, or navigating the discomfort, because like, what are we gonna do? It's, you know, what are we gonna do?
like women and periods, you're just like, we'll manage. And I think that there is a, so there is a, a callousing for some of us because it is not that we don't have the luxury, and I talked about this, we don't have the luxury of avoiding discomfort. There is little success in trying to placate. So, so there is a, but I think also, and my kids and I talked about this a lot, that for every
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (08:48.844)
Right.
Faith Clarke (09:02.065)
for every skill that you've had to develop because of a marginalized identity, then there's like an agility in that area. So yeah, I may not back out of a conflict. Like I will be like, wait, hang on, let's talk this through because I felt that feeling in my body. But more important is whatever it is that's bringing this, like at least let's understand what's happening.
I can be really persistent with that because I'll go process the body experience later. And I'm pretty skillful at processing the body experience. Even before I was kind of doing embodiment work, it would just be, you deferred it because you had to, and you grew up learning how to defer it. And, you know, we come back to it later.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (09:51.726)
Yeah, I mean, I think when we have discomfort, we go into fight, fight, freeze, fawn, typically, right? So we're starting to there's, it feels like a threat, whether that threat is real or not, right? So but the story that we're telling ourselves is there's some threat here. So then we go. Yeah.
Faith Clarke (10:06.545)
Can I pause that though and just say that it's the threat assessment because I think we have a lot of discomfort that we have not, there is a, it's not a threat and we know that. So in our interpersonal stuff and a lot of our society stuff, for whatever reason, it's easier for us to say, oh, this is a threat. And threat assessment is just, I don't have the ability. I can't know.
that I can come through this successfully. don't know that I have skills, resources, strength. So it's when whatever the activation is feels like it's bigger than us. So I'm always curious about what made me, especially when I'm in with another person, two of us seeming very similar, and yet I feel like this is a threat and the person doesn't. It's like, what's the difference in our internals that causes one person to say,
There's a threat. So once discomfort is, is you assess it and say, yeah, there's a threat here. Then that's when it moves over into this other place.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (11:14.722)
Yeah, this fight, fight, freeze, fawn sort of response, which there's that other response, which is face, right? That's that healthier response. When we know we are, we have safety, like you mentioned the sort of the resourcing that we need, the skills, whatever we go into face, but our immediate reaction often with that discomfort feeling that there's a threat is fight, fight, freeze, fawn. And many of us tend to lean into one or two of those more than others, right? So I tend to lean into flight, which is I flee. I just don't.
I can't, because I'm so not comfortable with being uncomfortable that I just want to get out of it. You know, for some people it looks like fawning just to bring the other person down to say, okay, well, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make this kind of dissipate and I'll acquiesce in whatever ways. So it can look different for different people. And obviously though, the goal is for us to get to a place where we learn through that threat assessment, is this a real threat? And obviously when there's a real threat, a genuine threat to safety,
we need to take care of ourselves first, but when we can start to do that threat assessment to say, is this a real threat? And if it's a, it's more of a, an ego threat maybe than anything else, right? Learning how do we face it? And that becomes the place of learning. What I'm ultimately saying is how do we learn to be comfortable with discomfort? And I think some people have more skill at it. Like you've mentioned people who haven't had the luxury of not being able to be uncomfortable, right? Like they,
that you're living with discomfort all the time, so you just have to learn how to be with it. Other people who've never really, who've had enough privilege that they've had their discomfort managed by externally often or quickly dissipated, maybe don't know how to be with it. But I think in either scenario, they're still learning to do, because even if you've had to be uncomfortable, it doesn't necessarily, I'm assuming anyway, mean that you've had the healthiest relationship with discomfort either, right?
Faith Clarke (13:05.137)
Absolutely, I was just gonna say that you're masking, you're bracing. None of that is, I mean, it's effective for your safety and for your navigation in space, but not effective for the thing with conflict, the thing with difference and different stories is the potential opportunity to create something, especially if we're saying we wanna create a different kind of world, then there is world creation is happening right between our differences. That's where it's happening. So to...
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (13:09.133)
Right.
Faith Clarke (13:32.593)
to meet difference with the skill of self-management, self-regulation, and co-regulation. then, wait, so how do we build this both? And that's kind of where we want to be. And that doesn't happen when we brace and mask and firm up and armor up. Neither does it happen when we're fleeing the scene or we're fighting. I've heard that there's some research, outside research, initial fight, flight,
freeze I think maybe fight flight was primarily white male research and as they've expanded it they've added freeze and face but I I've heard
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (14:12.16)
And Fawn, because Fawn tends to be a big one among women, certainly at least white women, but probably most women we learn that we have to make the other person feel better.
