Insights on Conflict, Self-Regulation, and Philosophical Humility

Welcome to the Conflict Skills Podcast, hosted by professional mediator Simon Goode. This episode marks a personal milestone, as Simon Goode reflects on his 45th birthday and the lessons learned through years of mediating conflict in both personal and professional settings. Drawing from hundreds of mediations—from business disputes to family disagreements—Simon Goode shares key insights about effective listening, self-regulation, and the importance of language. He delves into how frameworks and models can help us “zoom in” or “zoom out” when analyzing conflict, and explores broader philosophical questions about consciousness, perception, and the complexity of human behavior. Whether you’re looking to improve your conflict resolution skills at work or at home, this episode offers practical takeaways, honest reflections, and a reminder that understanding ourselves is at the heart of managing disputes successfully.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Workplace conflict and self-regulation

03:07 Emphasizing the power of listening

09:24 Learning to manage reactions

13:12 Understanding conflict through frameworks

15:15 The importance of language in conflict

19:22 Nuance in conflict resolution

23:49 Exploring ethics and free will

25:30 Embracing curiosity in neuroscience

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator, Simon Good. 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 to you, please consider pressing subscribe. Well, it's actually my birthday today, the first of June, and I'm turning 45. And I often reflect what things have happened to me over the past couple of years on my birthday. It's sort of a time often for reminiscing and taking stock to some extent of progress that I might have made or potentially realizing how little progress I might have made in other areas. It's a really nice, I think, time to reflect and just consider what's going on from different levels and different ways of looking at the same situation often means that we can accept it or deal with it more gracefully. And so when I'm doing this sort of self-reflection, obviously for myself, my area of expertise is conflict. I'm a nationally accredited mediator, I've done hundreds of mediations now across all sorts of different kinds of disputes, including partners trying to buy each other out of a business all the way through to parents who disagree about how often the kids should be going between the different houses and that kind of thing. So it's the wide gamut of issues and also the wide gamut of levels of emotional intensity that's involved there. Some of the time there might have been family violence situations or mental health issues or addictions or something else that might have been going on, and it's very difficult navigating some of those kinds of disputes. I thought that maybe I would experience a little bit of relief when I went and started doing workplace mediations, but what I soon discovered was that there's just as much trauma in in workplaces as there is outside of work. All of those same patterns of like power and defensiveness and positioning and all of those kind of things often mean that ultimately there's some adversarial element to workplace conflict. So it wasn't just very rational and logical, like I was sort of hoping for shifting from doing divorce and separation over to working with workplaces. But both of those different types of case, types of issues have taught me very different things about myself. I think about my own practice, my own approach to conflict, so to speak, as really being inherently connected to my own relationships. So often the lessons that I learn at work, they help me to communicate with my son differently or not to bite back when my wife's trying to push my buttons about something that she's upset about. So I think about my ability to facilitate conflict, but really tied up in all of that is my ability to manage myself. So it's things like self-regulation or managing my own thoughts and my mind, managing my emotions and those feelings that might come up for me, as well as different aspects of how that's connected to my habits, my lifestyle, and then even things like meditation and mindfulness and what I'm paying attention to. So I thought this could be helpful for other people to just maybe if I could share some of my thoughts about what stands out at me as far as some of the progress that I've made, and also talking about some of my goals or areas that I'm hoping to work on next. Now, one of the big lessons that I continue to learn as a professional mediator is the importance of listening. I think that I've just inherently begun to focus more and more on the actual process of listening. Like those conversations that gradually expand and people do have a sense of being heard, of being, what would you say, like seen, so to speak, I'm being noticed, I'm being acknowledged and validated. And so I often come into a dispute or a conflict thinking about what's the issue, what are the options that they should consider, what's the best plan, how can we manage all of this? So I'm, you know, at least aspiring to be a little bit solution-focused when I'm not getting sucked into the conflict myself. But I often find that the progress that we make as far as mediation goes are those moments when I'm really able to connect with somebody, to actually pay attention to the story that they're telling me about the way that they're experiencing things. And then it almost it's like it softens up the ground or something for them then to consider other options. I'm sure that we could explain that in terms of the neurobiology of the different bits of the body, the brain that are active, etc. Or even just in terms of the conflict and the issue