Fred the farmer needed to plow his fields. But his tractor was in the shop and the repairs weren’t going to be done in time. Fred noticed that his neighbor, Ed, had finished his plowing decided to ask if he could borrow Ed’s tractor.

Fred headed down the lane toward Ed’s house, thinking to himself, “I’m sure he won’t hesitate to lend it to me. Ed’s a good guy.”

A little way further down the lane, Fred mused, “Of course, some folks can be a bit odd about lending expensive equipment.”

Then he thought to himself, “He’ll think immediately about the price of gasoline. I’ll need to make sure he knows I’ll pay for the gas.”

A few more steps and Fred realized, “Ed hasn’t been over to chat much lately. I hope he’s not upset with me about something.”

As Ed’s house came into view, Fred remembered thinking that Ed had looked at him oddly at the last church supper. “I wonder what that was all about?”

As he stepped onto Ed’s front walkway, Fred thought, “I hope he isn’t going to make this difficult. He can be a bit ornery sometimes.” In his remaining steps to the front door, Fred’s mind reeled with all the ways Ed could be a jerk about the tractor.

He rapped his knuckles on the door. When Ed answered, Fred said, “You can keep your darn tractor, you selfish SOB. I didn’t need it that badly in the first place!”

Runaway thoughts and catastrophizing can hobble your difficult conversations before they even begin. Indeed, they can even make conversations difficult when they wouldn’t have been otherwise!

I see this challenge frequently enough in my mediation and conflict coaching work that I’ve developed ways to help clients avoid the trap. And I’ve written about the topic before, once telling another story about runaway thoughts, another time offering ideas for cultivating a non-anxious state of mind during difficult conversations, and yet another with questions to help you confront without catastrophizing. I’ve also written about my grad students’ reaction after a difficult conversations assignment.

By the way, if you know the original source of the above joke, I’d love to know it.

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.

Harold stood up, snapped his briefcase shut dramatically, tossed his coat over his arm and gestured to his legal team. “We’re leaving. This is over.” He turned and marched purposefully toward the conference room door, leaving his attorneys scrambling to gather their papers and catch up.

“Hmmm,” I said. “I’m not sure of the best thing to say right now, Harold…Oh – no – I do know what to say.”

I had been mediating Harold and Emma’s (not their real names) pricey estate dispute all morning and now into the afternoon. The siblings, each in their early 70s, started several hundred thousand dollars apart in their opening demands and had made tremendous progress. Both were lovely to work with – and completely stuck in their negotiations over who would inherit what percent of their father’s estate.

Lovely except for their almost comically frequent use of the F-bomb. Two refined, well-educated, generally pleasant adults tossing out the F-word and other choice expletives like truck drivers.

It was the last $5,000 dividing them that proved the hardest, and, it appeared, the downfall of the mediation’s almost-success. We’d spent an hour on that $5K, a pittance in the grand scheme of the money they were discussing, but powerfully symbolic nonetheless.

We’d patiently worked through the decade of frustration and anger over the way one felt burdened by caring for Dad and the other felt cut out of decisionmaking during those 10 last years. We’d talked over what had happened, and more importantly, what they wanted to happen in their relationship for the remaining decade(s) of their own lives. Those discussions had dramatically changed the money argument and brought them within $5,000 of resolving their legal case.

Each felt the other ought to pony up that last $5K, as a symbolic gesture of good will. Harold, it seemed, had just reached his end point, and suddenly he was up and striding toward the door. It looked like all their good work and desire to begin healing their fractured relationship was about to fall apart.

“Oh – no – I do know what to say,” I said calmly. Harold paused at the door, his hand on the nob, his back to those of us still at the table.

“Harold, are you out of your effing mind?” I asked loudly. Except…I didn’t say “effing.”

Harold’s hand remained on the knob. His sister’s eyes widened…the mediator had just said the F-word? Did she hear that right? The attorneys stopped shuffling papers and the room grew silent.

Harold turned slowly around. I prepared myself for a tongue-lashing.

