How to Avoid Unnecessary Conflict: Practical Skills for Everyday Interactions

In this episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast, host Simon Goode explores the ways people can unintentionally invite unnecessary conflict into their lives, drawing on both personal experiences and the story of a neighbor’s altercation. Simon outlines three main strategies to avoid such conflicts: learning to pause and prioritize, recognizing it's not your job to correct others, and not taking others’ actions too personally. He also shares practical mindfulness techniques and encourages reflection to help listeners break the cycle of reactive conflict.

TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 Neighbor's Frequent Conflicts

06:31 Navigating Conflict and Prioritization

08:34 "Breath Control to Manage Conflict"

11:28 Choosing Silence Over Conflict

15:47 Managing Automatic Reactions

Transcript

0:07

Hello and welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator Simon Goode. I set up this podcast to provide free resources and tools for dealing with conflict. So if that sounds like the kind of thing that's useful for you, please consider pressing subscribe in the episode Today I'm going to be talking about some of the things that people do which bring them unnecessary conflict. I think about myself probably throughout a lot of my relationships, both professional as well as personal. And I can see many instances where I would describe myself as a little bit of a high conflict personality, so to speak. I tend to be a little bit more moody, a little bit more self conscious and probably hypersensitive then to things like criticism or judgment or that kind of thing. And that being combined with what I think is probably a little bit of an ADHD type of brain means that I am sometimes frustrating other people around me, but when they react quite appropriately, I take it very personally. So it's been something that I've worked on in my personal relationships as well as professional throughout really the last 20 years or so. In other situations though, I've also noticed that I have always felt like I rubbed people the wrong way. Like I've traveled a lot in some of the different professional roles that I've been in. Even these days when I'm doing a workshop or a workplace mediation outside of Coffs Harbour where I live, I'm often, you know, going into a local cafe and buying a coffee or checking in at the hotel, even just passing people on the street. And I've always felt like people are looking at me suspiciously, like I'm an outsider. Other people seem to resonate and they're a natural fit. But for whatever reason, I felt like I was a little bit of a sore thumb. And it's been something that I've reflected on and experimented with changing, particularly over the last few years. But the reason that I decided to talk about this unnecessary conflict today was because I had just had a recent conversation with one of my good friends that lives nearby, one of my neighbors. It's a guy that's a bit older than me, but he has told me a number of different times when he's been in fights with people. He's been upset with our neighbours who drive too fast along our street, for example, and when he went to confront them, the person got really defensive and I think was quite intimidating and aggressive from my friend's perspective. He's also had run ins though, with other neighbors who he's lived with and just recently he had an argument with someone in the Bunnings car park. Bunnings is one of these big chain hardware stores that I guess is in other countries as well. But Bunnings seems to dominate Australia, along with another one, Miter 10. And these are these giant warehouses with huge, immense car parks. And the one in Coffs Harbour has a particularly poorly designed car park. I hate going there because there's a little roundabout and it's not clear who's meant to give way. There's all sorts of spots where two lanes merge into one and this kind of thing. So I suppose that's to set the scene as to the context that this argument happened in for my friend. I know when I go to Bunnings I can already feel the cortisol rising, like I don't want to be there. I find it incredibly frustrating. I. I know that whatever I need to find is going to be in the fifth aisle that I end up checking, or I'll need to go and talk to a random worker that's on shift and probably feel like I'm interrupting them and bothering them when I ask them how to find something. So all these little things happen largely subconsciously and I know that they happen for me, which gives me a little bit of a clue that they might also be happening to other people. This isn't a relaxed conversation on your couch. This is a situation where people, people might be naturally a little bit more either on guard or on edge or something like that, or at the least in a rush and prone to things like frustration. So my friend pulled into the car park and he got out of his car and had turned around to lock the door and another car had pulled into the car park next to him and he said this, this dog, it nearly bit my head off. He said that there was a blue cattle dog that I guess was out of the window, poking its head out of the window, barking and snarling at him, and from his perspective, really trying to have a go at him and attack him. And so he has been, I think, a bit startled, but he's turned around to the dog and I think sworn at it really loudly and probably loudly tried to put it in its place, like going, that kind of thing. And then a bit of swearing, you bloody mongrel or whatever. Probably a lot stronger language than that, if I can, if I'm imagining my friends mo more accurately than mine. So he's probably been swearing and a bit like reciprocally aggressive to the dog. But the owner of the dog really didn't like that he said that he jumped out of his car straight away and came around to my side and got in my face. And he said, what are you trying to do, have a go at my dog or something? And he said there was a large crowd of people gathered watching this interaction by this stage because the dog was loud playing, plus then him yelling at the dog, and now this third guy yelling, or this other guy yelling as well as the dog and my friend. But he said no one intervened. No one stepped in to lend a hand or help. This is an older guy, I think, from his perspective, being treated