itself. It's like when somebody is properly listened to, it helps them to connect with the present moment and they experience it kind of as it is, as opposed to this black and white broad brush picture that people often tell themselves. I don't know that thinking is as verbal as a lot of people consider it to be. And so a lot of the time our thoughts are mixed up with our feelings, our whims, our urges, our impressions. All of those things are very much a muddied swamp of different experiences. It's only been relatively recently and really only in Western civilizations that psychologists have pretended that they understood things like thoughts or feelings, or the mind or consciousness. They really don't know the first thing about any of those different aspects. So for me it's like there just seems to be something that's there in that listening process. It's like this human-to-human connection that we're able to make, and I continue to be a little bit surprised at the difference that that sometimes makes. Even for conflict which seemed really intractable and there seemed to be no hope initially. I've done quite a few mediations, and whoever referred it to me has said basically there's no hope for this one, just do your best, and then I write back to them and say, Well, they've reached an agreement, and pretty frequently I get a few exclamation points coming back on the response, which is always lovely. So the importance of listening, and it's not so much for me about learning a particular kind of question or learning this approach or something, it's slowing down, it's responding to what they actually said, like a coherent kind of response. If they say that this other kid beat me in the running race today, I might say, ah, did they, what happened? You know, I'm sort of sharing in the emotion of it, and it's coherent with what they're experiencing, probably as they're retelling me, let alone in the event itself. And that coherent response, I think, is it's very helpful for people as they try to organize their own thoughts and the experiences and make sense of them for themselves. The second aspect that really stands out to me as an area that I've developed is in my self-regulation. I'm not a very calm, composed kind of person by default. I'm easily frazzled, easily rattled, I jump from one thing to the other, I tend to rev myself up pretty frequently, like a few times a week, I'll be in a bit of a manic state of some level of distress, realizing that I forgot to send an attachment to an email or something like that, and panicking that I didn't confirm the mediation that's happening tomorrow or something. Like I get myself in a bit of a tizzy. In Australia, we would say you get your knickers in a knot, and I'm certainly somebody who'd be who could be accused of that a lot. So I've really had to pay particular attention to self-regulation, like what I can do when I start to rev up and I start to get worried, or it's a very similar set of steps that happens, a set of symptoms that I get when I'm angry, as well as a set of interventions that can be helpful, whether it's distress and worry or the anger side of things. Self-regulation for me has just meant that I'm better able to choose how to respond to a situation. Instead of a lot of the time in the past, I would get sucked in and reacting. I can remember a lot of my early management roles when I first got a promotion to move into leadership. I was clashing frequently with other managers or other sections of leadership in different parts of the organization. And that, to me, it felt quite distressing to be honest. I would often get worked up and then I would blurt something out in anger because I was frustrated at how stupid these people seemed to be or something. And then all of a sudden we would be in this negative pattern of interactions, and a lot of the time our communication would go down the gurgler. So I wish that I had just acknowledged the fact that it is going to be incredibly difficult dealing with other managers. It's going to be very challenging for me when I'm first learning the ropes of what's involved in this manager gig kind of thing. The transition process of moving from a peer up to somebody who's in a leadership role, that of course was going to mean that I was going to have a pretty bumpy road, at least in the short term. But if you're a high performer, it's very easy to have high standards about yourself, isn't it? So for me, I was thinking, well, I'm moving into this manager's job. I'm going to hit the ground running, let's see how much progress I can make. I'm going to be the youngest manager promoted to the executive leadership team or whatever. Like it was all about pride and ego and all of those things if I pause and consider it now. But back then it did feel like it was important. What I didn't realise was that all of these situations that I was in, at least early on, were really overwhelming. Like I think a lot of people would have found them stressful. But for me, given that I'm a bit quicker to react than other people might be, um, it's meant that I really had to pay more attention to it. And like I say, this has been a lesson that I've learnt through quite a few different painful mistakes along the way. It's a little bit validating then these days, where I go and do a training workshop or I'll give a presentation or something. And I often have people come up to me in the morning tea afterwards or whatever if I stay for lunch, and they'll say, Oh, are you like a Zen Buddha kind of person? Like, do you ever feel angry at all? You seem to just be calm all over the time, all of the time, and I'm smiling away thinking you should ask my wife and ask my son about that one. I don't know that they would necessarily describe me as calm all of the time, but it says to me that at