He was grinning from ear to ear. “You’re right,” he said, “I am out of my mind.” He looked at his sister. “Split the difference and make it to the tapas bar in time for dinner?” She nodded her agreement.

People ask me all the time what mediators do that makes the difference. Here are two to add to the list: Speak the language of our clients and bravely name out loud the thing no one else is willing to.

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.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not your adversary is as interested in working things out as you are.

A while back I mediated a workplace dispute between two women who had been friends for many years, worked in the same office, and had a falling out resulting in a strained, unpleasant atmosphere for co-workers and visitors to the office. Their boss had asked me to help sort out the state of relationship conflict between them.

One of the women (I’ll call her Lorraine) was eager to get my help, the other (I’ll call her Nicole) as reticent as can be. So reticent, in fact, that I wasn’t positive she’d show up for the mediation.

The morning of the mediation, Lorraine showed up bright and early, nervous but eager to talk things through with her former friend. With five minutes to go before the designated start time, still no Nicole. One minute…no Nicole. Five minutes after the start time, no Nicole.

Ten minutes into the designated time, Nicole appeared. Everything about her demeanor suggested she really didn’t want to be there. She made little eye contact with me and none with Lorraine. She sat hunched unhappily at the table, doodling on the pad of paper I’d supplied. Her verbal contributions were of the monosyllabic variety.

I checked in with her privately to make sure she wanted to proceed. Even when a boss wants it, mediation is voluntary and the kind of untangling needed here required two willing participants. She assured me she was willing to be there even while she was still unhappy about finding herself in such a sour situation. We returned to the mediation table.

Ten more minutes of Lorraine’s eagerness and Nicole’s reticence and I was beginning to wonder what more I could do to unlock the one-sided conversation.

Then my eyes locked on Nicole’s doodles. All over the pad of paper were large and small variations of a single symbol. A symbol that said in abundance what she had yet been unable to say with words or body language:

Photo credit: Zol87

The morning ended with one of those moments every mediator loves: Nicole and Lorraine hugging and headed out to the local pub for one of their traditional – but recently avoided – post-work drinks together.

Sometimes, people want to sort things out or reconcile with every fiber of their being, but they don’t show it. Maybe they’re protecting themselves from the risk of more pain. Maybe they don’t believe anything can really be done. Maybe they haven’t yet found the words to convey what’s in their heart of hearts.

Be careful not to judge someone’s interest in resolution by the attitude they project.

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.

In early 2006, I mediated a dispute between two siblings in conflict over their mother’s estate. The total value of the estate was nearly $1 million and the financial stakes were high. These siblings were well into their 60s and had decades of both love and garbage between them. They’d already spent untold thousands of dollars litigating the matter when it landed at my mediation table.

It was messy and loving and frustrating and complicated — like life.

After four hours in mediation, the siblings had made tremendous progress. They’d talked out the things that frustrated them: One had done most of mom’s primary care in her last months. The other felt deliberately shut out by her brother. They’d had tension when dad had died but mom had kept things together. They’d expressed keen remorse for how their anger with each other had created an embarrassing scene at mom’s funeral.

And still they were stuck in divvying up the estate funds, about $5,000 apart. Not bad compared to where they’d started. Five thousand is a whole lot of dollars, yes. Yet not so many dollars when considered in the context of the hundreds of thousands they were disputing.

We spent an hour on that last $5,000 and no wiggle room seemed in sight. I took a break and walked around the block while they went to separate coffee shops for refreshments.

When we re-convened, I said, “It seems a shame for $5,000 to get in the way of all the good work you’ve done, all the sorting out you’ve accomplished, all the possibility you have to reconnect your families again. It also seems to me that the idea of fairly dividing that $5,000 is what’s getting you stuck. So let me flip your thinking for a minute: How could you fairly share that $5,000 instead of divide it?

We were drafting an agreement 10 minutes later.

That last $5,000? They had a touching and befitting solution: Donate $5,000 to Hurricane Katrina relief in the name of their mother.

