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Conflict Resolution Tips and Blog

Why Bold Leadership Leads People Into the Storm

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A friend reached out to talk with me about a powerful leadership opportunity that had been handed to her unexpectedly. She signed on to be second in command but was suddenly handed the job of head leader in charge. She was afraid, but gong forward anyway. She reached out, because she knew that she was walking into a storm and she wanted to develop a leadership strategy for navigating it and making sure that everyone not only survived, but thrived under her leadership.

Bold leadership recognizes the need to choose to lead into and through the storm.

In the last few months, hurricanes have been wrecking havoc and changing livelihoods and lives everywhere they have hit. Even with preparations, tremendous damage still gets done and people look to leaders to help them through. Unfortunately, in business when it comes to conflict, most leaders are not prepared at the start and often let it build into a storm and then are left to watch as it grows into a full blown hurricane. At this point, most leaders want to run and hide or at least go someplace and scream, “Why Me????”

Getting to the other side with everyone intact and ready to sail the ship to safe, happy and productive shores together requires a leader who knows how to L.E.A.D.I.N. to the storm.

Level With Yourself. You are in a storm, there is no getting out of it because as the leader, unless you inherited it you likely played a role in causing it. Whether you avoided it or ignited it, it is happening on your watch and now
you have to not just handle it, but handle it with skill. Admit your fear to yourself. Conflict is scary. Few people like it, most avoid it and now that you know where you are, it’s time to level with yourself about something else.
How much do you really know about going forward straight into conflict and making it better and not worse? As leaders, our skill level in this area varies and being truthful with yourself is the first step. Do I need some real
expertise to advise me? Coaching, courses or a mentor? If none of this is available and the moment is right now then…

Embrace Resistance. Understand that both relief and resistance usually exist within a storm. People are afraid, angry, resentful, confused, unsure and a whole host of other emotions and they are tossing them all in your
direction. As much as they want the conflicts involved to be resolved, they also have their own reasons for holding on to their way of participating in them. By embracing resistance, you are fully expecting it and can prepare
yourself to listen through it to what is happening on a deeper level for people. Resistance isn’t personal against you, but is personal for those involved. They need their questions answered, their fears heard and their
requests validated through deep listening.

Account For Your Own Actions. Resolving conflicts in the midst of a storm requires leadership to be able to look within to where your triggers lie and prepare yourself to be triggered because your staff, your team or your
colleagues are in reaction mode and leadership needs to be ready to respond rather than react. Being triggered will cause us to react, understanding our triggers and their roots puts us on the road to being calm enough to prepare an appropriate response. If as the leader you are confronted with how your actions contributed or even blew stuff up, consider the possibility that there is truth there, perhaps you got triggered, if so own it and begin to….

Determine a Course of Action. Looking at the damage done and going for the easier fixes first can only be successful if you start to work on a course of action to resolve the larger conflicts. Involve all voices and consider as
many solutions as possible before you determine the plan to move forward together.

Implement Your First Set of Actions. Leading transparently throughout the storm is critical to keeping everyone on board, together and connected to you, each other and the solutions proposed. Clearly you are the leader and
if you want them to follow, they need you to let them in on as much as you can about what the plan is and how it will be implemented and their importance in it.

Navigate, Negotiate, Navigate. It’s a dance even if you don’t like conflict or dancing. You take a few steps forward and one step back. Everyone is not going to like everything, but being the Bold Leader that you are, listening and negotiating your way through the more difficult issues allows you to find out what is in the way and reshape the plan so that you can continue to navigate your way through the storm to resolutions that will allow everyone
to rebuild together.

If you are looking for the right way to build the Leadership C.O.R.E. muscles you need to be the kind of leader that can L.E.A.D.I.N. to Conflict and communicate more powerfully, professionally and productively, then I invite
you to check out my new Leadership C.O.R.E. Program.

