Conflict Management

Conflict Management

Managing Conflict in Relationships: Expert Tips and Advice

Golden Threads Project Worker, Ewa Babicka, shares valuable advice and tips on managing conflict in relationships. Effective conflict management is crucial for maintaining healthy and harmonious bonds with family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

Understanding Relationships

In the world around us, we have all kinds of relationships. We value each of them based on our beliefs, needs, and experiences. Even harmonious and healthy relationships can experience conflicts sometimes. These temporary disagreements are usually manageable and help set relationships back on track.

Learning to Manage Conflict

One might ask: “How?”

The answer is: You can learn managing conflict skills! These skills revolve around three universal focus points of any argument: “Did you hear me?” “Did you see me?” “Did what I say mean anything to you?”

Nevertheless, it would help if you started with yourself. Remember, the only person you can directly control is yourself!

Key Strategies for Managing Conflict in Relationships

Focus on What You Really Want

  • Mutual Purpose. Mutual Respect.
  • Clarify the issue, find a resolution, and move on.
  • Express what hurts you and what you need.
  • Work together, support each other

Improve Your Listening Skills

Let’s start here with our listening skills because we are often bad listeners! We do not pay attention to what the other person is saying. By the same token, most of us have experienced inattentive, selective listening; it was dreadful and deepened the conflict. Therefore, effective listening is crucial for managing conflict in relationships.

Here’s how you can improve it:

  • Talk less and listen more.
  • Do not interrupt.
  • Avoid stopping listening before the other person finishes.
  • Do not stop listening to remember what you want to say next.
  • Show interest by leaning forward, nodding, or smiling.
  • Clarify if you do not understand, but only when the person is finished speaking.

Communication Tips for Managing Conflict

To be effective in communication, we need to understand our triggers, biases, and prejudices. While speaking, introduce a concern without blame, judgment, or attack by using a specific framework:

  • “I feel……”
  • “Here is what I am noticing…..”
  • Focus on ONE topic at a time

Acknowledgment and Confirmation

Research shows that understanding our partners’ feelings and values, especially our loved ones, helps prevent major crises within relationships. It is crucial to acknowledge that our partners’ messages matter to us. Especially during disagreements, start with:

  • “I care about what you are trying to tell me, please tell me more about it.”
  • “Your opinion matters to me, please tell me more about it.”

Practicing Conflict Management

Before you find yourself in an argument with a friend, co-worker, neighbor, or loved one, use the guide above to practice active listening, a soft start to conversations, and positive recognition of others’ values.

Ask yourself:

  • Do I hear what they are saying?
  • Do they hear me?
  • Do I see the whole person, and do they see me as the whole person?
  • Do they understand that it also matters to me?
  • Do they know what matters to me?

By implementing these strategies, managing conflict in relationships becomes easier and more effective, leading to healthier and stronger bonds.

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