5 Tips To Overcome Conflict Avoidance and Improve Assertiveness

In this episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast, I provide 5 useful tools for individuals who are conflict avoidant, providing strategies to help them manage conflicts more effectively in various relationships. He emphasizes understanding the reasoning behind conflict avoidance, offers coaching tools for team leaders and managers, and highlights techniques like goal clarification and utilizing the six sources of influence. The episode is aimed at both conflict avoidant individuals and those supporting them, with practical advice on self-regulation and adjusting communication tactics to improve assertiveness.

Transcript

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Well, hello, and welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator, Simon Goode. Today, I'm going to be talking about five tips for people who are conflict avoidant. Now if you are somebody who finds workplace conflict or other kinds of conflict challenging, then my hope is that these five tips will be quite useful for you. But you could also use them for supporting other people around you who are dealing with conflict. And if you're in a team leader or a manager's position, one of the common scenarios that I come across is you're trying to help somebody else become more assertive, and they might be the kind of personality that tends to avoid conflict. And so what I'll get what I'm going to do as well is to talk about some of the coaching tools and additional layers of support that you can offer even if you're not directly the person who's dealing with the conflict and you might not necessarily consider yourself to be conflict avoidant at all. Now this aspect of being conflict avoidant, it can cause a lot of problems can't it? Like a lot of people sort of aspire or they have a goal of removing workplace conflict or reducing workplace conflict as much as possible And as a workplace mediator, obviously, that's a large part of my role is that I come in and help people resolve conflict. But the reality is that conflict is in every relationship that we're going to be in. There will always be some point where our interests meet their interests, our expectations don't align with their expectations, and so this is the opportunity for conflict to arise. It doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be an argument or a big blow up or dramatic incident or something. It might be a more covert underground type of conflict like someone being upset about something but you actually don't find out about it until after the fact. But when conflict needs to happen and it isn't dealt with, it can sometimes create quite a toxic effect. It can become a little bit like mold that begins to grow and fester in the dark corners of the relationship or within the, working day to day of a team when there are issues there that we're not talking through and then we're not dealing with. What tends to happen is that they build up over time. And one of the patterns that people who are conflict avoidant might find themselves in is this process of bottling things up and bottling things up and bottling things up until finally they reach the point where they just can't take it. Maybe some small thing happens and on its own it's not so significant but effectively with all of the other cumulative build up of stress that's been going on. It's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back and it can be a little bit like a volcano erupting in these situations. Somebody who was previously quite conflict avoidant, all of a sudden will tell you quite clearly what they think of you or let the rest of the team members know all of the different mistakes and problems that they've been contributing to. So we want to find a way of dealing with conflict a little bit more directly, and it's probably still finding a balance between being assertive and being supportive and empathetic. Now people who are conflict avoidant, they have often developed this tendency because of what's happened to them, the experiences that they've had. When I'm doing a workplace mediation, I'll often meet people one on one and they might say something like I'm conflict avoidant or I'm just not a very assertive kind of person or something like that. And there's two really good questions that I find quite helpful for unpacking that. One is, what happened that made you feel that way? Or what have you noticed that made you feel that way? I'm talking about the events. Or I could say something like, what did you learn that led you to that belief? Like, when did you start to think about yourself in this way? They're two slightly different ways of approaching the same thing. I'm effectively saying, why do you think what you think? But the two reasons that they could give is this happened, like, this was an event, I tried to be assertive with my previous boss and they yelled at me and it was really embarrassing and so from that point on, I've actually learned to keep my mouth shut or maybe I had this experience growing up where my parents acted like this and I suppose I've learned from them. But what did we learn? I guess that's about it's not worth it or I'm not the kind of person that can do this or I've learned that the other members of my team are hypersensitive and so there's no point giving them feedback. Like, there might be something else that's going on at a I don't know what you would call it, like, a more rational or a more cognitive layer, I guess, as the person's thinking about the process of them coming to hold this belief that they've got. And our goal isn't necessarily to prove that they're wrong or to get them to reconsider at this early stage. All we're wanting to do is to introduce a little bit of nuance because if they're telling themselves a story like I'm a conflict avoidant person, I can't deal with conflict, I'm not assertive, and you're trying to give them tools and options for being assertive, you know, of course, there's going to be this inherent friction that gets in the way every step that you take. Whereas if they can begin to think about themselves in more of an open way, sure, there's some situations where you like that. