My husband and I have an ongoing inside joke. I can get pretty inward-focused when I’m working on a project, so much so that I tend not to pay much attention to what’s going on around me. I know I’m really absorbed when I start to notice small bruises on my legs and arms. They come from my banging into door jambs as I walk around oblivious to my surroundings, thinking about whatever I’m thinking about. That’s pathetic, isn’t it.

Door jambs are not my only victims. My husband also bears the brunt of this over-absorption. One evening I opened a kitchen cabinet door into his head, because I was thinking about a coaching client and forgot (probably didn’t even notice, frankly) that Rod was standing there. He yelped. I woke up. [Read more...]

We have a terrific petsitter. She’s an animal lover, is very reliable, and spends some real time with our dogs when she comes to walk them on days when our schedules would otherwise make for a loooong stretch between walks. She’s also an excellent communicator, leaving us detailed notes about anything she noticed with the dogs or cats, returning calls promptly, and showing willingness to work with us to sort out the occasional glitch.

As I was pondering how lucky we are to have Laura and Spoiled Rotten Dawgs, I thought briefly about the petsitting company we hired when we first moved to this region. The women who ran the business seemed very professional—lots of forms to fill out, a careful interview of us before they’d accept us as their client, lots of paper handed over for our files. After a couple of instances when they didn’t show up to walk the dogs when we thought they would, I phoned them to see what might straighten this out. Sounds like a communication gap, I thought. The conversation went badly. I still cringe when I think about it.

“You’ve got no right to question us when you never even pay your bill on time,” said one of the owners over the phone. I could sense the clenched teeth through which these words were uttered.

Huh? What could she possibly mean? We dutifully wrote a check, with tip included, and put it in the mail the day after each bill was received (they left the bill on the counter after each day’s worth of walks). I’m far from perfect, but a late bill-payer, certainly not. Ahem! And what about that awful word, never?

She explained, without mincing words, that the contract we had signed obligated us to pay them at the time of the visit itself. So, instead of writing a check the evening after the bill was received, we were supposed to be writing it the morning before it was received; the bill, apparently, was just for our records. Uh oh.

When I asked why they’d never said anything—this had, after all, gone on for several months—she told me that they preferred not to confront “problem clients,” since confrontations could get ugly.

I have a rather distinct memory of thinking, yeah, this conversation is much better than her mentioning this months ago, before she was so ticked off at us she almost couldn’t put two words together clearly. And before our dogs suffered some uncomfortably long days without the chance to take care of their own business. We agreed to part ways, sort of a mutual firing. I dug the original contract out of the files—yup, there it was, several pages in: Payment due immediately at the time services are rendered. No question—we were in the wrong, contractually speaking.

And, had this been pointed out to us much earlier, we would have apologized, mea-culpa-ed, and gotten it right from there on. But we couldn’t fix what we weren’t aware was broken. And the more we erred, the angrier these women apparently got at us, until their interest in serving us well was pretty seriously eroded.

Confronting a problem or conflict is sometimes hard, no question. But failure to do so isn’t a healthy business strategy. In this instance, the problem behavior continued far longer than it need have, and the anger and frustration these women experienced really got in the way of the business relationship. Not to mention, they lost a client who could have been a good one for them over the long run.

I realized recently that I haven’t heard mention of their petsitting service in a while. They used to have a pretty visible presence in the region. Maybe they’re still out there somewhere. Or maybe the hyper-avoidance led to more than the loss of just a single client.

Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.

I’ve just returned from a week in Tylertown, Mississippi, volunteering in the Hurricane Katrina region for Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends operates the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the country, housing about 1,500 homeless pets on an average day at their base in Utah. They also work with humane groups around the country to set up spay/neuter, shelter, foster, and adoption programs.

Within hours of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, Best Friends was on the ground there, helping rescue and care for the thousands upon thousands of injured, dying, displaced and homeless pets. Today, they’re the only national humane organization continuing that work, from a temporary sanctuary/triage unit/field hospital/reunification center just north of the Louisiana border in Tylertown.

And if you were in Tylertown today, you would have no doubt about the critical need for these efforts to continue.

What does this have to do with conflict? I spent a week there, living and working in the kind of crude conditions you might expect in a temporary mostly-outdoor sanctuary in a region hit by a hurricane. The kind of conditions that breed discomfort and stress. I worked alongside 60-80 (depending on the day) amazing Best Friends staffers (truly amazing human beings, all of them–what I did was nothing compared to their work) and volunteers from around the country, all from different walks of life. We shared long days of feeding, watering, medicating, re-socializing, playing with, and cleaning up after hundreds and hundreds of dogs and cats in mostly temporary cages and pens.

Hard work in hard conditions, compounded by some dogs’ apparently personal mission to try to escape whenever possible. Hard work in an emotionally difficult situation, seeing hundreds of skinny, frightened, depressed and injured pets. Hard work compounded by the fact that so many of these dogs are pitbulls and many of us arrived with a fair amount of trepidation about stepping into the cages of these notorious animals (we didn’t leave feeling that way–most of the pits are amazing animals I’d welcome into my own home). The kinds of conditions you’d expect to practically breed conflict.

But there wasn’t any to speak of—and I’m someone with my radar out for conflict because of the work I do. There was no major day-to-day conflict in the areas I worked in and virtually no petty squabbling. There certainly were plenty of things we could have found to complain or argue about, with so many people with different styles, backgrounds, experiences and ways of doing almost any task.

It’s the power of feeling passionately about why we were there. The power of believing, first and foremost, that our mission was to help these animals, and understanding implicitly that having our own way or convincing someone else that we’re right or the righteousness of feeling tread upon were all less important than keeping these animals alive, helping them heal, and helping them find home again.

As I drove the 1,500 miles home, with frightened little Mama Beagle in the back of the car, a little girl I delivered to her new foster home in New York, I had plenty of time to muse and cry. I have been moved beyond words by the sheer amount of tragedy and sadness in that region and by the resiliency of both the human and animal spirit. I have been moved beyond words by the amazing gathering of humanity to help these animals and the families looking for them.

And I’ve been reminded in a most profound way that the power of a passionate mission puts a lot of day-to-day conflict into startling perspective. It’s surprisingly easy to set differences aside when we’re focused on what brings us together.

Endnote: If you’re interested in the ongoing efforts to help animals in the Gulf Coast region, Best Friends and other humane groups need your help with a petition that calls upon New Orleans to allow animal rescues to continue. For more information, please visit the Best Friends petition today.