People show their frustration and anger in different ways. Some shout. Some sweat. Some grow deadly silent. Some cry. Some become biting with their words. Regardless of how your anger manifests during conflict situations, there are some tried and true ways to de-escalate things for yourself.  Here are a few simple ways to manage your anger: [Read more...]

You’ve heard of coaching, no doubt, as coaches seem to be proliferating faster than rabbits these days. But what about a dialogue coach, conflict management coach or negotiation coach?

My coaching is specific and focused: Helping professional women (and the occasional guy) get ready to and effectively engage in difficult conversations at work and home, with both strength and grace. Here’s how to use a coach like me, who draws on two decades of combined professional experience as a mediator, conflict management expert, educator, and business owner: [Read more...]

A few months ago, I wrote a post audaciously titled, Do Conflict Better in 10 Minutes a Day. In what has proven to be a highly popular post, I asked, “…what if you gave yourself 10 minutes a day to work on strengthening the conflict skills or attitude you want to strengthen? If you were to give yourself 10 minutes a day to get better at conflict, what would you do with those 10 minutes? Ten simple minutes.”

If you’re one of the people who’s been intrigued by this idea, then you may be interested in this post from Lifehacker: Beat Procrastination with the 10 Minute Rule. Quoting Pyschology Today, the post reminds us that we can… [Read more...]

A client, Meg, told me that in conflict at work she finds it difficult to “think through the noise” in her head. That phrase really resonates with me because that’s my experience as well. I suspect Meg and I are not alone. Here’s some of the “noise” that goes on in my brain when I’m in a disagreement:

• How am I sounding right now? Is this the way I want to come across?
• Should I take the bait or let that one go?
• What’s the outcome I seek here — what’s my real goal for this conversation?
• Will I care enough about this one down the road to fight the fight now?
• How am I doing? Am I escalating or ok?
• How’s the other person doing? Well enough that we should continue?
• Am I being heard here? If not, what would help that happen?

No wonder it’s hard to think clearly in difficult conversations! And yet there are some things you (and I) can to reduce the brain noise a bit. [Read more...]

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.

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.

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...]

When I was little, a summer evening often meant sitting in an outdoor rocker with my grandmother, making necklaces out of dandelion stems, and listening to her stories about Scotland. I can still recall her lovely Scottish burr as she quoted one of her favorite Robert Burns poems, To a Louse (On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church). The phrase I most remember from the poem is,

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

My mother was also fond of quoting those lines, perhaps a bit too frequently during my teenage years. Today, I find myself quoting them in conflict management workshops, carrying on a multi-generational tradition of wisdom from Burns’ words.

It’s the poem that came to mind when I heard about an online Johari window. [Read more...]

Emma said to me, “I’m constantly second-guessing myself when I’m in conflict with someone. I speak and then later wish I’d said something different. And I hate that I cry when I get angry! It’s so stereotypically female. At work I’m told to ‘buck up’ and stop being so emotional.”

I hear different versions of this story from a lot of women in my work, whether I’m coaching, mediating or training. It makes my heart ache every time I hear it.

What’s the “right” way to do it? Maybe it’s better not to say anything than to say the wrong thing. How can I change the way I do this to better fit the people around me? How can I be less emotional during conflict? I know I shouldn’t show strong emotion in the workplace and crying is seen as weakness. Tell me how to change! [Read more...]

Years ago, when I was a college dean, I clipped out an article by Susan Komives, “Inhabit the Gap.” I came across it in my annual file cleaning this week.

The article’s abstract says, “To…translate knowledge into action, we must examine the ways in which what we know may not always be congruent with what we do.” The article was a challenge to educators to model and teach behaviors that narrowed the gap between knowing something and doing it. She could easily have been talking about managing conflict successfully. [Read more...]

Think about a time when you handled a difficult situation (and yourself) well. Would you like more of those high performance experiences?

Think about a disagreement when things went sour, got messy, or got in the way of the relationship. Would you like fewer of those experiences?

You can. [Read more...]

I’m pleased to announce that I am now a certified administator of the Conflict Dynamics Profile and have added this excellent tool to my value-added services for clients.

The CDP is a powerful and well-designed individual or 360-degree instrument for assessing conflict behaviors in the workplace, building self-awareness of conflict triggers and responses, and suggesting practical approaches for strengthening behaviors that promote effective workplace conflict resolution. Unlike style-based instruments (which also have their good uses), the CDP focuses on behaviors, giving it an action orientation.

Developed by the Leadership Development Institute, an affiliate of the Center for Creative Leadership, the CDP is a well-designed and psychometrically sound instrument. It can be completed in about 20-25 minutes, either online or on paper, and comes with a practical and in-depth guide for strengthening conflict management skills.

Applicable for all types of organizations, I will now be using the CDP as part of my existing training programs, as a stand-alone assessment for an individuals or workplace groups, and as part of my executive and conflict coaching services.