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the same moving forward. Let's think about some other options and it's kind of like just doing an experiment and seeing what's the right fit for you. And if that's not the right fit, then try something else. But this is an open ended way of thinking about the problem as opposed to the closed ended way of thinking about it like, I can't do this. The grow coaching questions can be really helpful for this as well. The grow is an acronym I've talked about in previous episodes of the podcast. It stands for goal, reality, options, and way forward. So if you're dealing with a conflict avoidance staff member and you're their manager or even if you're a colleague, I guess, and you're wanting to offer some support, you might ask them coaching questions around each of those four different areas. Your goal would be something like, what's the message that you would like them to get? You know, what would you like them to do differently or what would you like them to understand? Like, in that way, I'm starting with what are we aiming for here? What's the purpose of this communication? Then the reality would be questions like, how do you normally communicate with them? When you've had to raise this issue before, what did you find helpful? Where did you get stuck last time around? When you say that they saw red and became enraged, What did you first pick up on that gave you a hint that they were getting angry? And what was the topic that you were talking about at the time? And how did you bring that up? And do you always get that same reaction from them? Or have you noticed in other conversations that tends to play out differently? The option stage would be asking them questions like, what do you think might work if you were going to do something different? What could you try? And then the final state stage is the way forward. What will you do? So that's that makes sense. It sounds like talking to them in person would be the best way to go. And then the way forward question that you might ask is something like, what's going to be the best way to set up that conversation? Do you wanna schedule a formal meeting or just go and talk to them? Like, what do you think would work best? Doing it in person or on the phone? What what's going to work best here? And I'm not the one that comes up with the plan. I'm prompting them to develop the steps that they are going to take. So that's the starting point, I think, is whether you're the person who's conflict avoidant or you're coaching someone else, we need to understand how we've gotten to this point. And instead of approaching it in this black and white, this is the way it's always going to be, we're trying to introduce the opportunity for change moving forward. The other thing that sometimes helps for this is to understand why you've come to feel this way, why you've come to act this way, how you have developed this habit effectively. I think a lot of people who are conflict avoidant have developed it as a survival strategy, and it's one that has been quite successful, I would say, for thousands of years in tribal living. Don't upset people. Don't draw negative attention to yourself. You should be known as someone who goes along and gets along with others. You should be known as someone who doesn't create issues and drama. Of course, because if you're living in a tribe and you're you're gathering food day to day, you don't have time for people who aren't pulling their weight and aren't contributing. So a lot of us have this adverse reaction to standing out or upsetting somebody else. And in reality, there's no practical consequence for us. Like, it's not my job to keep everybody else around me happy at all times. So the fact that they become upset, like, rationally and logically, I can understand that that's not my job to fix it. But my tribal brain, you know, the tribal lower sections of my brain that are more connected to that fight or flight kind of response don't understand that logically. They don't think in this rational kind of way. It's much more of a subconscious reaction. So we can understand why we've come to feel that way, to have that reaction. It's because of a survival strategy and it's from tribal living and unfortunately, we're working these days with an outdated hardware system. So So we're stuck with the brain in our body that we've got even though that's not particularly well suited for a modern office environment or running a workplace mediation or something like that. So I can understand the reaction, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I need to take it and run with it. When I when my heart races, when I feel a bit embarrassed, when I feel self conscious, I can do things to regulate my nervous system and calm myself back down if this is a goal that's actually worth it. In other situations, you know, my son says something that annoys me, I'll still have that reaction. My heart will increase. I'll feel a bit angry or something, and I'll still take the the steps of calming myself down. But it's not because the goal is important. It's because I want to be a good role model for him or I want to support him in some other way. So it really is depending on the situation, how much we decide to go with this initial reaction and how much we decide to actively manage it and choose a logical response instead. Now there are some times when it's good to avoid conflict. I think a lot of people think about themselves as