In which Wolf explains why everything doesn’t have to be a fight, and in fact nothing has to be. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/arRTAkR9014
If I told you that all conflict was illusory, then you might reasonably think I was a bit out of touch with reality.
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"Back away slow"
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“Obviously conflict exists,” you say. And I’d agree with you in the sense that not every relationship is harmonious. It’s this lack of harmony that we understand as conflict. We understand that in certain situations someone isn’t going to get their way, and so they’re going to be unhappy about it, maybe even angry. Recall from my previous videos where I touch on the purpose of emotions, that the proper purpose of anger is a “drive towards justice.” We feel angry when we feel that what’s happening to us is unfair, and our anger drives us to find a way to balance the scales of justice.
But there are truly unjust situations. Sometimes someone is already intent on taking something away from someone else: they steal, or destroy, or abuse, or start a war. Even in situations like this, there is a deeper harmony available to everyone involve if they really wanted to look for it. But in this conversation I’m not going deal with situations where one or both parties don’t even want to look for that deeper harmony: when people are dealing in bad faith they’ve already rejected the secret I’m going to give you in a moment.
I’m going to assume that the conflicts in your life that matter most to you are good faith conflicts. In other words, that you and the other party really would like a better outcome than the one you seem to be facing: either a win-lose where one party gives in entirely, or a split-the-baby compromise where really, no one gets anything close what they want.
There are a couple secret keys to dealing successfully with conflict, and here’s the first one: in order to have a conflict, an apparent disharmony, there needs to be something else present. If this ingredient isn’t present then there can’t be a conflict, because there’s nothing shared between the parties. When nothing is shared, nothing is keeping the parties from just going their separate ways; from simply walking away from the table and never looking back.
This ingredient is your “common objective.” In any conflict there is always a common objective, and the key to finding win-win solutions is always to find that common objective.
Everyone working for a business should understand the goal of that business, which is almost always to make money now and in the future. When a conflict arises, it’s over the best way to achieve that goal because what’s good for the business supports that goal, and what’s not good for the business doesn’t. It’s really that simple.
Let’s imagine two siblings having a disagreement about how to, for example, keep a common area tidy. Let’s say the older one in their frustration is prone to yelling at the younger one. Set aside that yelling is pretty much never the right way to achieve a good outcome: what could their common objective be? Well, an obvious one is to avoid the outcome of yelling. It’s not pleasant for the yeller or the yellee. So you could say, “a peaceful relationship” is the common objective here. And even though we’d like to blame the one doing the obviously counterproductive yelling, in a recent video I explained why the “blame frame” is almost never helpful, and it’s almost always better to “map the system of contributions” made by everyone, directly and indirectly and then ask, “How can we prevent this from happening again?”
So now we’re starting to look at the deeper harmony inherent in all conflict. Whether it’s with a co-worker, a spouse, a child, or a parent, when you realize that you’re in a conflict, understand that if it weren’t for your shared common objective, there would be no opportunity for conflict in the first place.
Sometimes the common objective isn’t all that clear. You want what you want, and they want what they want, and you both can’t get what you want. Once you find your shared common objective underlying a conflict, it always starts to looks a lot more reasonable. But it might take some work to discover it, and in the next video I’ll give you some steps you can take to help get you there.
So what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and you can also join my community by emailing me at wolfpack@bewareofwolf.com. I read every email I receive, and respond to many. See you tomorrow!