Greetings, everyone! I hope Spring is starting to spring in your neighborhood. I’ve had about enough of this cold. It makes me want to hibernate. Hide away from the world and come back out when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and everything feels brighter.

Ironically, I find a lot of us have those same feelings about conflict. We want to hide from it and come back when everything feels easier, brighter, and nicer. It’s a word that causes a physical reaction for many of us. We feel it in our shoulders, in the pit of our stomach, in the way we suddenly become very busy when a hard conversation needs to happen. If that resonates with you, you’re not alone. Most of us were never taught how to navigate conflict well. We’re taught that it’s impolite, ‘not nice,’ or ‘causing trouble.’ We were just taught to avoid it.

This newsletter kicks off a three-part series on navigating conflict. We’re going to talk about why we avoid it, why silence is the real enemy, and how to engage with conflict in ways that don’t leave you dreading the next interaction. I hope you’ll stick with me through all three.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Why We Avoid Conflict (And What It’s Costing Us)

I was working with a leadership team that was, by most measures, high-functioning. Smart people. Good intentions. Solid results. But there was something off. Meetings were a little too smooth. Everyone agreed a little too quickly. And I kept hearing the same thing in my one-on-ones with team members: 

‘I didn’t want to bring it up in front of everyone.’

They weren’t avoiding conflict because they didn’t care. They were avoiding it because they didn’t believe there was a way to bring it up without consequences.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

“It’s not worth the fight.”

“They’ll think I’m being difficult.”

“If I bring it up, it’ll just make things worse.”

“Maybe it’ll resolve itself.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

Sound familiar? These aren’t irrational thoughts. At some point, most of us learned — either from family, a previous job, or a particularly bad experience — that conflict leads to damage. So we started managing our way around it instead of through it.

The problem? Managing around conflict doesn’t make it go away. It just drives it underground. Here’s the thing about conflict avoidance — it’s almost never about laziness. It’s about a story we tell ourselves that says it’s too dangerous. We give into fear, assumptions, and mistrust. 

What Avoidance Actually Looks Like

Conflict avoidance isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it looks like:

Agreeing in the room, then venting outside of it. How many times have you left a meeting saying nothing, then walked out and immediately said to a colleague, “Can you believe that?” That’s avoidance. The real conversation is happening in the hallway instead of the room.

Staying vague to keep the peace. When we soften our message so much that the point gets lost, we’re avoiding. We think we’ve said something, but we haven’t actually said the thing we needed to say.

Letting things build. One small frustration doesn’t get addressed. Then another. Then another. Until one day something minor happens and we react in a way that’s completely out of proportion — because we’ve been storing it all up.

Ghosting instead of addressing. Pulling back from a relationship or a collaboration rather than naming what’s not working. This one can quietly destroy teams.

The Real Cost of Avoidance

Liane Davey, in her book The Good Fight, calls this “conflict debt” — the accumulated weight of all the things we didn’t say, the feedback we withheld, the strategic decisions we deferred because we just didn’t want to deal with it. Conflict debt builds quietly. And it collects interest.

When we avoid conflict, we tell ourselves we’re being kind. We’re keeping things stable. We’re not rocking the boat. But here’s what’s actually happening underneath the surface:

Trust erodes. When people don’t feel safe to speak honestly, they stop bringing their real thoughts to the table. Conversations become performative. Innovation stalls.

Resentment builds. Unexpressed frustration doesn’t evaporate — it accumulates. And it tends to come out sideways, in ways that are harder to address than the original issue ever was.

Problems compound. That thing you didn’t address three months ago? It’s probably bigger now. Avoidance rarely makes problems smaller.

You lose credibility. People notice when leaders sidestep hard conversations. It signals, whether you mean it to or not, that difficult topics aren’t safe to address here.

So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

Because conflict feels risky. And in some environments, it is. If you’ve ever raised a concern and been shut down, talked over, or penalized for it, your nervous system learned something: this is not safe. Your avoidance isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation.

But here’s what I want to offer: the goal isn’t to become someone who loves conflict. The goal is to become someone who can move through it — cleanly, honestly, and without burning everything down in the process.

That starts with understanding why we avoid it in the first place. Because once we can see the pattern, we can begin to change it.

Bottom line?

Conflict avoidance feels safe in the moment. But the long game tells a different story. Unspoken tension doesn’t disappear — it just finds other ways to show up. And the cost of chronic avoidance is paid slowly, in the currency of trust, clarity, and connection.

Next time, we’ll look at why silence is actually a much more serious problem for a team than conflict ever will be. When conflict is addressed effectively, it’s one of the healthiest things a team can do.

Talk soon, Ellen

Want to learn more about how I support and work with clients? Let’s chat. Booking now for spring 2026.