Faith Clarke (14:20.987)
So what I've heard is that in stress, a lot of women, oxytocin is also released. So a healthy response that many of us don't have to learn is the huddle. Because you'll find that women also, because we have, I don't wanna say because we have more oxytocin, but we do, will do more of the let's cook together.
let's go over and let's take care of the, know, so this kind of coming together, which we have talked a lot about in other ways, micro communities and, you know, all of that is also a threat response, but it is a much more restorative threat response because we're saying, okay, let's kind of band together and see what we can do. And inside that commitment to band together is something that's more like, Ooh, how do we understand what's happening here? You know?
So I think different ones of us, backgrounds and otherwise, have had a variety of responses to this discomfort.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (15:25.346)
Yeah, and it's, think the first piece of the sort of puzzle of learning the healthiest ways through discomfort is probably that part, like that threat assessment you mentioned, and then also this piece of just understanding your sort of automatic, these like automated knee jerk responses, and then what does it look like to shift into something that is a little healthier in that? Because the only way to learn how to be with
conflict in a way that's really healthy and actually not only because healthy conflict exists, I think some people are like no conflict is always bad. That's not true. Healthy conflict exists and it's actually important often for creating something that's even better, right? Often through healthy conflict out of that comes something that's much better for everyone involved. But we can't get to that if we don't know how to be with conflict and how to be with our own discomfort.
in that scenario. And so I think that's, mean, when we're, going to be doing quite a few of these sort of shorter episodes around discomfort. And I think that's kind of what we want to showcase is some of that process and some of that through just sharing some of our own stories of discomfort ways we've handled it, maybe not as healthy and shifts that we've made to be able to be with discomfort. So this is just sort of that starting point to help outline some of these differences, the language and things as we're talking about this in the series.
what we mean. anything else you want to add just to this first sort of introduction piece of this?
Faith Clarke (16:57.519)
Yeah, just to say that while discomfort on its own, I don't think is very expensive emotionally, you know, there's, there is the cost of whatever the discomfort is in your body. I think it gets real expensive. And we're talking about ourselves as people who are, you know, leading in the business space or social impact entrepreneurs, or people who just want to help the world to be a better place. It gets really expensive.
when we start to get inflamed. So inflammation in our bodies, because what we've started to do is to tell a story that increases our sense of, can't cope with this. And so whatever it is that's causing our discomfort, know, Becky's not quite side part, not quite middle part is creating drama for my mind. That's one bit of cost.
But then when I make it be something about me, a threat to people I love, the world I want to see in the future, all of that is so debilitating to my energy. It's so debilitating to my ability to come up with good solutions either about this or anything else in my life. And so so many of us, especially at this time in our navigation of all the things, and we know what all the things are, are just so sapped.
We're, we're, we're, we're honestly sitting down in front of our computers using up, what do we measure energy calories, jewels, whatever, whatever the energy, because of how we're being with our discomfort. And it's not to be bypassing or whatever, but like this moment demands of me anyway, that I be my most aware, regulated self, even if it's for the good quality grieving.
It's for the good quality fighting, it's for the good quality co-creating, and it's for the good quality grieving. But I need to be my most aware and regulate itself to engage in the present moment. And that means I can't be jumping at every twitch I feel in my body and not understanding exactly what these messages are for me. So I guess just to say that while we can have a little definitions conversation about what these things are, it's just to acknowledge that right now,
Faith Clarke (19:23.441)
We are paying the price of our mishandling of discomforts and conflict in our whole bodies. And the system that we live in, empire, whatever we're calling it, is built for us to pay that price in our bodies. It is at our cost while the system creates a lot of the conflict around us.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (19:45.356)
Yeah, well, and there's very little cost if I say faith is only using my part as an example, like it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just an example and it's no big deal, right? You're right. That's minimal discomfort, minimal cost. When I start to say, faith doesn't like me, she thinks I'm ugly, you know, all of that, then that spiral that I can go on, that's where that discomfort can really have real cost.
Faith Clarke (20:09.42)
I'm taking advantage of you using your side part to forward my own voice in the socials.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (20:13.134)
you
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) (20:16.62)
Right. It can really, that can really mess me up and that's, and yeah, exactly. So, all right. This was the beginning point. We're going to do more conversations about discomfort and again, using some real examples to hopefully help illustrate some of these things. So we hope you'll come back to the series. Thank you, Faith, for this first conversation.