Conflict Zen

What does it mean to move toward conflict zen?

It means you know how to keep your balance or regain it in the face of difficult conversations that typically knock you off center.

It means you don’t keep adding new communication and conflict resolution skills to your repertoire if what you need more is the ability to access the good skills you already have when you need them most.

It means knowing how to gain clarity about a conflict situation…what it’s really about, for you, and what most needs to be discussed to clear the air and get back on track together.

It means learning what workplace or personal conflicts deserve your attention, time and energy, and what ones just increase your burden needlessly.

It’s about softening your hard edges if you tend toward the aggressive (in places that’s not so helpful) and strengthening your courage if your preferred method of conflict resolution is avoidance. I call it making peace with your inner conflict junkie or your inner conflict coward.

It means learning how to unclutter your conflicts so that the most important things don’t get crowded out by conflict crap.

I’ll be writing about each of these in the coming weeks. What would you most like to know about any of them?

Odds and Ends

I’m considering offering one of my Conflict Zen® retreats in New England in late fall. If you might like to attend the two-day retreat, please drop me a note so I can assess interest levels for that time of year. I cap the retreats at 20 and they usually fill up a month or two in advance.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

A regular Conflict Zen® reader wrote to tell me she’s been working on changing her past conflict patterns, primarily avoidance. Linda went on to say (and I share this with her permission),

“Maybe it’s me, but now that I’m facing some of the conflicts and trying to solve them, I’m finding folks sometimes want me to do anything but. I hear phrases like ‘let it go,’ ‘it’s no big deal’ or ‘let’s move on.’ What are some questions I can ask myself to ensure that I am differentiating correctly between it truly being time for me to let it go and move on, and others’ avoidance just perpetuating a dysfunctional group dynamic?”

I love that Linda asked for guiding questions instead of the answer recipe, because the latter will always be formulaic and unsatisfying and the former is where the real richness rests. Finding your own answers is so much more satisfying that anyone trying to tell you what your answers should be.

In Confronting Conflict: Raise an Issue or Let It Go? I pondered a question similar to Linda’s. But Linda invites me to go deeper, so I’ll build on my earlier thinking. [Read more...]