I’m reading a gripping book right now, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. Gonzales profiles men and women who survived epic-proportion catastrophes in nature—adrift at sea, caught in an avalanche, lost in the Bolivian jungle—in order to understand why some of us survive such extraordinary circumstances and most of us don’t. And he believes the principles he’s uncovered apply as well in other parts of our lives as they do when we face natural catastrophe…

One of Gonzalez’ conclusions is that survivors are able to abandon rigid paradigms that limit their thinking and therefore their survival. He says survivors "accept that the environment (or the business climate or their health) is constantly changing. They pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits…They come to embrace the world in which they find themselves and see opportunity in adversity." They make stepping stones of stumbling blocks.

A Good Principle for Conflict Resolution

The jump from Gonzalez’ conclusion to application during conflict is both elegantly simple and perhaps teasingly elusive. It’s easy to understand that the frame of mind with which you approach conflict is going to influence how well you engage it. It’s a bit harder to change your framework to one with the kind of positive, flexible attitude that gives you a lot more ability to see possibilities instead of barriers. Here are some strategies next time you find yourself faced with a situation that seems filled with stumbling blocks:

Give yourself an attitude adjustment. Sometimes it’s as easy as asking yourself, "If I could have a better attitude about this situation, what would I be thinking?" or "If I could think of the cup as half full here, what would I be thinking?" Other times you may have to take a break, get some exercise, or wait until you wake up on the better side of the bed. If you have a friend or co-worker who tends to see the positive, ask them to help you consider ways to view the conflict as a possibility instead of a catastrophe.

Take a step, almost any step. Gonzalez points out that survivors do something. They deal with what is in their power, moment to moment. For you, this means preventing yourself from being paralyzed by the conflict. Break down its monstrous proportions into smaller chunks and deal with one of them. Then the next.

Look for the beauty. Huh? Beauty in conflict? Sure—if you’re in conflict, then you’re alive and the world stretches out before you. The survivors Gonzalez profiles all did something amazing: In the midst of mind-boggling circumstances, they were all able to see the beauty of the slice of the world they were caught in. Gonzalez points out that the act of appreciating relieves stress, creates strong motivation and helps you take in new information more effectively.

During conflict we tend to turn our attention to managing the other person or getting her to behave differently.

Realistically, though, the only persons we can truly control or manage during conflict are ourselves. And in managing our own reactions, in seeking more constructive responses from ourselves, we inevitably change the interaction with the other person. When we change and improve the quality of the whole interaction, then we may increase everyone’s capacity to act differently or "better."

About Mental Models

In addition to understanding your own conflict triggers and how you might manage them better, it’s also important to understand how your conflict mental models are affecting the dynamic between you and the other person. As with conflict triggers, understanding your own mental models is self-reflective work that should happen outside of the conflict arena so that you’re better able to manage your actions and reactions during conflict.

Mental models are the paradigms or lenses through which we view the world, including conflict situations. If you know the work of Chris Argyris, Donald Schön or Peter Senge, then the concept of mental models will sound familiar.

Peter Senge, in his seminal work The Fifth Discipline , described mental models as "deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action." He further explained that differences in mental models explain, in part, why two people can observe the same event, then later describe it differently.

Because mental models often exist below the level of awareness, their influence on our behavior and on our thinking is usually invisible and unexamined. Part of our personal work in learning how to manage conflict better is to reveal our mental models to ourselves and examine how those models influence the ways we act during difficult situations. Becoming aware of our mental models creates for us behavioral choices we may not have been aware of before. Senge and others have suggested that mental models are actually generative.with creative energy and self-awareness, we can set about generating new models that help us navigate our world in different and more effective ways.

Uncovering Your Own Mental Models

In recent discussions with family and friends, some of the following examples of conflict mental models rose to the surface: "There’s ultimately a single truth in all conflict situations." "Overt conflict is a signal that something’s wrong with the relationship." "Conflict is normal and important for healthy relationships." "Proving I’m right means I’ll be more highly valued by others." "People who are loud during conflict are unstable." "You can’t fully trust people who keep their conflict bottled up inside." Wow! With differing mental models like these it’s no surprise that we get into situations where other people inadvertently violate our unspoken conflict rules of engagement or our assumptions about the meaning of conflict in our lives.

I encourage you to do some thinking about your own conflict mental models. Here are some short exercises that might help you:

• Find a photo of yourself as a child, particularly one where you can recall that moment in time. Try to put yourself mentally back there…What did you understand about conflict then? What had you learned about conflict from your family, friends, school, or faith?

   

• Think about a person with whom you’ve recently engaged in a difficult conversation. Did that person do or say anything pushed against a belief you have about conflict or the way to act during conflict?

   

• Talk to friends, family and colleagues about mental models. Discussing mental models with others can help raise awareness of our own models and expand our thinking about the varied assumptions, beliefs and paradigms people use during difficult conversations.