Life Coaching & Empowerment offers relationship coaching (similar to marriage counseling) for the Katy, Tomball, Spring, Magnolia, Humble, Atascocita, Kingwood, The Woodlands, Lufkin & Nacogdoches area of SouthEast Texas.
Fighting is a relative term…
I don’t mean your relatives versus my relatives. I mean it depends on what style of conflict resolution you grew up in, or are familiar with, and what you have trained yourself to adapt better with. Most any significant relationship, given time, will come to a point where conflict is inevitable. At this point, each person’s learn coping mechanism for conflict will assert itself. Basically, there are three ways we deal with conflict: 1.) fight (argue back with all our defensiveness), 2.) flight (leave or abandon the person/issue), or 3.) freeze (become unresponsive, often due to being overwhelmed).
In another article on our website, I speak about passive, aggressive or assertive styles of communication. Right now, I only want to show you the actual script for how to very constructively walk through conflict whether at home or at work. If done correctly, the process typically works extremely well almost every time, once both parties get in the habit. The key is to use the process often enough to where it truly becomes the pattern of preference for handling conflict. If your partner doesn’t use the process, or is unaware of it, you can definitely still use it on your end to decrease dysfunction conversationally.
Index Cards
It helps to create two 3×5 index cards. One card has ‘A sub 1’ and ‘A sub 2’ on it. The other card will have ‘B’ on it. They look like this:
A: “I feel ____________ (state a few feeling words only) whenever _________________ (state the situation that caused the feelings) and I’d like _____________ (state what you want to see done in behavioral terms from the other party). How do you feel about that?” Stop talking and wait on the other person…hopefully not overloading them with too many factors upfront.
B: “Okay, what I’m hearing you say is __________________________________.” State a thorough and specific summary, in your own words, of what they said. “Is that correct or not?”
A: Either say, “Yes, that is correct. How do you feel about that?” or “No, let me clarify further.” Be correctly more specific without demeaning the other person in the process.
I often have couples (or leadership teams) copy several sets of these two cards and place them on the refrigerator, atop the TV, in the break room, bulletin boards, on the restroom mirrors, and so on…to keep them extremely available, since you never know where a conflict might start up.
For more information on healthy conflict resolution for you, your family, and/or your teams, contact me for an appointment. I’ve seen literally hundreds of folks turn around seemingly hopeless situations, especially of crucial conversations! Whether it’s getting into role play for practice, using me as a coaching referee, or actually walking through the toughest of situations, coaching could be your answer!