The Conflict of Trust, Race and Engine Failure

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Last month I was sitting on a plane that was supposed to be a direct flight from NYC to Honolulu when the pilot’s voice came on to announce that there was trouble with one of the engines and not to worry. The plan was to land in Portland and take care of the problem. The immediate problem other than the obvious was that this announcement came an hour before we would arrive in Portland. I looked at my seatmate and those around us, including flight attendants and saw worry and fear so clearly. I leaned back in my seat and decided that all I could do was trust.

I remember thinking that I trust these pilots to know what they are doing even though I have not met them. I trust that any dark and scary imaginations that my mind can conjure up cannot and will not compete with their knowledge to do what they do regularly and that is to fly this plane and land it safely. They live this and I trust that they have stories to tell from their experiences. My seatmate shares that she has flown this airline for many years and has never had this experience. So, she decided to join me in leaning in to trust.

I had just finished reading O Magazine’s issue dedicated to talking about race and my mind went immediately there. I thought about this idea of trust and its relationship to race relations. People of Color are often subjected to the day-to-day oppressive notion that someone who has no clue and has never walked in your shoes is the decided and sanctioned authority of your experience. The people outside of our experience get to say that “you are making it up,” “that doesn’t happen,” “it was mean but I don’t think it was racism” or “let’s wait until all the facts are in” and the insanely frustrating “why do you always have to play the race card?”

People of Color who are socio-economically diverse, educationally diverse from all walks of life who tell their stories of similar abuses who should be the authorities on their experiences in this country, are not believed regularly. There is little trust or there would be more change. That many of us including myself experience this among people we know, respected friends and colleagues, slowly erodes our faith that the ethnic and racial conflicts in this country will ever end.

Trust, a little word with HUGE power.

While there is an enormous amount of work to do and continuous conversations to be had, I ask us to start to look at this idea of trust and the role it plays in our relationship to one another when it comes to race and ethnicity specifically. The sad truth is that even People of Color have been poisoned by the insidious beliefs of mistrust that have been so strategically ingrained in the fiber of this country.

Can you trust that we live this life every day and our experiences are where our expertise lie? Can we fly the plane while you sit back and trust that because we live this we know about all the turbulence and bumps ahead and exactly where things are going to land?

Are You In Touch With The Soul of Conflict in Your Work?

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Coming off of an incredible week of interviews and interacting with so many of you in The Soul of Conflict Tele-Summit, I experienced a huge crash. It had been a time of taking in almost an overload of information that confirmed much and shifted even more. There is a newness to my mindset when it comes to my work and a big part of what I am experiencing is gratitude and a sense of satisfaction that so many of us are moving in the same direction.

But I did spend much of yesterday in a place of deep sadness that I later realized was the surfacing of unresolved conflict in me that extends to my work. Why do I do the work that I do? Why do you? I have heard it said that…

We are often attracted to the work that we do by a particular need within us.

Often, I have heard people express the desire to help others who have had a particular hurt that they themselves have had. Other popular reasons I am sure we each have heard are… “I want to keep people from making the same mistake I did” or “I’m doing this to stop things like this from happening to anybody else.” Both of which indicate that many of us do the work that we do because of something uncomfortable, unpleasant or just plain bad that happened in our life.

Certainly, the tremendous amount of conflict that existed in my extended family between my dad’s five sisters, sometimes my mom or dad and some of us cousins turned every family gathering (of which there were hundreds in my lifetime) into a war of hateful, nasty words, hurtful gossip, accusations and threats. It would make sense then that I would want to do the work of helping people resolve conflict. If you look at your work in the world, I suspect that you can make the connection between your childhood, teen-life or early adult experiences and how you extend yourself in service these days.

But what the summit did was allow me to dig deep into the question of whether or not I have been living my life and doing the work from the place of equating things that have happened to me with experiencing things that have happened. Stay with me here.

What I recognize about The Soul of Conflict is that if I am truly dealing with the experience then I am working it all through. That means identifying, surfacing, looking at and then doing the work of healing those old wounds left by the first part of the experience (the incident, the harm). If I label it as something that happened to me, I can convince myself that I have left it in the past without acknowledging the wound it has left within me.