How we frame the problems in our lives has such powerful impact on the solutions we see and can’t see.

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.

Imagine that it’s two o’clock in the morning and this happens:

Your doorbell rings; you get up, startled, and make your way downstairs. You open the door and see a man standing before you. He wears two diamond rings and a fur coat, and there’s a Rolls Royce behind him. He’s sorry to wake you at this ridiculous hour, he tells you, but he’s in the middle of a scavenger hunt. His ex-wife is in the same contest, which makes it very important to him that he win. He needs a piece of wood about three feet by seven feet. Can you help him? In order to make it worthwhile he’ll give you $10,000. You believe him. He’s obviously rich. And so you say to yourself, how in the world can I get this piece of wood for him? You think of the lumber yard; you don’t know who owns the lumber yard; in fact you’re not even sure where the lumber yard is. It would be closed at two o’clock in the morning anyway. You struggle but can’t come up with anything. Reluctantly, you tell him, “Gee, I’m sorry.”

The next day, when passing a construction site near a friend’s house, you see a piece of wood that’s just the right size, three feet by seven feet – a door. You could have just taken a door off its hinges and given it to him, for $10,000.

Why on earth, you say to yourself, didn’t it occur to you to do that? It didn’t occur to you because yesterday your door was not a piece of wood. The seven-by-three-foot piece of wood was hidden from you, stuck in the category called “door.”

– from Mindfulness by Ellen Langer

Categories help us navigate our world. They help us order, understand and distinguish between things, people, ideas. But there’s a dark side to categorization: When we over-rely on our categories, they blind us to other ways of viewing and understanding what’s around us. Notes Langer, “We build our own and our shared realities and then we become victims of them – blind to the fact that they are constructs, ideas.”

We suffer from category error in conflict, too. We see someone acting out in a tense moment and label them “aggressive.” We see someone running from a conflict and we label them “avoider” or “wimp.” We observe someone doing something that seems out of character and conclude they’ve become “unpredictable.”

And as we act again and again based on that original diagnosis, we narrow our sight and tune out evidence that contradicts it. We fail to see the loving dad in the man labeled “unpredictable” because we’re too busy viewing his unpredictability. We fail to see all the non-aggressive things that would counter our categorizing the woman in the next cubicle as aggressive. This is precisely why I consider the “dealing with difficult people” approach to conflict resolution a profound failure and disservice – to ourselves and those we work and live with.

There are much more effective ways, and they begin not with diagnosing the other, but with turning our gaze to ourselves.

Hat tip to Dr. Ellen Langer, author of Mindfulness and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility for permission to user her door story in this post.

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.

Jay Rothman, author of Resolving Identity-Based Conflict in Nations, Organizations, and Communities (Amazon link) tells this story:

A Middle Eastern man died, leaving 17 camels to his three sons. The first son was to receive 1/2, the second son was to receive 1/3, and the third son was to receive 1/9. They were unable to figure out how to divide the camels fairly.

After arguing among themselves, they consulted a wise old woman for a solution to this difficult problem. She offered to lend them her one camel. Of the now 18 camels, the first son took 9, the second took 6, and the third son took 2. One camel remained, so the sons gave it back to the woman.

Mediators call this kind of thinking “expand-the-pie.” Fixed-pie thinking results in blindspots because it assumes that for one person to have more of something, another person has to have less.

And we mediators know that in many, many cases, it just ain’t so.

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.

Six blind men gathered to determine what an elephant looks like.

The first approached the elephant and touched its leg. “Ah,” said he, “an elephant is like a pillar.”

The second reached out just as the elephant swished its tail. Holding the tail in his hand, he declared, “No, the elephant is like a rope.”

The third stepped forward. “I’ll settle this,” he said as his hand touched the elephant’s trunk. “Neither of you is right. Anyone can plainly tell that an elephant is like a tree branch.”

And so it went. The fourth found the elephant’s ear to be like a fan. The fifth declared the elephant like a wall, after leaning up against its belly. And the sixth, touching the tusk, knew for sure the elephant resembles a water pipe.