quite aggressively by someone that's a lot younger and probably stronger and fitter. So he's thinking, how dare this person? Like, what's wrong with him? So I think they ended up just walking away from each other and didn't end up having another interaction after that, thank goodness. But when he got home, that's when I saw him that afternoon. And I said, how are you traveling? How are you doing? And he said, not good after this morning. And then went on to explain all of this to me. And he said that when he'd come home and had a similar conversation with his wife, she'd said something along the lines of, why does this always happen to you? She has also experienced him having these conflicts with neighbors and conflicts with people that he's worked with and now conflicts with random people on the street. And he didn't seem to know why. And I don't know why either. I wasn't there and I don't know exactly what happened, but it's certainly been something that I've been reflecting on since that conversation because it's been an area of focus for myself. I've really prioritized trying to avoid these kind of situations. I just find them so uncomfortable. And then it's very difficult then to concentrate and to get through anything productive for the rest of the day. And. And I'm also a lot more irritable and more likely to react to minor things myself. So it's this negative spiral, I think, that I often go down caused by these, I think sometimes avoidable conflicts that might be going on. So I suppose that is a very long winded way of trying to explain my focus and what the purpose is of preparing this podcast. And what I'm going to explain next are three of the main areas that stand out to me in my reflection myself, but also when I'm working with clients, when I'm running a workplace mediation or I'm doing some coaching or training in an area like conflict resolution skills. The first I think probably deficit that my friend might be experiencing and I was previously was we're not able to prioritize. Like in that particular moment, if my friend had have been able to pause and step back and think what's the best use of my time here? Like what's my goal? What's, what are the other things that are on my plate today that I need to deal with who's around me, who's with me, maybe my son's with me or that kind of thing. It's just, I think if we could pause and think about how important is this really a lot of these negative interactions, like this guy's dog was barking at you. Well, it's probably true that he should have controlled his dog and you might have actually felt like you were in danger and so he's a little bit reckless or careless or something similar. But you've got other things that you need to deal with as well. You're not this guy's parent, you're not his partner. It's not like you're his boss or someone that he works with even. It's very unlikely that you'll ever have anything to do with him again. So if you could pause and just think how important is this in the moment? You would almost always decide to just walk away and leave it. I think the skill to this prioritisation though, in the moment it really involves the ability to pause, to find the off ramps in the conflict that you're in, even yourself. And so different things are going to work for different people. But for me, I really concentrate on my breathing, really extending the breath out, that very long exhale. I count in my head to six when I'm breathing out and to six when I'm breathing in. But that first breath when I'm trying to avoid this red flag in front of a bull kind of moment myself, I just extend that breath out as long as I can. Just keep breathing out and keep breathing out and breathing out. I find that this often brings a sense of presentness or awareness or something similar because it acts as a circuit breaker for the normal fight or flight response that we go into when we're dealing with conflict. Obviously, if we think about our tribal brains that have evolved to focus on survival, if there's a threat like someone's attacking you, it's not really that important that you can choose your words carefully. It's much more important that you can fight, like hurt them or kill them or scare them off or whatever, or flight, flee, escape, so that's what your brain and body are prioritizing when it comes to things like conflict with the random guy on the street. You're not thinking logically, you're not thinking about multiple factors. You're not thinking about all of the contextual reasons that might be going on here. So that very long breath out, it interrupts this ramping up almost that our body does as we get ready to fight or escape a dangerous situation. So if you can develop that capacity to pause, it might be deep breathing. It might be a mindfulness activity, like just feeling the ground underneath your feet and wiggling your toes and feel the feeling of your socks in your shoes, feel the temperature of the air. Notice a few of the other things that you can see in the area aside from the person that you're in an argument with. Even noticing yourself internally. Like, my heart might be racing or I can feel the heat brushing to my cheeks or something similar. These mindfulness, I guess you'd call them techniques, but it's really just noticing. It's deciding to pay attention to the information coming in through your senses in that moment. What it does is it. It brings us to the present moment. And when we tend to ramp up and go into fight or flight mode, we're much more thinking about the past and the future. Like, how dare this person do this? What a jerk he must be. Or thinking about what do I need to do to shut him up kind of thing. We're not noticing, like the crowd of onlookers gathering, for example, as my friend was having this altercation with this guy. So we need that ability to pause, whatever the tool is that works for you to do that. Breathing, mindfulness, or something else. And then we can figure out those off ramps. If this is not an important priority right now, then what are the other options for me to deal with it? Maybe it's minimizing it or brushing it aside, or a quick apology. I'm sorry, mate, I must have had the wrong end of the stick here. My bad. Or sorry, mate, it gave me a bit of a fright. I probably overreacted. I've got a dog myself, and I know it gets a bit freaked out when a stranger's a bit closer than it expected. Like