To see the full experience through means acknowledging the effect it has had within me and working to feel, release and make the changes necessary to end its affect. As I reflect upon how many of us in conflict resolution work are sometimes the worst at conflict resolution in our lives, I also wonder how many of us as therapists, teachers, parents would admit that we are less than our best when it comes to using the tools of our work in our own lives, particularly during conflict.

Now is not the time for untruths. If we look into The Soul of Conflict in our lives we will find what we have left behind that needs attending to.

Award winning Author, Speaker and Top Business Coach, Pamela Slim speaks to this in this short and powerful clip from her Soul of Conflict Summit interview.

https://vimeo.com/203164412/27d65b5166

I hope you will watch it and then sign up for The Soul of Conflict Challenge where we get to the work of beginning to Heal Old Wounds.

Sign up here… http://soulofconflictsummit.com/challenge.

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The Conflict that Resides Within A Question. Are You Ready For the Answer?

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How far would you go to get an answer to your one burning question?

Daryl Davis traveled to the very people that hate him. What kind of courage does it take to ask a sibling that is gravely ill to increase her pain by healing the old wounds that have created lasting conflict between the two of you? Elizabeth Lesser exhibited that kind of raw courage when she chose to become a bone marrow donor for her sister.

These are the kinds of conflict that challenge so much of what we think and believe. They push us to look at our own capacity for facing and resolving conflict.

Daryl DavisAt the young age of 10, Daryl Davis was cruelly attacked while marching in a Cub Scout parade. As the only black face in the parade, he was offensive to many white adults in the crowd and their reactions were to throw bottles, cans and whatever they could find at him. When he returned home and his parents explained racism to him, he held both disbelief and curiosity. His question, “how can you hate me when you don’t even know me,” would lead him to the depths of hatred, the Ku Klux Klan.

elizabeth-lesserElizabeth Lesser found the answer to her question a lot closer to home. When her sister was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, Elizabeth was a match as a bone marrow donor. The painful transplant process was only half of the challenge that Elizabeth and her sister took on. The deeper and in some ways more painful journey came in asking the question, “if we are really talking about healing can we start with the old wounds of our relationship?” That kind of conflict resolution requires deep commitment to surfacing, examining and healing what is holding you back from moving forward in your relationship.

The opportunity to sit with Daryl and Elizabeth and delve into the raw, honest truth about their experiences opened the door to my own thoughts and a desire to engage in the work of learning how to live my life on the highest level possible.

I believe that the times are requiring that of each of us. We can no longer avoid the conflicts that are ripping our homes, places of businesses, communities, the nation and world apart. Learning to resolve conflict one meaningful response at a time is no longer a request, but rather a demand that our world is placing on us.

Are you ready?

Join me for the Soul of Conflict Tele-Summit: Healing Old Wounds to hear the rest of their compelling stories and so many more.

Let’s do the work of H.E.A.L.ing forward together. Go to: http://soulofconflictsummit.com.

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It’s 2017. Are You Ready for Conflict?

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At this point in history there is really no escaping conflict anymore. Yes, most of us are avoiders, but we are running out of ways to avoid confronting conflict, because it is the biggest thing in our lives thanks to this election.

As a nation, we are experiencing a split like no other.

Whichever side you come down on I know you feel it. People have been cut off by friends and family. Choosing sides and taking a defensive stand is epidemic. Ultimatums, the silent treatment, defiant pronouncements, arguments, fistfights are all on the rise.

The range of emotions we are experiencing run the gamut of grief, deep sadness, shock, disgust, disappointment, shame, embarrassment, hatred, elation, relief, joy and love. Yes love. Love is still present, but we’ve got to go through conflict to truly experience it. Our hearts will be tested, right alongside our patience and our faith.

But most of all, our ability to respond to conflict rather than react will be challenged over and over again.

Are YOU ready for Conflict, because it is here? Never mind that it has always been by your side waiting.

Now, it is out in the open. No hiding, no pretense and it is no longer waiting for us to decide whether or not to take it on. It will not be silenced by the turning off of the television set or the tossing out of the newspaper or by ducking social media or your family, your neighbors, your boss or your friends.

It is coming to each and every one of us LIVE.

Are YOU ready for it?