The CINERGY® Conflict Management Coaching Blog –ConflictMastery® Quest(ions) – is for anyone who finds self-reflective questions helpful for examining and strengthening your conflict intelligence. It is also for coaches, mediators, HR professionals, ombudsmen, leaders, lawyers, psychologists, counsellors and others who also use self-reflective questions as tools for helping your clients in these ways.
Two things that come to mind that many of us have challenges with when someone provokes us, are how to pause and to reflect when emotions are bubbling up inside us and we cannot really think straight – if at all. More often than not we react and regret. Something the other person says or does – or doesn’t say or do – sets us off and we spiral downwards. At these times – at some level of our consciousness – we perceive the other person is undermining us, challenging us, questioning us, even threatening us! Something we needed or expected from them is not forthcoming. Something feels unstable within us and around us. Something we trusted – about the other person or ourselves – feels elusive. Something scares us and knocks us off our equilibrium. Many emotions take over – anger, disappointment, hurt, sadness, betrayal, shock, frustration, fear and so on.
Since we become upset and unsettled when conflicts occur, it is difficult at these times to PAUSE and find a way to get some distance – physical or emotional or otherwise. This also means we are unable to shift to the executive functions of our brains to REFLECT and contemplate the dynamic of what went on. At these times, we are overwhelmed with emotion and unable to think clearly and consider the places we go to in our minds and hearts with any objectivity. This week’s Conflict Mastery Quest(ions) blog invites you to consider an interpersonal dispute that has set you off and provides an opportunity to pause and reflect and see how that supports you as you figure things out.
Interpersonal conflict is often deflating. Our egos, self-esteem, confidence, mood and other parts of us can all be negatively influenced when we are in dispute. Who the other person is, the subject matter, what she or he said or didn’t say (or did or didn’t do), and the attitude and facial or body language we observed – any number of these and other things could provoke us. I think I can safely say though, most of us experience moments like this when we are feeling deflated after a conflict.
What I notice from many of my conflict management coaching clients when conflicts negatively effect and linger for them is the tendency to be hard on themselves and go to places that reflect old habits. These include engaging in self-blame or blaming the other person, withdrawing, using silences, and reacting in other ways that demonstrate their default system.
If you have a tendency to go to a default (an old conflict habit that isn’t good for you) – even when you try not to – you might find this week’s Conflict Mastery Quest(ions) blog of relevance.
(Popular- from the archives)
When we are provoked by something someone says or does there is a moment of choice when we could mess things up or we could save them from messing up!
How to respond – rather than react – at these times is a choice, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that. Our gut instincts, our heart and emotions, our mind, our bodies, our faces get engaged in some way or another and our sense of reason gets lost as we express our reaction in any number of ways. Essentially, when we become embroiled in the emotional reaction we are experiencing and our sense of reason is compromised we do not typically consider we have a choice but to react spontaneously – often to our detriment – but, not always.
Let’s consider the good, the bad and the ugly of reacting quickly. The good thing is, our strong and first reactions may be the most honest ones. They might best reflect the degree of hurt we are experiencing about the other’s offensive behaviour. It might say – literally – what needs to get said that we have till now hesitated to express. These and other reasons support reacting with whatever comes to us!
And then there are those not so good reasons to react in the moment we are offended. One of the reasons is we may have misinterpreted what was said. We may not hear through what is happening for the other person that is important to them. We may not hear something that would be good for us and the relationship. We may cause the other person extreme hurt – with a quick unthoughtout reaction – and cause prolonged dissension.
Then, to name a few uglies – we might have missed the point and escalate a dynamic to ridiculous heights. We may be reacting to historical provocations that are unrelated to the dynamic between us and the other person. Another possibility is we might act and speak in such a strong and destructive way that the relationship ends altogether. We may agonize for a long period afterwards and experience ongoing and unreconcilable shame and self-blame and regret.
This week’s Conflict Mastery Quest(ions) blog invites you to consider the choices you had about an interpersonal dispute in which you reacted quickly (this is a dispute you already experienced and are revisiting to consider the good and the bad and the ugly of it) .
This week’s topic came to me when someone reminded me of the great quote “You do not need to attend every argument you are invited to” (unknown). Though I so agree with this, it seems we don’t always think we are at choice when statements, attitudes and deeds offend us and we react strongly to them. We likely don’t think either that some may not necessitate a response at all.
That is, in reality we often react to things that provoke us before we consider whether our reaction is justified, whether our perceptions and assumptions are askew, or whether we need or even want to engage in a conversation in the moment, or at all. Even if we perceive someone is purposely offending us, we are at choice about how and what we perceive, and about whether to respond and how, if we do.
For this week’s Conflict Mastery Quest(ions) blog, consider a time you reacted to something someone said or did and you realized, afterwards, that it was unnecessary and you could have chosen not to react.
(Popular- from the archives)
“The first step is clearly defining what it is you’re after, because without knowing that you’ll never get it” ~ Halle Berry
In any type of coaching the first main question coaches ask clients is what they want to achieve. Whether it is that day or overall – the idea, of course, is to determine the goals of people who want to make changes in their lives. When it comes to conflict management coaching, clients’ goals are typically long term such as being more conflict competent, becoming less avoidant about conflict, gaining more confidence when it comes to difficult conversations and so on. The importance of getting clear on what clients and we want to accomplish when it comes to our interpersonal disputes cannot be overstated.
What I have found as a coach with a conflict specialty is that what clients say they want in conflict usually extends well beyond what issues are in dispute, and what they initially express as their hope and desire. They are often apprehensive about expressing what is on their mind and about approaching the other person to resolve or at least, discuss things. For instance, someone might say “I want to explain to my boss why I couldn’t get the job done on time and I know they will freak out and I won’t know how to deal with that!” There are many possible underlying goals here and that’s exactly what coaches aim to elicit so that there is clarity about what is most important to clients. In this example, the client’s underlying goal might be to improve the way they deliver messages, to be better skilled at responding rather than reacting to people who “freak out”, to establish a connection with the boss who might be underestimating the client’s skills and so on. So, there could be many more goals or one main one.
The message though, as you see, is to define what it is that clients (and we) are after when in dispute so that attempts to determine goals are properly focused on what is really and truly wanted and not what initially comes to us while in the heat of the dispute. As Halle Berry says in the quote above –“without knowing what you are after you’ll never get it”.
With this in mind, I invite you to bring to mind an interpersonal dispute about which you are feeling apprehensive to address. This exercise is to support you as you deconstruct the situation with these questions to gain clarity on what it is you really want.
