Five with Fry
Five with Fry is your go-to podcast for understanding conflict—where it comes from, why it shows up, and how to handle it with clarity and intention. On each episode, Dr. Jen Fry breaks down the moments we avoid, the reactions we default to, and the skills it takes to move through conflict without blowing things up or shutting down.
Five with Fry
S2 Ep1: Your Family’s Conflict Style Is Running Your Meetings
Leadership gets clearer when you stop avoiding the hard parts and start asking where your habits came from. In this episode, we dig into conflict roots. Those early lessons taught you whether to speak up, shut down, smooth things over, or push harder. Those patterns do not disappear with age or job titles. They show up in feedback, decision-making, and how much trust your team feels under pressure.
I share how growing up with mixed family models taught me to avoid conflict, and how that avoidance eventually cost me clarity and credibility as a leader. From there, we slow things down and get practical. How do you act when you are sure you are right? When you worry you might be wrong? When you feel silenced? What did conflict look like when you were young, and how is that history shaping how you lead today?
This episode offers short stories, sharp reflection questions, and simple practices you can use right away. We talk about naming tension earlier, setting clearer norms, and following conflict through repair instead of retreat. The focus of this season is leadership that starts with self and shows up through consistent, thoughtful practice.
If this resonated, follow the show, rate it, and share it with someone who is ready to change their relationship with conflict. I also do keynotes, workshops, and facilitation. My goal is to help one million people build a better relationship with conflict, and it starts with you.
Welcome to Five with Fry. I'm Dr. Jen Fry. This podcast is about conflict and what it teaches us when we stop trying to avoid it. This season focuses on leadership starting with self. In five minute episodes, we look at the internal work of leadership: self-awareness, emotional regulation, accountability, and the patterns that show up when things get tense. You don't get to lead past what you won't look at. In some episodes, I'll ask a guest one central question: What is a moment of conflict that changed you for the better? Different formats, same goal, to help you lead with more clarity by owning your own stuff and using conflict as a tool, not something to run from. Hey friends, I'm Dr. Jen Fry, and welcome to this episode on conflict roots. We cannot adequately talk about leadership unless we start with who we are and how we got to understand conflict. It's so critical. And many of us don't think about it and realize that our conflict roots have a huge role on how we navigate conflict as a professional. I want you to sit back and think about when you were younger and how conflict played out in your home with your parents, your family members, your guardian. And within that, even if conflict did play out, that's a key component. If you were able to see conflict play out, or if conflict never played out. And potentially you were in a house that whenever conflict started to come up, it was nipped in the bud really, really quick. All of those ways conflict was managed have a direct effect on how you now manage it. Either you try and stay as far away from what you saw when you were a kid, or without realizing it, you're actually repeating those roles. And so you can't get away from how your family treated conflict. I think about for me, I had two very different ways. The white side of my family would just write strongly worded emails. The black side of my family, when I was in my mid-20s, I remember having to grab my aunt because she was choking my uncle up against the wall. Two completely different ways. But both of them had an effect on me. And it had an effect on my leadership. For a long time, I looked at conflict as something that I literally had to find a way not to allow happen. Even if I was mad, upset, stressed, whatever the word was, I didn't allow conflict to happen. And it had a direct effect on those I worked with and those I coached. And that's why it's so important with leadership to start with self, because you start to see the ways that your childhood shows up unknowingly when you're having to navigate hard situations with the people you work with, with the people you manage. So it's a really good reflection for you when you start thinking about leadership, not saying we're gonna have a positive culture, we're gonna be transparent, we're gonna be doing all these things. It's really important to dig all the way down and say, how do I view conflict as a leader? How have I been affected by conflict when I was younger? How has that shown up in my personal and professional relationships? How do I manage conflict when it gets really hard? How do I manage conflict when I feel like I'm right? How do I manage conflict when I feel like I'm wrong? How has conflict used been used against me? How has it been used to silence me? How has it made me feel when I've been silenced? How has it felt when I just wanted to say something and I couldn't? And so these are all critical components of understanding your conflict roots. You can't lead people adequately without understanding who you are and how you got to be there. And so that's why with this first season, we really want to sit with leadership starts with self. To be the leader you want to be at, you've got to dig down. You've got to be able to pull off some scabs and sit with the uncomfortableness, sit with the pain, sit with the reflection, sit with the memories that's bringing up that you realize that you didn't realize was kind of sitting on the top of that pond, just waiting to be dove into. And so we want you to just sit and reflect on those conflict roots you have and how have they affected you in ways that maybe you didn't really realize, and now are starting to think of them in a more nuanced way and are prepared mentally to start diving into it. It's hard, but the closer you are to your roots, the better you'll be. If this episode resonated with you, take a second to follow, rate, and share it wherever you listen. And if this conversation hits closer to home and your work, I also do keynotes, workshops, and facilitation. My goal is to help one million people have a better relationship with conflict, and it starts with you. Well, that's this episode of Five with Fry. Y'all, take what you heard, sit with it, and use it. Remember, growth lives on the other side of that conversation. Don't waste the conflict, and thanks for listening.