Personal Journal 9.4

Most of the conflicts I have in the home environment which would be a conflict with either my parents or my girlfriend are usually dealing with emotions more than anything else. My girlfriend and I have had conflicts over our baby that will be here in about 4 and half more months. She gets frustrated and wonders how we are going to pull it off and be able to support ourselves and the new baby. The good thing is our disagreements are civil. We sent down and talk it out, we do not yell at each other and we do not get angry with each other. I use a lot of the tools I learned in the book "Everybody Wins" by Gary Chapman which is my term paper book for this class. We are on the ssme page now, because we sat down and talked it out and came to an agreement. We are taking it one day at a time. We know it is not going to be easy and especially at first. But I told her I am going to make every sacrifice possible to help us raise this child and she knows that she has to also. That made her very happy. The conflict I have had with my parents is pretty much the same thing or at least in the same category. They have told me that we are not ready yet and that it is going to be very hard for us to raise our child, but now they are supporting us. I worked this conflict out by showing them in the past four months that I am going to be a good dad, that I have done a lot of growing up here recently. I have told them that this is the most important thing to me and that I love Jill and we are going to get married. They believe me and are on board with us now because they have seen all the changes I have made in my life for the better in the past few months. That is how a lot of conflicts get worked out is by actions. The old saying "you got to walk the walk if you are going to talk the talk," which pretty much means I got to back up everything I am saying. I was in a conflict at school in some group work we were doing outside of class one day. It waa in my physical geography class, there was four of us working on our lab manual. We could not agree on some of the answers for this lab manual, we were not throwing blows or anything just a disagreement. So, what we did to resolve it was first we all just took a step back and took a ten minute break. Then when we came back to get to work we mapped out a game plan. In this class we can turn in one lab manual and put all of our names on it and we all receive the same grade. We broke it up into four parts and then when we were finished we checked all of our answers and we said if there was a problem that we could not agree on an answer for that we were going to leave the answer that was on there from who ever worked on that problem. If it ended up marked wrong that we had to live with it. I have realized that the bigger the group a lot of times the harder it is to come to an agreement on a conflict, but in the end whether it is a group of two or a group of thirty-two if I want to come to an agreement on something I have to be civil about it and listen to all the parties involved.