I always pause to ask myself whether or not I might be overreacting when it comes to a conflict and I love asking a very trusted friend for their perspective and whether they think I might be over-reacting as well. I'm always thinking to understand, is there a place in that interaction where I was out of line? And where I do need to apologize for something? Where in that interaction do I personally need to take ownership? So, that's the process that I go through initially. I definitely want to seek to understand the other person's position. And so when I do approach that person and open up the door to have that conversation. I also do my best to convey that to them immediately, that I'm really seeking to understand how they feel about the situation and what they need. And what they would need from me in order to get things back on track, and then of course, I also want to be able to share my thoughts, and my feelings and my needs as well. A few years ago, I initiated a call to a coworker after learning that she had felt that I didn't think she was very bright and that had led to some defensiveness and aggressiveness in some of our interactions, which I didn't really understand at the time. But once I gained insight into this it all grew to make sense. So, when I gave her the call, I immediately apologized and let her know that this had come to my attention and that I didn't want her to feel that this way. It truly was not an accurate reflection of how I felt about her. But I opened up the door to really understand more about how she felt and how this had been the impacting our working relationship. And what that did was it made me aware of so many other areas where her feeling about this had bled into other parts of our working relationship. i.e., her being a little more aggressive and defensive with me and of course affecting our ability to get some work done. So, once we had this conversation things changed dramatically and I'll never forget her telling me that she thought it was very noble of me to have made that phone call. Throughout the call I made sure that when I apologized and opened the door to have this conversation with her that there were no excuses. I never said anything like, I'm really sorry that you felt this way, I made you feel this way or that I was really stressed out and sorry that things got kind of crazy. I never said anything like that i just completely owned it. And I said, I can see how I contributed to you feeling this way, that wasn't right and I want to make sure that moving forward you don't ever experience that with me. It's open door for you to come to me anytime and say, hey I didn't feel good about our last conversation. Thankfully, once we had this conversation, the air was cleared and things were fine after that. I was assigned to work on a project with an SME who had a reputation for being extremely difficult to work with. And at first everything was fine. Then we had a meeting where things went south. And when I called him the next day to kind of work on getting things back on track, he was very angry. He was very defensive and very confrontational. Apparently he had, he was attributing or blaming me for something that I actually hadn't been involved in. And this was resulting in some of these new feelings that had started to arise. So, in that conversation he made it very very clear he wasn't interested in hearing my side of the story. When I tried to explain that I actually hadn't been involved in this part of the project that he was blaming me for. He made it very clear he did not want to continue working with me. And I thought he was being a little overly emotional for the situation. I can understand being upset but I couldn't understand him being that angry over this particular incident. And that was when I realized that we were dealing with emotions that were going beyond what I thought were going to be possible to manage in order to have a rational conversation. At the moment where I realized that he wasn't gonna be able to have a rational conversation with me, I decided that we needed to at least put a pause on that relationship until that could actually occur. Sadly enough, that day never came. When approaching a conflict always seek to understand first. And I feel like this is the key to opening up a door to a successful conflict resolution. People generally don't care what you think or feel or say until they know that you care about them first. And if I have a situation where there's a conflict and I know that I want to go ahead and proceed that towards a resolution, I might open the door by saying something like I didn't feel really good about how our last conversation ended and I want to talk to you and see if we can get things back on track. I have some thoughts that I want to share with you, but first I wanna learn more about how you're feeling about it and what your thoughts are. And I feel like when we have that conversation it opens up the door for the person to be receptive to sharing their authentic feelings and needs, which is absolutely key. People need to be authentic in conflict resolution so that we can truly clear that air. The best advice I've actually learned recently was to ask the other person what is it that I'm not seeing here from your perspective? Or what is it that you're saying that I'm just not hearing for whatever reason? Those are really good statements, because the other person, if you're in a partnership, or on a project with somebody else, you have another set of eyes that can be tremendously valuable. And so, if we can keep our ego in check and recognize that other people are going to be valuable contributors. They are seeing and hearing, experiencing the situation, maybe differently, or maybe it's a project, differently than you are. Really opening up the door for them to share those thoughts and that input can be tremendously valuable.
