coaching · mediation · facilitation

Well apparently I am supposed to be grieving. 

I tell people that my dad died at the beginning of December and most of the time they then tell me that it will be difficult, that I should remember the good things and then they head into their own experience of the death of parent.  Not everyone does this – but many.

I am learning lots of things as a consequence of this experience.

We don’t all have similar experiences of death and grief.

There is no such thing as normal

We do lots of adaptive listening – (adapting the thing that someone tells us to our own experience)

There are some strong rules that say we shouldn’t think negatively about people who have died

I don’t miss him

I feel quite relaxed about him having died

I want and need to look at my relationship to fathering, how I do it, how it was done to me and the emotional residue

Not everyone will be sharing my experience

I now need to start sifting my experience and working out what I need from the social constructs that surround me.

My father died early on the morning of 5th December.  He has had frontal lobe dementia and been in a care home for three years.

I have a complex history with him – many years of distress and pain, needing to work through my feelings and reactions to him. Getting help when needed, grieving, meeting and sometimes avoiding, sometimes working on it.

Earlier today I was talking with someone and said that in many ways he has been my primary teacher.  It felt good to say it – I have learnt about my relationship to conflict and also to compassion as a consequence of my struggle with him (and with me).

There were times of acute pain and these don’t disappear although the strength of feeling attached to them starts to shift and change.

Some of my teachers talk about ‘changing the past’; I’m not sure about this yet but am clear that I have some ongoing work to do with regard to this relationship.

This post has a workplace orientation but I hope it is also relevant in other contexts.

It is important to remember that most disagreements never escalate into conflict. Usually an event happens, you say something, the other person says, "Oh sorry about that" and both of you are satisfied. What turns a disagreement into a conflict is when you say something and you don't get the response you hoped for. Instead you are ignored, not taken seriously, not listened to, dismissed as trivial, not acknowledged or get what seems to be an over-reaction.One of the key principles to dealing effectively with a conflict situation is to separate your reactions from responses.  A reaction is where I don't feel as if I have a choice about what I am saying, feeling or doing whereas when I make a response I have moved to an internal place where I can choose what I say and how I say it.

Dealing with conflict often feels difficult and for many of us it is something we would rather avoid. It takes effort and is sometimes risky but a small stretch out of our comfort zone can sometimes stop a conflict escalating to truly damaging proportions.A version of this article appeared in the Times Educational Supplement

I walked into one of my favourite cafes today (Boston Tea Party), bought a drink and went in search of a table to do some writing. 

The café was busy with very few spaces except at a large table where a woman was sitting by herself. 

I asked her if I could sit at the table, she said sure, so I sat and said ‘I didn’t want to disturb your privacy’. She turned back to me and asked ‘What do you mean by privacy?’

We then fell into a conversation that started with thinking about what privacy means, how it is different from personal space, how this is affected by culture and then we headed into an array of other areas, both personal and conceptual.  It was the type of conversation that cuts through all the day-to-day debris that can fill our lives.

At some point we described it as an oasis – two humans feeding and being fed by each others' attention, ideas, presence and engagement.

I wish to offer her my thanks and share the delight of that moment of grace.

Positions, interests and needs

Understanding positions, interests and needs are the fundamental requirement to dealing with any conflict situation.

• A position is the behaviour that appears on the surface, it is known and visible.
• An interest is what we actually want, it is often unknown and invisible.
• Needs are our fundamental requirements (like safety and belonging) that drive our interests.

A position is a stance that we take in a difficult situation that we presume will get us what we want.  Positions are often ‘unexamined’; they are a loud and direct reaction to a given stimulus.

‘Just go to your room’

‘I want him sacked’

‘Why do you never wash the dishes?’

‘How dare you say that to me?’

‘You’re a complete incompetent’

Shouting at another driver due to road rage

These are all examples of positional statements, they are what comes out of our mouths when we are frustrated, angry, had enough or can’t take any more.  At one level, they are our attempt to get us what we want.  They often contain lots of emotion, sometimes clearly expressed sometimes hidden within the statement.

These statements are often heard by others as if they are coming out of the mouth of a persecutor, although when we say them we are usually feeling like the victim of someone else’s persecution.

They are the tip of an iceberg and in order to work effectively with conflict we need to explore the interests that lie under the surface.

Let’s use road rage as an example:

I’m driving happily along and someone turns out of a minor road in front of me causing me to slam on the brakes to avoid driving into them.

I then swear loudly, flash my lights, beep my horn and drive very close to them.  All of these are positional reactions to the situation.

As the driver, what happened to me when the car pulled out?

I was shocked and possibly scared, I reacted by braking quickly and then the rest of my reaction got channelled into aggressive behaviour.  What is seen by the other driver is my aggression not my fear.

What did I want? 

