Check out our Season One podcast "On Conflict" with your favourite podcatcher or on our website www.onconflictpodcast.com.  Season Two launching January 2020! 

 

1. HEALTH - Why We Avoid Conflict - Let Me Count The Ways

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I was teaching one of my favourite workshops recently, Transforming Difficult Conversations, and one of the handouts I made up for this workshop jumped out at me.  I created it quite a few years ago, and have been adding to it and amending it ever since.

In it, I list several reasons why we are all caught in the matrix of avoiding difficult conversations. In many organizations I come into, people say: “In our team, we avoid conflict like the plague.”  Or: “Our organization doesn’t do conflict.” 
 
Well, I have news for you!  It’s not just your team, your organization or your family.  It’s endemic.
 
Avoiding conflict is not just something you may have come across. It’s the norm for most people. 
 
Here are the main reasons I list in the handout for why we avoid conflict:
 
1) Our Biological Predisposition – Animals First
We have a predisposition as humans to scan our environments for threats/risk.  A snake these days is most often a hose, but it’s still hard to convince our brains of that.  Any sense of threat (real or perceived) sets off a biological cascade of reactions for protection. We feel threatened and we react in more primal ways. Social threat is just as real for our biology as physical threat.
 
2) Our Collective History as a Species
Our history as a species has positive, peace-oriented aspects. It also has a violent history lurking under our consciousness as a remembered way of interacting.  Cooperative species, some research shows, have been winning the evolutionary edge.  However, in getting here, we’ve had centuries of violence – with only a recent “long peace” (see Pinker's: The Better Angels of Our Nature).
 
3) Individualistic Culture
In more peace-oriented cultures, the community has a role in the resolution of individual conflict, so when two people fight, the understanding is we all suffer. There is a community-wide pressure for the two to either reconcile or to bring the conflict to the community forum.  These forums are “circles” and a key part of all peace cultures (as studied by William Ury, The Third Side).  In individualistic cultures, conflicts are seen as private, no one else’s business and shameful.
 
4) Family Culture
Many of us don’t learn how to deal with conflict collaboratively in our families of origin – either because our parents didn’t engage in any conflict (so we didn’t see any collaborative skills modeled) or because they engaged in it badly. This early imprinting goes unconscious and it’s something we all carry around.
 
5) Corporate Culture
There is a tendency for North American corporate cultures to avoid dealing with conflict.  Emotions are deemed unprofessional and avoidance is the norm.
 
6) Individual Skill
The lack of skill so many of us suffer from is rooted in the above reasons.  Most of us are not even aware of the influence of these different cultures so don’t realize how truly hard it is to come to peaceful solutions.   As the John Watson quote goes: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
 
With all those reasons, no wonder most people want to avoid conflict. 

What follows naturally, is this question:  What motivates people to come to the table? 
 
That’s been a question my onconflictpodcast co-host, Gordon White, and I have been asking for years.  It’s an ongoing inquiry and a question we ask ourselves and our podcast guests. 
 
There are many answers.  Here is one I'd like to offer.

Moving someone from anger or fear to openness and a desire to engage, starts with one: you.  What I’ve noticed is when I am stuck in some of my most primitive emotions, I need another person to reach in and meet me.
 
Sometimes the meeting is in itself enough to help me soften and open.  Other times, I need stronger medicine and need the other person to help me see my situation a different way.

What about you?  What are some of your learnings with regard to what brings people to the table?  What motivates people to want to engage in those conversations we’ve decided we should avoid?
 

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2. ENVIRONMENT - Remembrance Day for Lost Species

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I recently heard artist and activist Persephone Pearl on the radio show Tapestry.
 
It was an affecting interview, where Persephone shared that she wanted a way to acknowledge the multitude of species that are dying off daily.  She saw ritual as a way to engage and deal with our grief about these tremendous loses in a way that could be honouring and meaningful.
 
The premise is that we have no rituals for coping with extinction, ecological destruction and environmental loss.

Pearl didn’t push the grief under or ignore it and instead sought to share it. In 2011, she organized the first-ever Remembrance Day for Lost Species in partnership with a theatre group in England. The day has become an outlet for activists, artists and mourners to find creative ways to share their grief for extinct species – and reinvigorate their love for the natural world.

There are many Remembrance events now happening around the world, and organizers hope the day can function as a funeral does for humans.  The events vary from a full-on procession, to a small gathering of folks for a poetry reading, to a dinner tribute to the dodo bird. 

You can make the event your own, for your own community, small or large. It can include story-telling about how the losses first affected you and continue to affect you.  There can be drawing out your grief and telling the stories of your drawings. There can be candle lighting, meditation, prayers.  It is yours to create.

The event takes place across the world on November 30 and I put the date in my calendar.

Do you want to do the same?  Let’s together join on that day to celebrate those species we’ve loved and lost and are losing.   
 
Share your ideas for how to mourn on the day.
 
This is their website for inspiration.

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3. NEGOTIATION - What Do We Need to Become Helpers?

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My podcast host, Gordon White, and I recently put out a survey asking our readers about what kind of conflict training they might want.  Over 50 people responded (thank you!) – and the input will go into creating some online training offerings for you!  More on that in the future.
 
In the meantime, there were a few themes that emerged.  One being how easy it is to avoid conflict.
 
Another one that grabbed me is summarized by this survey respondent’s comment:
 
“It seems that there is a growing anxiety, blame and defensiveness in our interactions as a result of the uncertainty coming from the climate crisis and political unrest. Developing these skills may help us ride through this storm without killing each other or at least harming each other a little less. I believe harmony and goodwill, resilience even can actually arise from these difficult situations when we develop these skills.”
 
This comment surfaces a question that haunts me: 
 
Can strengthening our capacity to deal with conflict actually help us in these increasingly difficult times?

It is a premise I put forward in my forthcoming TEDx talk (more on that when it’s released!) entitled Mediating While the World Burns.  Yet, it’s still hypothetical in my mind.  How do we know that having these skills and abilities could override our inherent instincts for self-protection when we see our bodies threatened with heat-exhaustion, starvation, chaos?
 
When I go to the times of chaos in the past, I do note there were always people who stepped forward with compassion, hope, help.  This story of good people exists in my own family's past as well; it is the reason my mother survived the war (yes, that story is also in my TEDx talk!). These helpers who seem to exist despite the harshness of the times, are often the people, when interviewed later, who say they were taught as children that one must do the “Right Thing”. 
 
In fact, the famous children’s educator Fred Rogers, says that when he was young and might see something frightening on the news, his mother would tell him: ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ So, he started to look for the helpers and would always see them in every disaster known to humankind.
 
What do you think we need to help us become those helpers? What nurtures that state?
 
Now, that is an empowering inquiry!  What say you?

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