I was talking with a friend today about how much conflict there seems to be in the lives of many of her clients. She works a lot with people who have retired or are about to retire. Because she works in the financial services sector, she frequently gets to interact with people around a topic that often is a long-standing source of conflict: money.

Or at least on the surface their conflict gets played out around money. But I'm a big believer in the expression "it's never about what it's about". So if it isn't about money, what is all this conflict about? Well, to corrupt one of Will Shakespeare's immortal lines "Let me count the ways"!!

At it's most basic, conflict around money almost always comes back to being a conflict about power and authority. Interestingly, in my long experience of working with people, it often isn't even their own issues with power and authority. It is the conversation they saw their parents having about power and authority. Who was the boss? Who got an opinion and who got a vote? Who wasn't listened to? Who was listened to? If the paycheque wasn't in your name did you have any say? If so, how much and about what? Now when I say "conversation" I don't mean to imply that many of us or our parents ever actually sit down and talk about what money, power or authority mean to us. I mean the conversation that was presented to us through action, through wrangling and sometimes even outright fisticuffs, through deed more than spoken word.

When was the last time you thought about power and authority in your relationship with your significant other? How honest are you about how much you posture, play victim, bully or use silence to get your way ...and then claim to the world that you have no power?

The other thing about conflict in relationships that struck me when I was talking with my friend is just how much she dreads it coming up in her encounters with her clients. It has clearly not yet entered her awareness yet that conflict between people is a huge opening for creativity. I love and celebrate those moments when my clients become cranky, irritated, annoyed or downright abrasive with me or with their partner. Because I know that moments holds huge potential for a shift.