Every person faces confrontation. Some face it better than others.

You know what it feels like when a person gets in your face, yelling about what you did wrong. Then this person proceeds to tell you what to do next in order to correct things.

It’s awful. Unexpected. Embarrassing.

But there’s the flip side. What do you do when you’re the one needing to confront a situation? A person? A behavior?

To begin with, most people walk away from confrontation. Maybe its part of their makeup, their upbringing or the result of a confrontation gone wrong.

Conflict is a fact of life. Getting comfortable with it is the hard part. Conflict is painful and when confronted many of us slip into some form of avoidance. That’s the first mistake. It doesn’t go away – it just grows. As the saying goes, dealing with conflict when it feels like a “pinch” is so much better than waiting until it grows and feels like a “crunch.” No doubt conflict can be destructive but it can also be constructive.

Every person is a born leader with leadership skills waiting to be developed. You lead your life, your family, your friends, and your work colleagues.

In the previous two issues of Influence It! Real Power For Women, you learned about the relationship between emotion and selling.

This knowledge is critical in your ability to understand human nature, emotions, and persuasion.

As the world-renowned neuroscientist Damasio showed, no decision humans make is based on rational thinking alone.

Triggers are alive and well for everyone! They are part of our memory, there to guide us and sometimes protect us.

Triggers work by way of emotions. When we are exposed to a certain stimuli, and depending on our history, we experience a rush of emotion that tells us how to react.

Is work-life balance really a myth? Is it something for men as well as women? YES!

Every now and then, I pop over and read the fabulous musings of Cali Yost. She’s an expert blogger on the work-life subject for Fast Company and hosts her own site at the Flex+Strategy Group. I like Cali’s content. And I agree with her: work-life BALANCE is something of a myth. She prefers the phrase “work-life fit.”

Listening to the people you are trying to persuade.

The purpose of leadership is to get someone, mainly a group of people, to do something – and that’s to follow you, to agree with your plans and to move to convincing others about your ideas.

You need to convey your message in a way that convinces them to get on board.