Hi everyone! Sylvia Lafair here, and I’d like to offer just a few tidbits about conflict and how to handle that nasty thing that drives us all crazy.
So, please raise your hand when they ask how many people out there like conflict. If you do all over the world where I worked, I have asked that question, and in a room of 50, in a room of 200, you usually get one or two people who raise their hands.
Conflict gets tight inside, scares us, makes us want to run the other way, and makes us feel like, is it my fault, is it always my fault? So, I’m going to give you one little tidbit toward the end of this.
So, listen for just a minute. Many times at work, we feel discounted, ignored, and pushed aside because somebody else is trying to climb the ladder of success. So, you can’t blame them for climbing the ladder of success, but you need to know how to manage that. It’s like taking wild horses and learning how to teach them to behave appropriately.
So, what does that all mean? It means you don’t run away. You don’t get into it with them. You stay very centered. You breathe. You ask questions, and if you have a colleague that’s upsetting to you, my biggest suggestion is don’t go to each. I don’t go to your boss. Don’t go with your friends. Don’t go to your colleagues. Go to the person. So, what do you do once you go to the person? Well, you have to talk to them, right?
Okay, so here’s the way you do it. You can start there in two ways: create and tell them how you feel about things you know. When you tell me my work isn’t good enough, I feel frustrated, discounted, upset, whatever your word is, and then what I do. What I have done is. Usually, I shut down and push away. I pull the curtain down. I talked to myself. I spoke to my friends, but I will talk to you this time.
That’s it. That’s all you have to say, and then you zip it, get quiet, listen to them, and wait for their response, and then… but this has to come from the work you’ve done. Your internal work says, “I really want to have a relationship with you.” That works too many times. I’m getting responses saying, “I can’t work with him or her, and I’m leaving the job,” and I have found that often you go into another job, and there’s another one right there. So, the question here is, what can we do to make our relationship work better?
So, tackle this. Learn how to handle it. Learn to look at the essence of conflict, and when the stress gets to the hot button, know that you always tend to revert to patterns you used in your younger years to protect yourself. This isn’t about protection. It’s about understanding. It’s about dialogue. It’s about creating a new way.
I’d love you to contact me at CEOptions.com. I’d love to hear from you. We have an incredible staff of coaches who can work with you. One of our essential skills is helping people learn to handle conflict so that you can change things from nasty, annoying, and push away to the next level of collaboration.
It’s doable. It’s workable, and we all need to learn it.
Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day, and here’s to your success.
