Conflict is inevitable, the question is how you will show up when conflict comes knocking.
The mental knowledge and emotional intelligence of how to handle conflict and human emotion in your relationships are two of the most important skills you will ever learn in your life. Master these and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief, a lot of time, and a lot of money. Don’t and you’re kinda screwed.
Here we go.
Defining
Emotion and conflict are estranged roommates who set up camp in our most important relationships, yet few of us understand how they really play together. Conflict isn’t a cognitive – it’s an emotional state. Sure, you can make a list of all of the things you don’t like about your person, and like the perfect prosecuting attorney, you might be able to read the charges off one by one, and describe date, time, and place of each of the offenses. But all of this is really just data to support for what lies beneath: your feelings. People don’t get pissed off because of what you do, people get pissed off because of how they feel about what you did. Conflict isn’t a thought, it’s a feeling.
Conflict Dynamics
You probably don’t want to wander around with a chip on your shoulder, or at least you shouldn’t. So how do we melt the tension and bad feelings that kill our better selves? If we are going have any chance of success to show up as better participants in conflict, the first step is to understand conflict dynamics. Consider the bicycle wheel analogy. At the center is the hub, then the spokes, finally the rim. The hub of conflict is emotion, the spokes are all of the strategies that manifest it, and the rim is the result. When you build a wheel, you’re always “trueing” the rim (the result), and you do that by adjusting the spokes (conflict strategies). But if your hub (the center) has bad bearing, nothing is really going to fix it. Start at the center and work your way out.
One Do, One Don’t
Here are one “do” and one “don’t” when it comes to conflict and emotion.
Do
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the late and great Steven Covey coined the phrase “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”. This point of view embraces empathy, not sympathy, as a way of showing up in the conflicts of your life. Empathy is the skill of understanding how it is for the other person – even when you don’t agree.
But there is a predicate to seeing conflict and your role in it through lens of understanding before being understood. That predicate is a sense of personal security. You must feel secure enough in yourself in a moment of conflict to put your agenda aside and be open to the other person first. When we enter conflict with each other, we’re usually on emotional autopilot – there is no referee with a whistle and often no timeout. That’s why when you’re in your right mind (like hopefully you are right now), you need make an emotional sticky note to remember that people don’t need to be “heard” as much as they need to be “understood”.
In human conflict, just as in human love, each of us craves being understood at our deepest levels. Understanding is far more important than agreement and far more valuable than validation. Conveying a message of understanding to another is best done with a communication tool called “reflective listening”. Reflective listening is a tool to confirm understanding, nothing more. Example: “Let me see if I understand this, you’re really angry because of A, B, and C. And you feel this way about D…right?”
There’s a lot of magic in this trick. It’s probably got the highest ROI tool to resolve conflict with another person. Reflective listening – it works.
Don’t
Conflict is inevitable, it always has been, it always will be. The trick is how you show up. Maybe you’re really emotional, maybe you have a lot of scar tissue from past conflicts, maybe no one ever really taught you how to fight fair, maybe you’re just a bully. We all show up in our conflicts differently.
But no matter how you show up, always remember that there are always 3 parts to conflict: the beginning, the middle, and the end. The end of conflict will come. Maybe not soon, but eventually, and when it does, the end will be what people remember most.
Feelings come and go, but words are sticky. Words spoken in the heat of debate have a long memory, and the elephants among us remember that one slight of tongue in that one certain moment and it becomes a kind of branding iron. Sharp conflict words are the epitaph that eventually buries all of the good we have ever done before speaking to them. It’s not fair and it’s not right, it’s just true.
Two Flavors
Think of conflict and emotion as vanilla and chocolate – they different, but they live in the same food group. It’s the same with conflict and emotion. The ingredients of successful conflict and emotion include conveying understanding, reflectively listening, offering empathy, and being mindful of words. Embrace these thoughts, notions, and ways of being and you will most certainly be more effective in dealing with the inevitable conflicts in your life. Don’t, and you’re kinda screwed.
Good luck and have a good week.
Joe Still
2023.11.19
Cite
“Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, they’re still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.”
– George R. R. Martin (Game of Thrones)