How to Confidently Deal with Conflict
Feb/100
I have to tell you that I’m not great at handling conflict. I’d much rather have things run smoothly and make sure that everyone gets along, works together, has fun and delivers great results, so when conflict happens I feel awkward and uncomfortable.
I tend to do what I can to set things up ahead of time for smooth sailing, and I’ve really had to work hard at dealing with conflict when and if it arises. Here’s what I’ve found has worked for me.
1. Don’t make it personal
Sometimes it’s easy to let your emotions get tangled up in things, especially if someone’s disagreeing or even attacking your position. Anger, blame, hurt and a bunch of other provocative emotions can be at play, and before you know it you’ve got a bigger problem than you ever thought.
Don’t make it personal – people are allowed to disagree with your position, just as you’re allowed to disagree with others.
By all means be passionate, but that’s not the same as being defensive or coming out on the offensive with all guns blazing. The moment you start taking differences of opinion as personal criticism and judgement (even if that’s exactly what’s being thrown at you) you’ll be on the defensive or offensive, so balance that passion with the facts and a healthy sprinkling of common sense and perspective.
2. Get the facts
There could be facts you need to know about or areas you need to explore before taking action. Make sure you go deep enough into those areas to figure out the facts of what’s happening, but don’t dwell on detail after detail after detail.
This is often a tricky balance between doing enough due diligence to be informed, checking in with your instincts and leveraging your experience to anticipate the different paths, and it means you have to put a hold on resolving the conflict until all parties can do their due diligence.
Be clear on what do you need to know and the most effective ways to get those answers. Work that out with an open mind and you’ll be in a stronger position to move forwards.
3. Listen
If you do one thing, make sure you hear everyone and respect their point of view. This is not the same as understanding everyone’s perspective (that can take a lifetime), but it’s important to have a healthy respect for their position even if you strongly disagree.
Listening demonstrates the value of the relationships you have and that you’re willing to listen and engage with others. That can speak louder than any amount of yelling.
Also, it might just mean that you discover a way through that hadn’t occurred to you before, giving you the opportunity to use nuggets of gold from different people to create a way forward that’s a workable and effective compromise.
4. Simple assertion
You have the right to be treated with respect and consideration, and coolly asserting that right is a powerful strategy.
To do that you need to watch that things don’t get overly complex – the more complicated you make things the more complex it’ll be for people to unravel and the more complex it’ll be to communicate clearly. Keep things simple (jot down bullet points if it helps) and figure out the simplest, most effective way to move forwards.
If you’re in a leadership position there’s often a point where the debate needs to be over, and you need to communicate that in a way that engages rather alienates. You might not have all the answers, but you need to be confident enough to be able to make a good decision. Then your job is to let people know coolly, simply and unambiguously what the facts are, the way forwards and what’s expected.
5. Be ready to be wrong
If you’re wrong, admit it. Don’t hang on to your position just for the sake of wanting to be right – that’ll just get you into more hot water, is sure to waste everyone’s time and will probably end up with you looking or feeling silly.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking being wrong is undesirable, it isn’t. Allowing yourself to be wrong shows that you’re switched on enough to do the best thing for all concerned and find the best route through. It demonstrates that you’re lead by integrity and are willing to take on new ideas if they work better, even if that flies in the face of what you were thinking previously.
Be ready to be wrong – that’s how you grow.
Steve Errey almost died at age 9 as he choked on a grape. Today, Steve is still feeling the effects of some extravagant spending but remains remarkably upbeat and positive. As a leading confidence coach with clients right around the world, Steve has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Read more at The Confidence Guy
5 Ways to Stop Second Guessing Yourself
Feb/100
Some years ago I remember standing in my kitchen, staring silently at my boxes of cereal, trying to decide which to have for breakfast. Was it a Frostie’s morning, or was it more of an Oat Crunchie’s day? Or maybe granola? I stood there for 5 minutes, until – utterly frustrated – I marched out of the house and went without.
Fortunately I’ve learned to make decisions more quickly and more easily now, and when I notice that second-guessing and doubting starting to kick in, I kick it right back. So here are 5 ways to stop second-guessing or, of you prefer, 5 ways to make confident decisions.