least some of those different approaches that I take to self-regulation are beginning to pay off. Now I've talked about self-care and self-regulation in that five-factor factor uh model of self a number of different times, so you can check out previous podcast episodes on self-regulation or self-control if that's something that you'd like to work on as well. The third aspect that I wanted to talk about in terms of progress that I've made is more related to how I think about conflict itself. Like there are many different models and ways to understand conflict. Early on, I was really drawn to a model called motivational interviewing, and then I looked at different coaching models as a way of helping improve somebody's self-efficacy. Like I was thinking I'm a counsellor, but I don't want to give the client the answer. I don't necessarily want to come in and be the rescuer, because of course what that means is that then we're in this pattern of victim rescuer, and I don't necessarily want there to be some dependence on dependency on me or that kind of thing. So I've always from the beginning thought in terms of clients about how can I help them help themselves, so to speak. So the motivational interviewing was an incredibly good way of thinking about ambivalence, uh why people become addicted to different behaviours and how you can provide a helpful and therapeutic support without validating what they're doing and saying it's okay, but also not expecting immediate abstinence or something similar. The sector that I was working in back then was drug and alcohol programs, which is where I first encountered it. I actually think though people are often quite addicted to conflict in a very similar way that they're addicted to social media or some other kind of destructive behaviour that they can't stop doing. So there's different ways of thinking about conflict and different models have been helpful, the five-factor self, the five types of conflict, the grow coaching model, etc. But as I pause and consider what have all of these frameworks got in common, it's almost like it helps us to zoom in or zoom out of the conflict. Like if I want to understand what's happening in my hand, I can just stand back and look at it, and I can describe some skin or a freckle or a knuckle or some hair or something. Or I could get out a microscope and look, and I would be describing something completely different if we zoomed in to the cellular level, for example. And then I suppose that we could zoom in to the atoms within that, and then there would be the electrons and protons sort of orbiting, so to speak, and then there's all of this space in between them. It's incredibly hard to get your head around, isn't it, as a poor human with our limited capacity to understand and make sense of all of these different elements. But it's all my hand. So discovering something like a microscope means that we can understand the hand and the cells and the biology in a much higher level of detail. And I think that some of these different frameworks, when applied to conflict, they almost become a technology that helps us to assess and maybe take stock of what's going on, maybe interpret the context and become more aware of different factors that are contributing, even becoming aware internally about the multiple complicated ways that events affect us and this reciprocal relationship with our perception and our thoughts and our feelings, and around and round we go. We're not objectively seeing some kind of data in the outside world. We're kind of coming up with a bit of a projection in our head, our brain creates a hallucination of what reality is effectively. So there's no black and white, there's no facts at the end of the day. As soon as you begin to look into human perception, you realize that it's all this very complicated process of figuring out patterns. And so when we think about something like relationships and conflict, when we apply these different models, like the five types of conflict, what I think it helps us to do is to zoom in a little bit. So instead of just conflict being this blanket thing that's bad, all of a sudden we have this tool that helps us to consider the different drivers that might be present. It's not like a microscope, we're not drilling down to the atoms, drilling down to the cells, but it's true in a very similar kind of way. There is this relationship, this cause and effect of what I'm doing and how the other person interprets my behavior. What's that old saying? If you always do what you've always done, then you're always going to get what you've already got. And so for me, when I begin to think about the same situation but in a different kind of way, it's almost like calibrating my perspective to some extent. And then that often opens up new options that I hadn't considered and eventually hopefully leads to a plan or the beginning of one. So zooming in and out, I think out is the other aspect of that zooming that can be helpful there too. Like I can zoom in and look at Myers Briggs personality type indicator or conflict modes or something similar. Or I can zoom out and think more broadly about the patterns that are going on within the organization, or not just this argument that I just had with this person, but how does this sort of fit within the broader history that we have together? A lot of the time when we zoom out from the conflict, it means also that we're not as captured, we're not as swept up in the emotions and all of that sense of urgency in the short term. The fourth big learning to me, and I've sort of referred to it a little bit already when I was talking about listening, but more specifically, I've become increasingly aware of the effect of language. The language that we use when we're speaking to somebody, and that I suppose includes the