| Handling Conflict to Live the Life Of Your Dreams by Elaine Allison
One of the greatest skill sets I feel a women leader can master is a technique to handle conflict eloquently. Do you find it is hard not bringing your work conflicts home or alternatively, not bringing your conflicts from home to your work? They often overlap. The skills discussed here will help you in both places. You rarely see men discussing their issues with a group of people. When we don’t understand the simple causes of conflict and simple methods to deal with it eloquently, we can often find ourselves caught up in ongoing quarrels that can eat away at our productivity and can exasperate our mental state. Women are more emotional than men, and unfortunately most of us have never been educated to deal with conflict, so we handle it like we saw it modeled at home. To illustrate several points about handling conflict, let me tell you a story from my own experience. Every summer, for our family vacation, we would visit a cabin in the woods that has been in my husband’s family for three generations. This is where he spent every summer of his childhood. It is a five hour drive from our home, and then we would un-load for another forty minute boat ride, since the cabin sits on an island in the middle of a river. The bass fishing is perhaps the best in the world, or so they claim. The cabin (a hut), is over 100 years old. It has no running water, no electricity, an outhouse and mosquitoes as large as your children. My husband loves it, I hate it. But I go because it is my family vacation and I want to support him. On the way up one year, about an hour into the drive, my husband looked at me and said, “I forgot to tell you, my mom is coming.” Now I love, respect and truly admire my mother–in-law. She is one of the strongest women I know. She lost her husband at a young age and raised five amazing children all on her own. I grew up across the street from her my entire life and got to observe her doing this. (Okay, my husband is literally the boy next door, or at least across the playground – yes, it is a true love story). I have one really small problem with her coming. She smokes and I have asthma. My response to this dilemma is called “third party conflict” and we see it playing out in the workplace all the time. We take our conflict to the wrong person. We complain to our manager in hopes they will “fix”, the other person for us. I teach proper methods for handling these conflicts myself, but often forget to utilize the techniques in my own life. In this case, I turn to my husband in disbelief and say, “You are going to tell your mom, not to smoke in the cabin right? I could die, you know, my asthma and all?” He looks at me with a sheepish chuckle and says, “Oh no, I’m not telling my Mom not to smoke in the cabin, this is her domain, you know the rules, when she comes to our place she’ll smoke outside, but in her home she gets to smoke.” I ask you though, “Am I right, she should not smoke in the cabin?” Some of you will say yes, some no. The point I’m illustrating is this: “It doesn’t matter if you are right; it only matters if you can find a 3rd way. This way of thinking, is especially graceful if you can remember this when you are managing other people. It takes so much energy to prove you are right and I’ve seen people argue for hours or never speak to each other again because they are stuck on proving they are right and that the other person is wrong, instead of finding another way or a solution. We get up to the cabin; she smokes outside all day, not one cigarette in the cabin. I’m relieved. Not telling someone how you feel can be a reasonable option in conflict as long as you can let it go and not allow it to bother you anymore….just accept it. Sometimes though it festers into something larger and it wasn’t the right choice to say nothing. Around 9:00 p.m. we’re still outside in our lawn chairs on this long hot summer day and as many of you will know, the mosquitoes come out about this time and we are forced to go inside the cabin. We play cards for about an hour. She doesn’t smoke. My husband is kicking me under the table, trying to indicate to me “this is great, she knows, she isn’t going to smoke inside”. We all retire shortly. My husband and the boys go down to a little hut with four bunk beds, my daughter and I take the master bedroom and my mother-in-law takes the back porch. She is wonderful and I can’t be more relieved that she has not smoked in the cabin. I get into the 100 year old roll away bed, where I bring my own foamy, sheets, pillow and sleeping bag. I turn off the flashlight and play tag with the one mosquito until about 1:00 a.m. I can’t stand the smell of the old cabin and I can’t sleep. Around this time, I find out my mother-in-law has another bad habit. She is an insomniac. I hear her at the kitchen table just outside my bedroom door playing cards; I can hear the cards snapping. I lay there and wait. Sure enough some time later I hear the click of the lighter and then a deep inhale and exhale. I grab the flashlight and check the cracks around the door and sure enough, the smoke is wafting into my room. I grab towels and facecloths and begin stuffing the door frame. It still comes through. I get into back into bed and try to ignore it. I start to panic and use my inhaler several times. I lay there and count the number of lighter clicks until about 5:00 a.m. when the sun comes up. I wonder if my inhaler will last three more nights. I finally realize I won’t be getting any sleep on this night and open the door and ask with a wheezing voice, “Have you been smoking?” She looks at me and says, I’ve had one, why is the dog hair bothering you?” I’m thinking, are you kidding me? I smile politely; take another wheezing breath and say, “I think so.” She says, “Oh don’t worry honey, we’ll get that room washed down, bang out the carpet and get all that dog hair and dander out of the room, you’ll be better tonight”. I say nothing and just nod okay. In the morning, who do you think got it? I nag after my husband all day and say, “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything to your mother”. He tries to calm me down and says it is only a couple