being conflict avoidant, as having a problem. I mean, Uber drivers who refuse to come up, I used to get really angry at that when they were delivering food, like a menu log or DoorDash or those kind of services. And I would get really angry when I had to go down to the lobby and collect the the meal. But if I pause just for five seconds, it's so easy to empathize with this person who's probably on quite a low income. They're wanting to maximize the amount of deliveries they can do in an hour. I've got no idea at the level of frustration and hassle that the restaurant gave to them when they picked up my meal. You know, I really do need to get off my high horse here. And there are some benefits of going in the elevator and going downstairs, a little bit of exercise that'll change my mindset. Like, this is just such not a big deal if we can pause for five seconds to think about it. But I think a lot of people don't. They write an angry message to the Uber driver or they'll call them or they'll give them a one star review or something like that. And I think, unfortunately, that often ends up in a negative effect on them because they've engaged in this kind of a gross way of dealing with conflict. They feel gross for the rest of that night. They might be a bit more snappy, a bit more irritable. Somebody else is talking to them later on, etcetera. They are more likely to look for easy shortcut options for dopamine, like the chocolate bar that's sitting in the fridge or something like that. So I think avoiding conflict in those like it's just not worth it kind of situations actually makes a lot of sense. It also might make sense when you're dealing with people who you're not going to have much to do with, even at work like a a staff member from a different department or something. If they rub you up the wrong way, don't worry about it. Just try to be mega polite, short and sweet. Over the years, as you reflect on how your communication might be perceived on them, it's possible that you realize that you've actually contributed to them. You probably came across as a bit of a jerk when you did x and y back then. So although you're just looking at the tip of the iceberg and seeing them being quite rude, it's possible that they're misinterpreting or they've taken something that you've said in a way that you didn't intend it. Right? So we don't wanna jump to a conclusion that they have a problem, they are completely wrong. We wanna take more of an open ended curious approach of, okay, that's interesting. I feel like I'm being respectful, but I'm getting this terse response from them as a result. Let me see what I can do differently or maybe I'll just say, maybe this isn't such a big deal. They seem a bit annoyed at me. I don't have a lot to do with them. I'm not relying on them. Maybe I can just let this one go. I find this a lot myself. There's just particular people that just rub you up the wrong way. It's almost like the the tone in their email or the way that they begin a meeting or the way that they'll start a phone call with you or something like that. It just it really does irritate you. And I think if we take every little bit of that irritation that comes up through the day and run with it, we're going to end up in a lot of unnecessary conflict. There'll be other situations where being conflict avoidant also makes sense. Maybe you're dealing with someone and you don't have much control over them. Like, at the moment, I'm a parent with young kids and I've noticed that my friends, my neighbors, other family members, they've got quite different norms and values in terms of parenting decisions. Like, I've got one neighbor and they leave a relatively young child at home. It's younger than I would leave them at home and they leave them all day while they go out to work. So I find this quite challenging, but in this particular situation, I've decided not to raise it with them like I'm taking the conflict avoidant approach because I can't really see a way of that conversation playing out where it goes well. Like, it's not my job to tell them that I think they're being a bad parent. If I did raise that, I might think carefully about a very open ended way of discussing the topic more generally speaking. Like, what do you think about supervision? I'm just, you know, I find these kind of things really hard myself. I'd love to get your input. But what I'm really wanting is to tell them, I think you should reconsider. And so often, I think when we get into that quite tricky type of conflict where it's not really our job to fix it and we don't have any control over it, we might actually be just opening up a can of worms that it's not going to have much productive benefit. I'm not necessarily saying I'm not going to raise it, but, you know, other parents' decisions around how to parent their kids. This is a topic where maybe being conflict avoidant makes a lot of sense. And in fact, unfortunately, I think a lot of people tend to butt their nose into those kind of things thinking that they know best. And in reality, they're only just going off their single subjective anecdotal experience. I've got other neighbors and there's no hope that I'm gonna change them. You might have one neighbor and and he revs his motorbike because he drives up the road every morning. You know, I doubt that going to talk to him about that's gonna fix it, but I suppose that you should try. I think for me, I'd probably be more inclined to just do a quick deep breaths after I wake up and try and get back to sleep and not get too enraged and upset about it. Or maybe there's risky times when raising the conflict would actually create danger for yourself. Like, there was a group of teenage boys riding one of those electronic motorbikes down at my local park down near the beach the other day. And sometimes I might ask them, guys, would