A wise man, who had happened by during the men’s exchange, stepped in. “You are all right. And all wrong. Each one of you has just a piece of the truth because you experienced a different part of the elephant. Combined, your individual truths will paint the true picture.”

I tell this story when I’m mediating, training or conflict coaching and someone has great clarity that they’re version of what happened is the right one, or their version of The Truth is the only one.

When I polled readers a few months ago, asking for your number one conflict frustration, more than a few answered with a version of “when someone isn’t able to see it from my point of view.” Now you have a story to tell them — and yourself.

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.

In a mediation recently, each side was quite sure their memory of the original conflict situation was the right one, the correct one, The Truth.

I was reminded of the problem created by confusing perspective with Truth, with absolute rightness.

The Other Side, a traditional Zen story

One day a young man reached the edge of a wide and fast-moving river during his travel to another town. He sat on the banks for hours, pondering how to cross safely and get to his destination. Just as he was about to return to the village from which he’d started, he saw a well-respect Zen teacher on the other side of the river.

The young man called over, “Wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?”

The teacher thought quietly for a moment, then called over, “”My son, you are on the other side.”

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.

A farmer headed down a bumpy, pothole-ridden dirt road with a cart filled to the brim with freshly picked apples.

Passing a gentleman headed in the other direction, he asked, “How long will it take me to get to market headed this way?”

The other fellow looked at the cart full of apples, then down at the muddy potholes. “An hour if you go slowly,” he replied, “and all day if you go fast.”

Conflict resolution is like a carting apples on a bumpy road. It may seem efficient to hurry resolution along, but it’s usually much more effective to slow down and do it right.

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.

This is a Zen koan (traditional story) known as Maybe:

A farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbors gathered upon hearing the news and said sympathetically, “That’s such bad luck.”

The next day, the farmer’s son attempted to ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. “How awful,” the neighbors said. “It looks like your luck has turned for the worse again.” [Read more...]

The bailiff unlocked the small courtroom. After telling me to make myself at home, he pointed to a small red button on the wall. “If you need me, just press that button and I’ll be in here faster than you can blink an eye. It’s an emergency button.”

“Ok, thanks,” I replied, and began to unpack my briefcase.

“I mean it,” he said. “Just press the button. Maybe you should set up your chair so you’re near it.”

I gave him a long look. “You seem to want me to know about that button. Is there something else you want to tell me?”

I was about to mediate a messy estate dispute between family members who’d been winding their way through the legal system for a couple years. [Read more...]

Autobiography in Five Chapters
by Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost…I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street. [Read more...]

Last year around this time, I ran a story about my seasonal visit with four famous Christmas-season television stars known for their hot tempers. A few of you have asked about it in the past few weeks, so here’s the link to the story:

Cooling Holiday Hotheads: Television Stars Confront Their Triggers

And one more gift to you for the holidays: The link to listen to a 1974 recording of John Henry Faulk’s touching Christmas story, a Christmas morning tradition in my home. [Read more...]

What is this about a husband in Kenya?

The college president for whom I was working at the time stared at me across the table during our weekly one-on-one. She looked troubled.

I set my coffee mug down. A what?

In yesterday’s strategic planning meeting, I heard you mention a husband in Kenya. There must be some explanation. Does Rod know? [Read more...]

We bought a new stove last week. It has a lot of electronic bells and whistles. Our old stove, ca. 1974 (I know, I know), could never have dreamed of such gadgetry.

The old stove’s timer emitted a honking blast of noise that just kept going until one of us ran into the kitchen, hands over our ears, to turn it off. The new stove’s timer beeps in a pretty little way when the time is up. If we don’t go in and press the keypad, it’ll beep again in about a minute. Makes sense…wouldn’t want to burn the dog biscuits because we missed one beep. [Read more...]

A workshop participant recently asked me, “When I can’t get the other person to talk, and the conflict can’t be resolved, how do I let go of it?”