verbal and the nonverbal cues that we're sending, our speed, our pauses, our volume, our tone of voice, etc. too. Like obviously they're important, but the actual words that we say can make a dramatic difference. I often, you know, I discuss with mediators sometimes, is there a right way to say something? And I know a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to that, and they say, Oh, it's not about the right and wrong way. We don't want people to ever worry that they're doing the wrong thing. Okay, fair enough. Like I'm not saying it's the wrong thing. Obviously, we're not marking a test or something. But is there a right way to communicate? Is there a right way to say something? I incre I'm increasingly beginning to think that there is. And I don't mean that there's specific words that are right, but I mean there's something about when we've paused and we've calmed ourselves down and we're composed that means that we can show up and be our best self. And then in terms of our intentions, when my intention is actually caring about the other person, like if there's an issue that I'm having an argument with my wife about or something, like I don't know, it might be a small thing that we've had a number of different arguments about in the past. I think the right way to me approach that kind of a disagreement is really doing my best to support my wife and say or do all of the things that are going to be the best for her. When I'm thinking about myself, worried about some sense of unfairness or maybe not wanting to tolerate the discomfort from doing the thing that I want to do, like I have a chip on my shoulder, and so even then if I agree or I say the right thing, it's almost like it's not properly aligned with my intentions. Whereas when I can actually like forgive some someone if I'm upset about something that they've done, or just decide to set aside my needs for now, it's just a postponing it in the short term. It often means that I can better focus on what's going on for them, their interests and their needs, etc. And then ironically, I often get a much better response from that kind of approach. I think because my wife experiences me of genuinely showing up and saying, hey, this seems like a bit of a problem, would you be prepared to talk it through? Like I'm not coming at it with you're right, I'm right and you're wrong, I'm gonna convince you. It's like we have this mutual situation that we found ourselves in. We've got this relationship between us, and we have a mutual responsibility to look after it, I suppose. So let's think about what nurturing that would look like. So I I've begun to think more about there actually being a right way to say something, but it's more about this alignment with what you might call the heart and the head, with your intentions as well as your plan or the how you actually plan to express the thing that you want to talk about. But that importance of language, even slightly rephrasing the language for someone, it might mean that they're able to agree to a proposal that's made in a mediation. It's one of the things actually that we learn early on as mediators. You can't ask people, are you happy with that? Are you happy to agree to that? They've just proposed that. You happy with that one? I mean, very often they'll say something like, Well, no, I'm not bloody happy with that, of course I'm not happy with that, this is ridiculous, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the reframe that we often use is more along the lines of, is this something that you could agree to or is this something that you could live with? It's neutral. It's just, is this something that you would be willing to tolerate? Is this something that you can accept despite the fact that you think something else might work, despite the fact that you've got these concerns, etc.? And in that way, we're not really saying, trust me, it's like you have autonomy there. Would you be prepared to go with me this far? And then what would be needed in terms of a review process, etc.? But those little tweaks of language and that little difference that the nuance can make, my goodness, by the time you get to the end of a mediation or the end of a difficult conversation like that, you're often in a very different place than you would have been if you'd kept pursuing the are you happy with that or the defensive or whatever the kinds of language was that you were using that wasn't working. So the final aspect that I wanted to talk about that I've really learnt about conflict recently has been the connection to philosophy. I hadn't considered things like where consciousness comes from or what's my view of it. I grew up as a my parents weren't really religious early on, and then they started going to church when I was in sort of late primary school. So they went to the Anglican Church in Australia, which would be the Episcopal Church, I think, in America. I'm not exactly sure what all of the different um sort of parallels are. It's the Church of England. But I at university I sort of thought that religion and you know the sky daddy in the sky kind of concept of God obviously wasn't true, and it didn't take very many questions from atheist friends to really shake me in that perspective. And I'm not saying necessarily now that I've decided that I know all of the answers, but as I think about well, the philosophical arguments of a creator versus not, or what would be the possible connection of quantum physics, the sort of astral age of the universe, which we can calculate from the different colours of light, etc. coming through. So backdating that to the 13.8 billion years or whatever it is that the earth has been around for. Like what happened before that? There is actually a question that's there, and we don't often stop to consider the fact