1. Test them against your values.
So many times we have to make decisions without a framework and no way to judge between two choices. When faced with a tricky decision it’s often a good idea to line up your choices and ask “Which one of these most honours the things that mean the most to me?”
The decision that’s most in line with the things that mean the most to you – your core values – will be the best decision for you. That might not be the simplest or most practical, but because it fits with who you are and what’s most important to you it will always be the best decision for you.
2. Trust your gut.
When I was growing up I used to love rainy Sunday afternoons watching Columbo, especially the bit at the end where he’d sidle up to the Bad Guy, say “Just one more thing” and then proceed to blow apart the bad guys alibi. Just brilliant.
What Columbo had bundles of was a great trust in his intuition. In every episode, from the very moment he first meets the bad guy, he knows ‘whodunnit’ – and he always trusts that.
So look at what your intuition tells you is the ‘right’ decision for you. Forget about all the “What if’s” and the myriad, tiny details – what is your gut telling you? Listen to your intuition, it knows what it’s talking about.
3. It just doesn’t matter.
My decision between breakfast cereals wasn’t a biggie. Whichever one I chose, there were never going to be any huge consequences and the ripples from that decision wouldn’t have been felt much further than the end of my spoon. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter which way you go.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in second guessing yourself, going round in circles and over-complicating things, when – if you get right down to it – it just doesn’t matter. Going round in circles is only going to make you dizzy, so stop it. Ask yourself this question – if your future happiness wasn’t dependent on your decision (and it isn’t, by the way), which way would you go?
4. Have enough information.
Go and get the facts before you make a complex decision. By all means weigh up the pro’s and con’s so that you can get an understanding of what’s behind a choice. But be careful – there’s a huge difference between knowing enough to make a choice, and knowing everything to make a choice.
When you feel yourself pursuing every fact or every piece of information before you make a decision, stop yourself. Ask “What do I really need to know to make this decision?” and focus your efforts on getting the best information relatively quickly, rather than pursuing all of the information you could get your hands on given a longer period of time.
5. Respect your doubts.
We all naturally shy away from change, and we’ve developed a whole bunch of tricks that make it easy for us to avoid making decisions and stay exactly where we are. That part of you is often called the “Gremlin”, and it’s the part of you that would rather avoid making decisions altogether rather than run the risk of making a bad one or screwing up.
Your Gremlin is not the same thing as having doubts, which are valid concerns about a possible course of action, or reasonable concerns about what might be in store. Your doubts can help you prepare for change and get ready for what could happen.
Your Gremlin is adept at feeding on your doubts and using them to get you to stay put, so knowing the difference between your Gremlin and your valid doubts helps you clarify what’s real and what’s imagined, what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant.
Steve Errey almost died at age 9 as he choked on a grape. Today, Steve is still feeling the effects of some extravagant spending but remains remarkably upbeat and positive. As a leading confidence coach with clients right around the world, Steve has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Read more at The Confidence Guy
The One Thing That Makes Love Work
Feb/100
You can’t walk down the street at this time of year without seeing a schmaltzy couple draped over each other or a window full of love hearts. Whether you like it or not, the trappings of St Valentines Day can be seen everywhere.
Now, I’ll put my hands up right now and tell you that I’ve screwed up my fair share of relationships. I still get tongue-tied when I see a beautiful woman, I’ve pushed people away to protect myself and I’ve run round and round in circles wondering how things ’should’ be done.
Despite that, there’s a heap of things I do know about relationships. I know that it’s important to know what you really need from one; I know that you need to be in a place where you feel ready to be in a partnership with someone; I know you need to open up your baggage so that it doesn’t weigh you down or steer things in the wrong direction; I know that relationships aren’t about blaming someone else for what’s wrong or needing to be right and I know that the things you like and love about your partner are what matter, not what you don’t like.
But what I’ve also learned is that all of that stuff is useless without one, simple thing:
You have to be ready to let go and make it up as you go along.
I call this act of letting go “freefall”, because there’s a point where you just have to let yourself go; a point where you have to loosen your grip and let gravity take its course.
Love isn’t about game playing and it isn’t about logic, and all the relationship tips, advice, checks and balances mean nothing unless you agree to do this one thing.
Loving someone is scary, confusing and unpredictable, and the catalyst to making a choice to freefall is a big bag full of courage. You have to trust yourself to feel your way through and you have to forget about the old rules you’ve set and all the “should’s” and “ought’s” that set you spinning.