you mind moving away? This is normally the section where dogs go or something like that. But on some days, like, if there's eight of them or something like that, and they seem to have a lot of bro energy going on or I can see alcohol bottles around or something like that, I might not go and raise the conflict with them in that case. You know, maybe I can just go and, I don't know. If if it's not gonna create any long lasting problems, then maybe I can just mind my own business to some extent in that kind of situation too. But what do you think? Like, ultimately, isn't it even as I've gone through those different examples, they're all subjective value decisions that we make, aren't they? Which conflict is worth it? Which conflict should I butt my nose into and give my perspective? Which conflict should I continue to escalate the level of assertiveness and not let it go? And when should I walk away? These are all subjective decisions that you'll ultimately need to make. So if you're a person who would like to be less conflict avoidance, you'd like to feel more confident dealing with conflict, you might consider what are the priorities, what are the situations, or who are the people around that you would like to deal with better? And if you were dealing with them better, what would that look like? In other words, it's not in every single interaction that I have that I need to find a way to stop being conflict avoidant. There's probably only a few specific important conversations that go on in a given day or in a given week. And so I can focus my effort and resources on preparing on those types of conflict where the stakes are high, if that makes sense. So let's go through some of the different strategies that we can use if we are a person who are conflict avoidant, and I would put myself in this category. I think over the years, I've developed some reasonable level of skill for dealing with conflict and communication, And I'm, you know, I'm a mediator, so I do deal with it day to day. But even in my own personal conflict, I've become better at it. And one of the most useful ways that I think that I've done that is to spend more time clarifying my goals. If you were less avoidant, what would you like to be more of? So I sometimes talk about these five conflict modes when I'm running conflict resolution training workshops with groups of staff in organizations They were developed by a couple of psychologists, Thomas and Kilman. So there's competing, which is when we're very assertive, we hold the line, we ask for what we want, or we say no to the person who's asking us to do something that we don't wanna do. Then we could collaborate. We work together with the other person to come up with a win win. We have a few different messages back and forth. We might meet them and go through options, do some brainstorming, that kind of thing. The third option is compromise. We meet in the middle. This is where nobody gets a % of what they want, but at least you can reach a middle ground, get to something that people can agree with, and then move on. Then we've got accommodating, which is where we do discuss the conflict. We do have the conversation, but we ultimately give in. We say yes to what they're asking us to do, or we drop our requests if we were asking them to do something. And then the fifth option is avoid the conflict. So if you want to be less conflict avoidant, which of those other four options would you like to be more of? Obviously, for most people, it's the competing one. I'd like to be more assertive. But you might not realize that there are actually these other three options that are also not avoiding the conflict. Accommodating, for example, like raising it, getting to a resolution even if you're not pushing too hard on your side of things, or just compromise, meet in the middle. For a lot of people, this is a much more realistic goal than just being competing and being mega assertive. I mean, if you think you're going to go from being completely conflict avoidant to super effectively assertive overnight, you've probably got another thing coming. It's probably not gonna play out exactly like you're thinking there. It's going to be a gradual step by step process. And for some people, it's like, look, I can give you that. And that was something you were gonna give them anyway. If I'm going to do that, what I need from you is this. If you, then I. If you can do this, then I'll do this. So So if you're a conflict avoiding kind of person, that might be a natural first step and that would be your goal. You don't necessarily have to go in and say, no. That's not that's not the way it is. You're wrong. Maybe it's just, look, if you can do this, then this is what I can do for you. And we don't need to go into a lot of, you know, high emotion back and forth in it. In other situations, it might be working in a more collaborative kind of way. Like, if you're dealing with issues and there's complaints that are coming through from customers or something like that, and you would like to be less conflict avoidant, you wanna get more on the front foot at responding to them, then maybe a collaborative process would make sense. Setting up a time to go through the issues with them on the phone maybe, and then talking through options and coming up with a bit of a plan. Now I like in economics a term called satisficing. I don't know if you've heard that before. It's kind of like you don't need to go for the best. Just go for something that's good enough. Like, it's something that's satisfactory. It's not excellent. So if you're wanting to be less conflict avoidant, what would a satisfactory bare minimum, you know, the minimum viable messaging that you would need to send to get to get the job done, what would that be? And you want to be a little bit careful at connecting the outcome of this goal with your