more nights, I’m sure you’ll be fine. For three more days, with very little sleep and rationing my inhaler, I sit on the rocks by the water swatting mosquitoes watching everyone else having fun fishing, tubing, jumping off the rocks into the freezing river. I want a hair blower, a hot shower and a flush toilet more than anything else in the world. I thank my blessings I’ve had the privileged life I’ve enjoyed. On the drive home, I look at my husband and still in disbelief that he couldn’t see my side, I begin to complain about the conflict again. Now there is something else in handling conflict that you will want to be very aware of, it is called, negative imprinting. Negative imprinting is where you are in a conflict with someone and you are directly looking at their face, and are in an emotional state. For example; have you ever had a conflict with someone in your work and it was not resolved. You were angry and upset and looking at this person during the disagreement. After four or five of these incidents you’ve negatively imprinted their face into your brain. The person you are looking at becomes ugly in your eyes. They weren’t ugly when you met them, but after four or five of these, you are having trouble sitting near them in a meeting. You begin to avoid them. You might even think, “You weren’t ugly when I met you - I don’t remember seeing those nose hairs before”. Think about being in conflict with your significant other, and looking at your significant other’s face with each one. After several years of this, you may wonder what you even saw in them in the first place. To stop negative imprinting, I suggest grabbing a piece of paper to write on when you are arguing that you can both look at to focus on to decipher the conflict. This way you are looking at the paper, not each other to make sense of what the disagreement is about. You get mad at the situation, not the person. Your anger or emotion is directed differently. If you can separate the person from the situation, you will be more successful at coming up with a resolution. Reflect on the last conflict you had, when was it and who was it with. Most people in my seminars say the following; my son yesterday, my spouse last night, my brother last week, my boss this morning, my colleague three days ago. Isn’t it amazing that most people don’t say, “I think my last conflict was three years ago”. This is because conflict is going to happen today, tomorrow next week, next year and the year after that. When do you think is the only time you’ll ever get rid of conflict in your life? When you die! Some people say when you are sleeping, but I know some of you are having restless sleeps over conflicts. Would you like to know the only thing that causes conflict, whether it is at home, in your personal life or at your job or during your volunteer work? The only thing that causes conflict is when your goals, expectations or objectives…..are different than those of the other person. I’ve been teaching conflict resolution for years, a lot of it comes from my experience as a prison guard; my ability to handle it was a necessary skill as my life often depended on it. As we are driving home, and I’m still complaining, my husband looks at me and says, “Okay you teach this stuff, grab the piece of paper”. On a napkin in the car I wrote the following (and this is the template to use every time you get into a disagreement that you can’t seem to instantly resolve;
As we went through these options, my husband looked at me in excitement and said,“I’ve got the perfect answer, next year, don’t go!” I looked at him in shock, and said, “Don’t Go! Why should I not go? I’m not even doing anything, she is the one blowing smoke!.” I begin to cry. I’d been kicked off the island and I felt like I was in my own “Survivor” television series. My tribe had sent me home. My husband looked at me with great care and concern and said, “Honey, I don’t mean this in a mean way. Think about it, you hate going, you don’t like the mosquitoes, you don’t like the outhouse and you would prefer to have a blow dryer. If you don’t like it, why do you go?” I stated, “Because it is my family vacation and I’m trying to support your love for this place.” All of a sudden, I had a brain swap. Have you ever been fighting for your position and all of a sudden you change your mind? I really considered not going. Hmmm…I thought. I said, “You mean to tell me you would not be upset if I didn’t go?” My husband said, “No, of course not, you really don’t like it. I know it is uncomfortable for you. How about we go on our family vacation somewhere else and I’ll bring the kids up with their grandmother on my own for a few days each year?” I’m telling you, if I could have gotten out on the highway and done a dance at that moment I would have. Don’t go! It was perfect. So now each year we go on a family vacation to a location with a chandelier in the lobby and a flush toilet and he gets to go to the cabin. We found our 3rd way. Now I ask you again, “Was I right? Should she have not smoked in the cabin?” The point is, it doesn’t matter if you are right, it only matters if you can find a 3rd way. Finding alternatives, 3rd ways, options after you’ve each declared what your wants or needs are, is one of the greatest ways to overcome seemingly impossible conflicts. About Elaine Allison Elaine Allison is an International speaker who has enthralled audiences from coast to coast in both the United States and Canada with her lively presentations and affable style. Elaine was one of Canada’s first female prison guards in an all “male” maximum security correctional facility at the age of nineteen. Dealing almost entirely with men, at a time when men made it clear that they did not want women in their domain, Elaine had a “crash course” in understanding how we interact with each other and lead people, as her life virtually depended on it! She began to truly observe how women dealt with conflict, leadership and power, themes she has built into speaking and writing. Elaine has also won the 2002 Visions of Excellence, Entrepreneur of the Year Award for her speaking and consulting business. Get more insights into Elaine and her business at www.ElaineAllison.com.
|
