Pleased to be an official SOB

There aren’t many times in a woman’s life when she feels pleased and honored to be called an Official SOB.

This may the only time, actually.

You see, Liz Strauss of Successful Blog has included me in her list of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers. Thanks, Liz, not just for the appreciated nod, but also for reminding us all how nice it is to be acknowledged for something done well.

Conflict Hack: Take a Real Break

We all know the value of taking a break when things get a bit hot under the collar during conflict. Research on brain function during heightened emotion backs up this practice—and suggests that how we use that time during the “break” makes all the difference in the world.

Simply taking a breather is much less effective if we use that time to replay the conflict in our mind. Such replay and rehearsal, when we’re already angry, extends the state of strong emotion.

To truly cool off, studies suggest, we should engage our brains in activity that isn’t about replaying the conflict. So next time you decide to go for a walk after a disagreement, find something else to think about.

When We Use Our Voices, We Sing

After my post Women and Conflict: Have You Lost Your Voice? earlier this week, several women wrote and asked variations of this question:

Are there good books or courses for learning better conflict management techniques so that I can find my “right voice”?

The short answer: Yes. The longer and more thorough answer: Maybe not.

I’ve been a trainer, teacher and coach for quite a while now. And the longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that the answer does not rest in learning new techniques for anger management, new recipes for dealing with difficult people, or new formulas for negotiating better, though these approaches do provide some respite. This dawning belief has certainly changed how I train and coach.

The real path to doing conflict better and creating a little more peace in our lives lies in learning how to access and use the real voice that is ours and ours alone. When we use our voices well, we sing.

Wear Red Today—It’s Equal Pay Day

Today’s a red outfit or accessory day, my friends. A while back I wrote a post, It’s Time to Make It Dollar for Dollar, about the way women’s pay continues to lag behind men’s. Each year, the National Committee on Pay Equity sponsors an Equal Pay Day to draw attention to that gap:

Equal Pay Day is observed in April to indicate how far into each year a woman must work to earn as much as a man earned in the previous year. Tuesday symbolizes the day when women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week.

NCPE encourages everyone to “Wear RED on Equal Pay Day to symbolize how far women and minorities are ‘in the red’ with their pay!“

Women and Conflict: Have You Lost Your Voice?

A couple of months ago I wrote about Using Your “Right Voice” in Conflict. I promised that I’d write more on this topic and a number of you have been asking when. I’ll start right now.

In 1982 Carol Gilligan published “In a Different Voice.” It was required reading in grad school in the mid-eighties and touched a chord for me and many of my women friends and classmates. Here, we thought, is someone who’s speaking to us, to what we bring to our work and relationships. Here’s someone who’s acknowledging women’s ways of being and asking the world to acknowledge them, too.

Over two decades after Gilligan first challenged us, the world is still unsure quite what to do with women’s voices. I talk daily with women who second-guess themselves. With women who’ve been speaking with an adopted voice for so long—adopted for a work world that still, by and large, places high value on male ways of knowing and doing—that they’re no longer sure what their own authentic voice sounds like. With women who are realizing that they’re not heard well or enough and have gotten into conflict behavior patterns that, at minimum, aren’t serving them well and may be leaving debris in their wake.

Women, we don’t trust our own voices enough. And it shows. [Read more]

Shut Up and Listen: Multi-Tasking and Conflict Don’t Mix

A disagreement isn’t the place for multi-tasking because doing conflict better means really paying attention. Here are the 3 top multi-tasking mistakes you can make during a dispute:

1. Doing anything else while the other person’s talking. When you do something else when someone’s talking to you, you send the message that the conversation with them isn’t worth your focus. This may not be a faux pas during ordinary conversation. But during conflict, when people are hyper-alert for slights, they may assume you don’t really care and it’ll escalate the conflict. So put that paper down. Take your hands away from the keyboard. Close the file cabinet. Give the other person your full attention for a few minutes. What a difference it’ll make! [Read more]

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   My Husband Speaks in Semi-Colons: Women, Men and Interrupting

   April 17, 2006

   My courteous, salt-of-the-earth, Midwestern husband, Rod, does not like that I interrupt him when we’re chatting, Take, for example, this exchange:

   Rod: "When you get home from your trip on Saturday, let’s plan on a quiet evening."

   Tammy: "That sounds good. I’ll be tired anyway."

   Rod: [spoken with a note of vexation] "I wasn’t finished. As I was saying, when you get home on Saturday, let’s plan on a quiet evening…"

   Tammy: [Waits, then finally thinks it's safe to speak] "Ok."

   Rod: [Furrowed brow is now quite apparent] "…let’s plan on a quiet evening; we could do something like a simple dinner, then a DVD; or maybe a board game…"

   I hear periods signaling the ends of sentences, but he’s speaking in semi-colons and ellipses. [Read more]

   Filed Under Healthy relationships · Comments Off  

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