self perception. You can decide how to raise the issue. You can decide how to prepare. You can't decide how you are perceived. You can't decide the other person's reactions. These are simply things that are not within your control. We can influence, but we can't manage. Like, we can't control. So this means that if it goes wrong, if it doesn't play out the way that we wanted it to, we need to be quite careful at not beating ourselves up and blaming ourselves for it. In reality, it will be the contextual factors and even the person and what they've been doing that day and maybe they've come from two or three really difficult meetings before you talk to them. So the reaction that you got was certainly not all to do with you. But from where you sit, you're not exposed to all of that additional information, so it's very easy to be quite, self denigrating and and blame yourself when something goes wrong and that kind of thing. And, actually, what I've noticed is that people who are conflict avoidant, they do tend to be quite hard on themselves. When they do make a mistake or something goes wrong. They tend to think that it's because of them. They also tend to think that it's likely to continue happening in the future. So it's not today was a bad day. They say, I'm not the kind of person that deals with these conversations well. So they think it's because of them. They think it's gonna continue in the future, and they think that it's across contexts. Like, it's not just dealing with customers, it's also dealing with colleagues or it's not just, you know, their technical work, it's their team leader and management role as well. So when something goes wrong, we need to be careful to keep in mind that circles of control, that there'll be some element of what we do that's fully within our control. There'll be some elements of the conversation and the issue that we can influence, and then there'll be other elements that are completely outside of our control. So this doesn't mean that we can't set a goal for this, but what we need to do is to not connect it too closely with our view of ourselves, our self perception. The second tip that I wanted to give were some of the options that you could use for accommodating. This is something that a lot of people might not consider when they have a goal of being less conflict avoidant. Do you wanna be more accommodating? No. Of course not. I wanna be more assertive, but you should really consider the costs and the benefits. Sometimes being accommodating is fine early on, but one of the ways that we can be more assertive is to set a limit on how generous we're going to be preemptively. Yes. I can give you a discount, or, yes, I can organize this without cost, or, yes, I'll come in on that day that's my day off. I just wanna be clear though that I'm not going to have any flexibility beyond this. Or to the customer, yes, we can do this, but I just wanna be clear that there'll be no further changes made under that existing quote or something like that. So for some people who are naturally conflict avoidance, this is the very small first step that you can take, setting these limits preemptively, which makes it much easier to be assertive and hold on to them later. Now I talk about being accommodating as one of the options that we could consider, especially when we can give something that's not too high value to us, like our attention, for example. Sometimes you flat out and you just don't have time, but sometimes you can just listen to somebody who's upset about something for fifteen minutes or twenty minutes or thirty minutes. Just give them a chance to vent. Give them a chance to have their say. Give them a sense of feeling understood and feeling heard. This might be a situation where you have to set a limit preemptively. Like, I just want to be clear that I've only got thirty minutes on the phone today. If we need more time, I can call you back later on in the week if that would be alright. I just wanna be transparent because, you know, I do have something that I need to attend to after that. You should prepare to be assertive. Like, once you stop giving them what they want, they're probably going to have some kind of a reaction. So you should prepare for how to weather the storm, and that's probably in an issue based level of no, that's what the contract says or going back to the clauses in the emails that you've sent back and forth. But it's also probably the emotional layer of just calming yourself down from how gross it feels to have somebody complaining about you or upset at you or that kind of thing. I think often it's better to be assertive early because we can relax that. Whereas if we're too flexible early on, sometimes it can be difficult then to re ratchet up the level of assertiveness that we're trying to take. The third tip that we can use in our efforts to be less conflict avoidant is to use structure and other people. I really like a particular model called the six sources of influence. The idea is that we've got these different ways of influencing someone else's behavior. Some of it is to do with us communicating directly with the person. Some of it is us engaging other people. And then the third layer is us using the environment or the structure. So So we've got those three layers. We can talk to the person. We can get other people to help, maybe talk to them on our behalf, come and join a meeting, have a conversation with other people there, that kind of thing. Or we could use the structure. Some of those options I've already talked about would fit there, or it could be following up with formal emails after a meeting to make sure everybody's clear on what's expected and this kind of thing. So with each of those three layers, we've got two different kinds of influence that we can have. We can change their motivation or we could change their