I’ve had the privilege of bearing witness others’ decisions to let go of an unresolved conflict and move on with their lives. And it really is a conscious decision not to let too much of the past eat up too much of the future. Those decisions, which I’ve witnessed as an executive coach, as a mediator and as a college professor of conflict studies, usually became possible when one or more of these had occurred: [Read more...]

Like any other tool, conflict management tools become truly useful when you use the right tool for the situation and get practiced enough to use if effectively.

Years ago, when we lived in Vermont, my husband and I decided to build a very large deck off one side of our home. It was a giant undertaking. Since both of us have terminal degrees in our academic disciplines, building a deck was one of those projects where we often joked, “How many people with a doctorate does it take to…” Deck-building was, quite frankly, not our strength and we had a lot of learning to do in order to achieve the end result we wanted.

Fortunately, our contractor, a woman who had masterfully completed projects for us in the past, agreed to help us learn how to build the deck while she made sure we didn’t mess up the project completely. [Read more...]

It’s been a dog-focused kind of month in our home, with our two geriatric canine companions showing their age in ways that are making us a bit sad. Because they’re on my mind, here I am again with a dog story. Thanks for bearing with me…and the prize, when you keep reading, is a handy little tip for more effective conflict resolution.

Luigi is our little guy in his middle teen years.

Luigi was a finicky eater from the start of his life with us. Some days, he turned his nose up at his dog food entirely, even with the premium foods we offered. He’d sniff his food and walk away. He also earned the nickname Vomitar early on, due to his penchant for the periodic little bile upchucks that we came to understand were part of Life with Lu.

Then, about five years ago, he developed partial seizures. Trips down to Tufts’ Foster Hospital for Small Animals and several shockingly pricey MRIs later, he was prescribed potassium bromide to control the unexplained events. Suddenly our lively, mountain-climbing little dog was a groggy, fattening pile of snoring fur. And while the seizures were a bit more infrequent, they were by no means gone.

After a year of drugging him into a stupor, we decided to try something drastic: [Read more...]

Some of you know I’m a dog lover and that Rod and I share our home life with a giant canine named Hugo and a wee guy, Luigi. And two cats.

Hugo is a mutt, Golden Retriever and Newfoundland. A couple of weeks ago, he suffered his third idiopathic vestibular incident. It’s a mystifying syndrome without a clear cause, but just picture a dog who looks like he’s had a stroke and you’ll get the right idea: stumbling in circles because legs on one side have stopped working, drooling out of one side of his mouth (instead of both sides for a change!), temporarily blind in one eye, bouncing off inanimate objects he doesn’t see on that side.

The first time it happened it was terrifying. By the third time, we knew it for what it is. Most vestibular incidents resolve in a few hours to a few days. This time it took over two weeks.

Ok, so you’ve got the image of a giant black dog who looks like he’s had a stroke. Now add the image of [Read more...]

So, you want to get better at your difficult conversations at work or home. Maybe some new conflict management tools will make a difference, right?

Not quite. Formulas, recipes and active listening will only get you so far. I generally believe that most people I meet in my workshops and conflict management coaching already have all or many of the good skills they need to manage conflict well. It’s not so much about building better skills. As with all tools, it’s about what you do with them…how you put them to work.

A few years ago, my Interpersonal Conflict class was just getting underway when Kate, very animated as she came in, raised her hand. “Can I tell a quick story about something that happened to me this morning? I promise it’s relevant to class!” Well, that got my and the students’ attention, particularly since Kate was so electric from the “aha” moment she was about to describe. [Read more...]

When I was in my 20s and my mother was still alive, she broke her hip a few weeks before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a major family event each year and my mom had always done it all, a Renaissance woman.

Stuck in a wheelchair, she was sad and unhappy that she wouldn’t be able to handle Thanksgiving that year. No worries, Mom, we all said, we’ll do it. My siblings and I would be there from our various corners of the Northeast U.S. and we decided we’d rally for the cause. My father, never one to cook, would also help out.

It was the most disastrous Thanksgiving in anyone’s memory, before or since. [Read more...]