that it might be connected to us. Like the same level of amazing complexity in the universe, and it's so amazing. I remember a guest on Joe Rogan just recently talking about if our sun was the size of a full stop on the page of a book, then just the Milky Way galaxy would be bigger. Than the Earth itself by ratio. And of course, the Earth is tiny compared to the Sun. So, how many more Suns are there in the all of Earth if we're just sort of orbiting around a tiny full stop here? It really does make you stop and consider, well, what does this mean for us? So, this amazing complexity, it like boggles the mind, and a lot of us find ourselves quite in awe of looking up at the stars. But we could also think in a very similar way about ourselves. The level of microbial life going on in our gut bacteria, for example, is amazing. It's this incredible feat of engineering that you take whatever food you put in your face, and that's what you use to literally regenerate cells. So skin cells, blood cells, brain cells, bone cells, all of these different elements, we're recreating ourselves constantly. So that same level of complexity as the universe is also present in our brains. We have potentially trillions of neurons, and each neuron, the this brain cell, has up to 80,000 other connections. So it's this integrated network, it's not a computer. All of these analogies that psychologists use fall short when they're actually compared to reality itself. It's not a computer. We don't know why there's a correlation between this type of electrical signal in the brain and this type of subjective experience that somebody has. We're just, just, just beginning to sniff around the edges of it. And if you pause and think about perception, like I mentioned, our brain is just a predicting machine. It's more or less figuring out what we need to do next. And so that's what happens in our body. We get ready to act. If there's a threat, then we get ready for the fight or flight kind of response. But is that the full extent of it? Do you know what I mean? Like, if we go into fight or flight mode, am I still responsible for my behaviour? Did I still choose to do that? If I'm in an argument with someone and I'm my face is going red and I'm getting very upset, am I choosing all of the words that come out of my mouth? What if I've had a few beers? Am I choosing that? Like all of a sudden, you really do need to consider things like ethics or free will or philosophy, the beginning of the universe, where we fit in, etc. Why are we designed this way? Why do we experience the world this way? And it really has made me consider many different aspects of all of those underlying beliefs that that's connected to. For religion, to some extent, I've been exploring that a little bit more than in previous years, which has been a bit of a trend recently. But I'm also realizing the limitations of my knowledge around some of those different aspects. Even in consciousness, I was reading an article recently and it listed out, I think, 150 or so of the leading theories about consciousness. So there's a lot to get soaked in almost. I really relish it and enjoy it. But once you realise just how little we know, it does make me pause and reflect on the many ways that I've oversimplified everything really. Relationships, who was and was isn't, wasn't neurodivergent, how I consider things like counselling and psychology, psychiatry, and how that's connected to other things like families and other supportive networks in the community, etc., were just really beginning to scratch the surface, and I do like to think of myself as an evidence-based kind of person. I do like to think that the approaches that I was going to take to help someone were backed up by the data and backed up by the evidence. And so my hope over the next few years is that counsellors and psychologists would begin to take this topic a bit more seriously, to stop pretending that they know so much about the brain and how it makes us do the things that we do. So, what does that mean then that there's a brain like this little man sitting inside your head that's controlling you, like with the remote control? We don't know the first thing about a lot of those different mechanisms, let alone why that is the way that it is. So for me it's had a little bit of a humbling effect. I've stopped, I think, speaking from a position of being an expert and more like a curious person talking about what I'm wondering about and what I've been thinking about. And I've noticed that that tends to be often quite helpful for other people who are the reflective, you know, considerate kind of people themselves and a lot of the time in a very similar journey through philosophy and history and science and all of the different related areas. But what do you think? How has your conflict journey been over the past few years? Have you had particularly challenging experiences? What are the lessons that you've learned? And how do all of those different experiences that you've been through affect how you show up to conflict these days? I'd love to hear from you if you'd be willing to make a comment down below. You can shoot me an email if you've got feedback. It's podcast at simongood.com. If you've got an idea for a future episode of the podcast, uh feedback, a thought for yourself around what has helped for you to develop in your conflict skills, I'd love to hear from you. If it's been helpful, I'd very much appreciate if you would be willing to consider leaving a positive review. It makes a really big difference for little podcasts like these, so thank you in advance if that's something you're prepared to do. And otherwise, thank you very much for listening. Hopefully, see you again in another episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast soon. Bye for now.