Generally, I want other road users to drive safely so that my life doesn’t get threatened.  In this example, my interest is that other road users drive with care and my need is that my own safety is maintained.

What’s the likely consequence of my positional behaviour.  The driver who pulled out may be embarrassed or even humiliated by having driven poorly, my aggression may spark their aggression back to me and at its worst, both cars stop and the drivers get out and start fighting.

The underlying need for both people is their safety and they are now fighting in the middle of the road – this is often the consequence of conflicts that remain at a positional level, it may not be a physical fight but it is often some form of fight.

Let’s look at another example

I was talking with a medical advocate – a woman who works with people who are upset or angry at the way that they or someone close to them, have been treated by the medical services.

It was in the middle of a mediation training course and I asked the group if they had any examples of using the position and interest concept since I had last seen them.

She said that a client had come to her, very angry about how her husband had been treated by the ambulance service.  He was ill and dying, the ambulance service took a long time to get to him and he died before they arrived. She was blaming the ambulance service and full of emotion – this was her position.  The advocate acknowledged her emotion and started asking her client what it was she wanted.  During a long conversation what emerged was that the client had always promised her husband that she would make sure he died at home.  On this day as he had become increasingly ill she ended up calling the ambulance and telling him that this is what she had done.  He died before they arrived but she felt awful because this was the last conversation she had with him and she felt that she had broken her word to him.

The advocate helped her to talk about this and then pointed her toward some help for her distress.

For me it is a stark and powerful story of someone feeling really bad and needing to blame someone else, the ambulance service.  By recognising that something was driving the bad feeling, the advocate was able to get at the interest and the needs (feeling guilty and needing recognition). The outcome hopefully will be much more beneficial for the client than a potential pursuit of the ambulance service for financial compensation or an apology, neither of which would have directly addressed the interests or needs – and in fact may have left them entirely unspoken.

Changing my mind about conflict

 

My last post finished with the suggestion that we should change our mind about conflict and I want to start to explore what this means.

‘Changing my mind’ is a phrase I have stolen from my partner, who wanted to reclaim it from its usual negative connotation and meaning and instead, use it as a way of making a deliberate and positive choice.

So, what I am suggesting is that when we are in conflict and viewing it as ‘bad’, it may help us if we can change our mind and see it in a different light.

Let me take a couple of examples to explore......

You are a parent and your young child is having a tantrum in the middle of a supermarket.

There are many possible reactions and the one I saw today was the parent starting to shout at the child who then got even louder and more distressed.

Changing your mind in this situation is tough because you may be grappling with a sense of embarrassment, feeling very visible and perhaps being judged as a ‘bad’ parent.  The parent will also be running into a bunch of ‘rules’ that exist inside them about how they are meant to behave.  These are the rules that we all have - the ones that define our sense of what is normal.  The issue with these rules is that we often don’t know we have them until they get broken.

To change your mind, you may need to take a breath and internally go ‘my child is upset about something, I wonder what it is?’

This might enable you to stay relaxed and find a way of interacting with your child other than just shouting.  The process of changing your mind is about being able to look at the same situation in a new manner – it requires an effort.

Your boss...

A different example might be that your boss at work, who you usually get on well with, has been abrupt, short and a bit aggressive with you for the last week. You are confused, upset and hurt, you may have started to use the word bullying about their behaviour. Your relationship with them is professional, so you don’t know much about the person aside from how you see them at work.

It will be easy to drop into a very negative place about this type of conflict.  If you are not very assertive you may stay quiet – suffer in silence – and hope it stops.  If it does than that’s great because things get back to normal and you don’t have to worry about it – or do you, might you be a bit more vigilant for this type of behaviour from your boss?

What happens if the behaviour continues?  You may be able to deal with it but it might build up to an outburst from you back at your manager or that you head off to HR and put in a complaint.

So where does changing your mind fit in this picture?

It can kick in at any point but the easiest is when you start to notice the different and uncomfortable behaviour from your boss.

Rather than feeling like the victim of this behaviour – if you can change your mind you create an opportunity to say to yourself ‘something is going on here and I don’t understand what it is’. 

Perhaps you can approach them directly, ‘You seem to be behaving differently over the last few days, are things okay?’

Or ‘I’m noticing your seem a bit distracted, can I help?’ 

The difficulty with these types of approach is that you need a degree of confidence and assertion to be so direct.

If it is difficult for you to be this assertive it may be that you can take a step back from your reaction to their behaviour and start to wonder about what is causing them to behave this way. 

This process may not change their behaviour but it can start to change your reaction to their behaviour.

You don’t have to be a victim, you may be able to become an observer and this might give you some space to think what you want to do.

My key thought is, no matter what the circumstance, can I look differently at this situation? 

Can I (or am I prepared to) make the effort to change my mind?

What is it that I need to do if I want to change my mind?