ability. So I can make them understand why it's important to show up on time at work or I can improve their ability to show up on time at work. And conflict and assertiveness is very similar. If your goal is to influence a team member, for example, maybe you're dealing with someone and they're tardy. They show up late to the office every day. Well, you could talk to them directly about that. Maybe you explain that if they're late again, you're gonna give them a formal warning or you're gonna let them go or something like that. So which one is that influencing? Would you say that that's improving their motivation or their ability? To me, that's pretty firmly in the motivation bucket. I'm improving the chances that they'll make an effort to show up on time, but the ability bucket is quite different. For that for that area, I might use a coaching approach, for example. Like, I could say something like, on the days when you're running late, what happens that tends to contribute to it? And then they might say it's when I can't find my keys or when the kids are off daycare or something like that. Like, there might be specific things that are happening. And then, of course, you can use that same grow coaching approach to help them to develop self efficacy for dealing with this issue. So you could say, oh, okay. And and what happens next? When how does that normally play out? Alright. That sounds really tricky. Do you think might help? Or on the days when you're able to be on time, like, how do you overcome all of that? Because it sounds like sometimes you can't find your keys or the kids are off sick, but you are able to be on time, whereas on other days, it seems to cause more of an issue. What what's going on there? And then the options questions would be, what do you think would help? What can we learn from that? What can we apply here? What can we tweak in those days where things aren't working, etcetera? And then the way forward would be where are you gonna start? What's the next step for you? So that's the ability side of things, and I think both are quite important. We want them to want to do what we're asking them to do, and we want them to be able to do what we're asking them to do. But that's just that first row there. That's us talking to the person directly. I can threaten them. I can promise them with something, etcetera, the carrots and the sticks, or I can use the coaching approach for ability. But I can also engage other people to either improve the person's motivation to do the thing that I want them to do or to improve their ability to do the thing that I want them to do. Again, it might be a a common issue within your team that people aren't doing the right documentation for the work that they're doing. There's an issue of data entry or something. Well, you could get a peer to help them. This might be motivation, like, you could talk together as a team about the problems that the data areas are causing, maybe identifying recurring issues within the structure itself. But putting the the discussion on the table, which might introduce a level of self consciousness to the person who's making all the mistakes when they realize that the other people around them aren't actually making the same mistakes that they're making. Or they could have mentoring with a senior person that could give them some encouragement and talk to them about the importance of doing this correctly in terms of the impact on the clients at the end of the day or something else. Or we could improve their ability. We could have somebody sit down with them and go through the data entry with them to figure out where the gaps are in their knowledge or where the possible misconceptions are or maybe even just thinking about what the common issues are that are coming up. Like, maybe the person's getting too distracted, so they just need someone to sit there and watch them do it so that somebody can say, look. I wonder if it's worth just closing the YouTube video for now, get this done, and then you can open that up afterwards. What do you think? And then we can also use the structure to improve either the person's motivation or their ability. An ability option might be something like developing a cheat sheet that you can use within the team, handing it out to the staff members to hopefully reduce the errors that they're making in that way. Or we could talk to them as a group even about, going out for a special lunch if we can go through a month without any errors or something like that. That's an example of using the structure to, influence motivation. So I don't know how that resonates with you, but for me, that's been a very helpful way of thinking about situations where I need to influence someone else because all of a sudden, I'm not the single, like, one with the burden on my shoulders to get this job done. It's a really nice integrated way of engaging other people as well as the environment, And I really like thinking about what needs to happen for them to do what we want them to do. They need to want to do it or have the motivation at least, like, agree to do it even if they don't want to, and they need to have the ability. The fourth tip that I wanted to mention was a combination of the compromise and collaborate options in that Thomas Kilman five conflict modes model. So we had avoid, and then we also had accommodate. Then we had compete. That was the very assertive, very direct option that we've got. The other two was compromise. This is where we meet in the middle or collaborate. That's where we work together to get to that win win kind of option. Now it's probably going to feel quite easy to compromise in the short term. You do want to use this option when it can end it quickly, and you're giving away something that's not so important to you. Collaborating though, that's probably more useful in situations