One of the most important life skills that you have to learn is conflict resolution. If you don’t, you’re going to spend a lot of your life miserable, because we’re imperfect people, and we have conflict almost every day of our lives. And if you’re managing or influencing others, your ability to deal with conflict directly impacts trust, culture, and collaboration.
So, if you want to resolve conflict, you’re going to have to make the first move. It takes courage to approach someone you are in conflict with and tell that person you want to sit down and work it out. And you don’t start with what the other person has done wrong. You don’t start with a bunch of accusations or ways that you’ve been hurt. You start with what’s your fault.
The conflict may be 99.99 percent their fault. But you can always find something to confess! Maybe it was your poor response, even if it came out of defensiveness. Maybe it was your attitude. Maybe it was the way you walked away.
You have weaknesses in your life that others see clearly but you’ve never seen. Those are your blind spots. Those are the weaknesses that you’re clueless about. That’s why you need to come to conflict resolution with a humble heart and begin with your own faults.
As the Bible says, “Why do you notice the little piece of dust in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the big piece of wood in your own eye? . . . First, take the wood out of your own eye. Then you will see clearly to take the dust out of your friend’s eye.”
You need to confess your part of the conflict first. What’s the piece of wood in your eye that is keeping you from seeing the situation clearly? Don’t start with the other person and all the ways they’ve hurt you until you’ve confessed your part of the conflict first.
Did you cause conflict by being insensitive? Or were you overly sensitive? Did you not show compassion for the person who was hurting? Were you being over demanding?
What are your blind spots? Once you figure them out and confess them, you’ll be ready for the next step in conflict resolution.
Let’s put that into practice:
- What difference might it make, in your team or relationship, if you started with ownership instead of blame?
- What’s one conversation you’ve been avoiding that you could take a first step toward today?
Excerpt taken from Daily Hope by Rick Warren.
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