there were multiple off ramps here of either apologizing or deferring to the other guy, or maybe just deciding not to respond. But in the moment, the reason that they're so difficult to identify is because our brain's going into that fight or flight mode. I don't know if that makes any sense to any of you that have experienced that yourself. But for me, it's that the ability to pause in the moment, this tiny little microsecond almost can make the difference. The next area that has worked for me, and I think it might even be something that my friend finds useful as well, is to remind yourself that it's not your job to put everyone in their place. I think this is incredibly helpful because we're not pretending that the behavior is not bad. Like this person probably could have restrained his dog more carefully or, or he could have chosen a different car park, not right next to my friend, or he could have apologized to this random who his dog is scared rather than coming and starting a fight with him. But it's not really my friend's job to teach him this or to put him in their place. I think a lot of the time, again, this is our tribal brain kicking in. If we think about living with a small group of people who we really do rely on for survival. When someone steps outside the norms or breaks what would be considered etiquette, for example, or good manners or respectful treating of somebody else, it has been a problem because we have a small number of people that we're incredibly dependent on. So it has been your job to put the people around you in their place for thousands and thousands of years. Especially if you're a parent, it's probably a bit of your brain that kicks in and grows a bit stronger like a muscle. Not that it's necessarily one that you want to strengthen, but you know, you do need to think about what's going on for them and what's best for them, and at the same time as giving them some autonomy, putting the guardrails in place, so to speak. So that's why our brain looks to do this with the randoms in the Bunnings car park. It's our survival brain kicking in again. But this isn't your job. This isn't someone that you're in a family with or you've got an ongoing relationship with. This isn't someone who you're relying on or depending on for anything. And the reality is that you're probably not going to fix them, you're probably not going to change them. However they are, they have developed that way of being through the 35 years or 40 years or however long they've been alive. So your five minute interaction with them in the Bunnings car park is very unlikely to make any difference. And I think the bottom line for this is that the opposite has the tiniest chance of changing them. If you can be very apologetic and deferential, you're showing them that not every altercation needs to lead to conflict. Whereas if you respond in kind, they're swearing at you, you swear at them, they're yelling at you, you yell at them, they're in your face, you push them back. You're just continuing to contribute to the same cycle that's probably led them to be the way that they are. So it's a little bit of why I think there's such a magic source in some of the world religions like Christianity. It's because that act of forgiveness or grace, like treating people more respectfully than they deserve in the moment. How can I be more reasonable than this unreasonable behavior warrants? This is the kind of thing that these people notice. It stands out to them. So ironically, I think if it is your job to make them a better person, you forgiving them and treating them as absolutely. As respectfully as possible might actually make more difference than you threatening them and going on with all of the argy bargy kind of thing. But regardless, it's not your job. You're not their parent. So you need to remind yourself in the moment that it's not your job to put everyone in their place. Doesn't mean the behavior is okay, but it's not your job to fix it. So I suppose that was the third point that I wanted to discuss. Don't assume that people are out to get you. The reaction that you experience isn't just to do with you or whatever you've done and however you've treated them is only a tiny little piece of the combination that their brain is factoring in as they react to you. So I don't think if we think about it in that way, it makes a whole lot of sense to take conflict so personally. But we need to go through this exercise at times of either giving someone the benefit of the doubt or asking ourselves questions like what are some of the other reasons why this person might be acting the way that they are that don't involve me. It interrupts that automatic me versus you adversarial fight or flight instincts that we often have. It's very challenging, isn't it? Like, we're not really hardwired for modern society. Our brain and our body are still ready to defend ourselves if a bear is chasing us, or when we lived in tribes for so long. So like short of a hardware upgrade, some type of a chip or something like that that you might want installed, which I'm not at all interested in doing. By the way, I think that we're probably stuck with it and if we can learn to manage that automatic reaction and understand that the reason why we're becoming escalated is this fight or flight response and use some of those reflective tools that I've described in that in that episode, it can really make a big difference for us. Let me know what you think though. How does that resonate with you? Have other questions that you've used for self reflection been helpful? Do you use a particular technique to reflect after conflict, like writing it down, for example, or debriefing with a particular person? And what difference did it make to your own reactivity? Have you maybe identified the fact that you tend to be a little bit of a high conflict person yourself and it's been something that you've worked on and managed to change? I'd love to hear from you. If you're watching on a platform where you can leave comments like Spotify or whatever, please feel free to make a comment. I'd be incredibly grateful if you would, and if it's been helpful, leave a Like if you've got an idea for a future episode of the Conflict Skills podcast, please let me know. But otherwise, thank you very much for listening. I hope to see you again in a future episode, and all the best. In the meantime. Bye for now.