where you don't wanna give away anything. Like, if a staff member asks you for a raise and you wanted to take this collaborative kind of approach, you might say something like, sure. I'm happy to talk to you about salary. I also want to know though, where do you wanna be in terms of your career over the next few years? Because maybe there's particular types of training that we could support you in or giving you different levels of experience or exposure to larger projects, for example, or we could have you shadow shadowing or being mentored by one of the senior partners within the business. Like, these are all options that we have for giving the person something that's important to them even though we might not have to give away the salary if if finances is something that's particularly important to us at the time. So that collaborative approach is really good because you do get to a win win option. The problem is that sometimes there's no win win that's possible. And that's where I think dropping back down to that compromise, although it doesn't feel great in the moment, sometimes it's just kind of the least bad option in amongst a whole bunch of other bad options. Like, if I continue to meet with this person and go round and round in circles, they might take advantage of me or I just actually literally can't think of something that I want. Probably what's more realistic is I take the compromising approach. So if we've got the same staff member who wants a raise instead of the let's sit down and go through training options, etcetera, I might just say, look, I'm not going to get authority to give you that raise that you're talking about of 5% or 10% or whatever. Would you consider a 3% raise this financial year? And then we set a time to discuss it, you know, next July. That's the compromise option. And I think for people who are naturally conflict avoidant, they sometimes get sucked into too much of that collaborating. More meetings, more discussion, these are scenarios often they don't feel particularly comfortable so that isn't great for them altogether. Like, the other person might be able to railroad them or walk all over the top of them or something. And even if they do manage to hold their ground and be firm, it often means that they walk away feeling quite stressed out. So the final tip would be think about how horrible it feels to go through conflict because this gives us information about how to prepare. We need to prepare for self regulation. As my tribal brain kicks in and my fight or flight response activates, I need to do practical things to calm myself down. I need to think about a way to buffer the storm of their potential tirade or rant, you know, if this is the kind of person that makes really personal comments, then I should prepare to receive some personal comments, you know, I should prepare to feel a bit embarrassed or to be offended or to be surprised at a comment that they make. I don't want to walk in thinking that I know how it's gonna play out because when it doesn't play out that way, it causes me quite a stressful reaction. Whereas if I walk in thinking, oh, this will be interesting to see how it goes. I've done what I can to prepare. Ultimately, I'm not responsible for the outcome here, but I'm gonna do my best. It makes us feel very differently as a result. We view this as a system recalibrate re recalibrating. And if you continue to avoid the thing that makes you uncomfortable, then, of course, that tends to become more and more uncomfortable when you finally do have to face it. You should think about things like how you can deescalate the other person, factors like status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. How are you going to calm them down? It's fine to think that you need to be more assertive, and if you're a conflict avoidant person, you probably do. But what's gonna happen after you're assertive? They're probably gonna get annoyed at you, so you might then need to have some tools in your toolkit ready to calm them down. Slow down, lower your volume, allow some silence, give them a chance to vent, acknowledge their complaints, provide certainty around what specifically you're asking them to do and by when, and let them know that I'm not asking you to do this. So I don't want you to think that this is some kind of a performance management process. It's absolutely not. I wanted to talk to you about this directly because one of my values is to be transparent and honest where possible. You should also prepare quite specifically about how you will be assertive. How will you name the issue, like the actual problem or the the topic that you want to discuss? I tend to find it quite helpful to raise these issues in a way that's mutual and neutral. So mutual, it's between us. It's a shared issue that I wanted to discuss. Maybe you could say I wanted to discuss communication between the two of us or some of the decisions in the projects that we've been working on. So that's not a blaming thing. It's not like, I wanna talk to you about those emails that I've sent and I haven't received any replies. Like, obviously, that's not mutual. You're the one that's got the problem and it's not neutral. You're wrong. Whereas if it's like, I wanted to discuss this topic and I'm curious and I'd like to maybe get your take on it and think about what's working and what we can tweak, we are inviting the other person to collaborate in the conversation as opposed to setting up a more adversarial kind of dynamic where it's me against you. You should think about what is the change in behavior that you're asking for. When I'm doing conflict resolution training, I often talk about the positive confrontations model and the three steps in that is what ask check. So you might prepare in the same format. What have they done? How are you gonna describe that behavior? I've