Be willing to make it up as you go along. Be willing to let your heart play a bigger role. Be willing to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing and be willing to take a chance.
As far as love goes, we’re all in the same boat. Play from the heart.
Steve Errey almost died at age 9 as he choked on a grape. Today, Steve is still feeling the effects of some extravagant spending but remains remarkably upbeat and positive. As a leading confidence coach with clients right around the world, Steve has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Read more at The Confidence Guy
Birthdays, Self-Reflection, and a Better Year Ahead
Sep/090
I recently had a birthday. As I’ve gotten older, birthdays have become for me a time of intense self-reflection: where am I in my life, where do I want to be, what could I improve? They don;t depress me, like they do so many others, but they do make me think.
Birthdays are also natural times for me to make new resolutions. New Years Day has never felt like much more than an accident of the calendar, but birthdays – especially with mine falling right at the start of the academic calendar that has dominated most of my life, when I really am making a new start in much of my life with the dawn of a new academic school year – seem like a natural time to start making choices about the year ahead.
Now, I said “resolutions”, and we all know resolutions fail. My fellow Lifehack writers have written about the failure of resolutions over and over again, as for instance in Steve Errey’s post entitled pretty unambiguously New Years Resolutions Don’t Work – Here’s Why. But I think we need to reframe the idea of resolutions, to think about them not so much as goal-setting but as problem-solving.
When we think about resolutions, we tend to think of them as a matter of resolve, that is, of willpower. “I resolve to do x, y, and z.” Of course, if we had the willpower to work on our novel, pass on rich desserts, or be more outgoing at social events, we wouldn’t need to resolve those things in the first place. And so yes, they fail – and often leave us bitter and disappointed with ourselves.
But what if we thought about resolutions not so much as a matter of resolve but of solutions – that is, as a re-solution to life’s problems? My father, a great collector of quotes, likes to repeat Einstein’s dictum that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”; it seems to me that most of life’s problems remain with us because the solutions we’ve adopted don’t really solve them – and so we try the same solutions, over and over, harder and harder, thinking eventually those problems must give ground.
Consider, for example, this situation which many of us are or have been in:
- Problem: Your aren’t advancing in your chosen career.
- Resolution: Work harder, put in longer hours, apply for higher positions more often.
- Re-solution: Are you still committed to this career? Maybe you don’t have the passion and drive you had when you entered it ten years ago. If money weren’t an issue, would you still want to do what you do? What would you do? Inventory your skillset and your passions today and start looking into changing careers.
Maybe that isn’t how you’d address the problem, but you get the idea: a real re-solution needs to address the problem not in terms of what you aren’t doing often or well enough but at the very core, questioning the assumptions that the problem itself is grounded in. If you’re stalled out in your career because you no longer have any passion for it and are just putting your time in to collect a check, then a career change may well be in order – and if so, then it no longer matters that you’re stalled in your current career.
Let’s try applying this to a personal matter:
- Problem: You’ve been dating for months/years/decades and can’t seem to find someone with whom you’re interested in a relationship.
- Resolution: Get out more. Join an online dating service. Visit a professional matchmaker.
- Re-solution: What are you really looking for in a partner? Maybe you’re spending too much time and energy dating people because you should be interested in them, not because you are. Or Maybe you’re dating anyone who seems interested in you at all “just in case”. Take time to figure out the pattern in your past dating life and then act to consciously break that pattern.
Again, this may not be your re-solution, but the principle applies: whatever you’re doing isn’t working, so don’t do more of it, do something entirely different. And you can’t know what to do differently without really examining not just the behaviors that make up your current practices but the reasons you are behaving that way in the first place.
For the last few weeks, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing – re-thinking my goals, my choices, and my habits to see what simply isn’t helping to solve the things in my life that I’m not quite happy about. And, at the same time, the things I am – this isn’t about self-flagellation, but about an honest inventory of strengths and shortcomings, so that the one can be applied to the other.
Two years ago, that process led me to embrace a fledgling second career as a writer; last year, it led me to seriously rethink my approach to relationships and what I wanted in a partner; this year, who knows? I think I have some answers I didn’t have a month ago – and I have another 12 months to figure out what to do with them.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