just looked through my email. It doesn't look like I've received a few replies to these last ones I've sent. That's causing issues because I can't make decisions around the other people involved in the project. Just specifically, this is what you've done and this is why it's a problem. And then the ask would be, could you get back to me by close of business today? Is that realistic on your end? Like, just a very succinct, short, and sweet, this is what I actually want you to do. I'm not just dumping a whole bunch of complaints in there because, of course, you're just gonna start defending yourself and that's just gonna go back into, you know, you justifying what what's happened, etcetera. The ask is where we shift the focus to the future and the solutions. And then the final stage check is something like, how does that sit with you? Are there any issues on your end? Maybe even just saying, is there any other additional information that's needed or is there anything that's not clear? Now I tend to find it helpful to give a general reason. Like, I wanted to talk to you about this because it's causing delays in the projects due to other people waiting on you making decisions. Like, some general reason why it's important to have this conversation. I wanted to talk to you about how things have been within the team recently. The last thing I want is that we have fractions develop and people go into their silos. What I'm aiming for is a dynamic where everybody feels interconnected with the other team members, and we're working together in quite a harmonious way regardless of the specific people that's there on the day. And then the final thing that you might need to do to prepare is preparing how to end. Like, how are you going to actually finalize the conversation? Like, what words are you gonna say? But even what steps are you going to take? I tend to find it quite helpful, especially if you're a conflict avoidant kind of person and you finally managed to raise an issue. Maybe sending an email afterwards. Just I just wanted to confirm that, we're on the same page regarding the conversation today. I really appreciate the fact that you're willing to do dot dot dot, like, listen to this or share your view on this or consider this. It sounds like these are the next steps that we're going to take and then outline them clearly. For me, I don't find there's much needed beyond that, but confirming it in writing tends to be quite a helpful step to take both to, I guess, generate and elicit buy in, but also so that then you've got a written record. If the other person doesn't do what you've asked them to do, then, you know, for the conflict avoiding kind of person, at least you've got the data, at least you've got the facts at hand, and you're not so worried about them denying that the conversation ever happened or something similar. But how does that sit with you, those different tips that I've gone through there? Clarifying our goal, considering options for accommodating and when that might be a helpful option to use, using structure and other people and that six sources of influence, how we can improve people's motivation as well as their ability. Do you find it helpful thinking about compromise versus collaborate and which situations you might go down which path? Or maybe for you, it's thinking about those tips to prepare for the self regulation, for how to raise the issue itself, or even how to end the conversation once it happens. Now I didn't mention this. I didn't put it in my notes, but, by the way, the other thing that you'll need to think about if you're a conflict avoidant kind of person is how do you look after yourself after the conflict? Because it's so bloody stressful, it's likely that your heart will be racing and you've got this build up of adrenaline just pumping through your system. So go for a quick walk around the building or do some push ups or wash your face or have something to eat. You probably will need to do something to manage the physical build up of stress because being in these kind of conversations when you're a conflict avoidant kind of person just can feel very, very uncomfortable. And I've actually got a few different episodes that I've prepared previously around self care and self regulation and those kind of tips if it's something that you think would be helpful for you. Well, thank you very much for listening. I I do hope that it's been useful. I tend to find conflict avoidant kind of people quite rewarding to work with myself. So if you've got a staff member that you find a little bit challenging in terms of how to get them to be more assertive, I do offer coaching if it's something that you think might be helpful down the track. But, otherwise, I I really do hope that some of those ideas have been useful for you in your situation, whether you're the person who's conflict avoidant or you're supporting somebody else. If it's been useful, I'd be incredibly grateful if you would leave a positive review. It makes a massive difference to little podcasts like this, so thank you very much in advance if that's something that you're prepared to do. I saw some just so beautiful reviews and comments have come through recently. I have to say there was a couple of moments where I almost had a tear in my eye. I felt quite touched. So thank you very much for the people who have left those. Very sweet, and at least for me, it really does make a big difference. So thank you very much. And if you would like additional resources for dealing with conflict, whether that's related to workplace situations or conflict outside of work, please consider pressing subscribe. Otherwise, hope to see you again in a future episode of the Conflict Skills podcast. All the best managing the conflicts until now and the next week or two until the next episode is released. Thanks. Bye for now.