Core Insight Skills
5 Steps to help you face conflict with confidence
(and why it's worth it)
Conflict is part of life. It’s part of sharing space with others. And it grips us when our perceptions and experiences not only don’t match, but feel threatening in some way.
While conflict is difficult and causes us to charge into battle or disappear and hide, when we face it with confidence, it can also help us expand. It can be a clue that there are important things to address, and that by addressing them, new perspectives and possibilities emerge that are essential for growth.
Facing conflict with confidence is not easy. When we feel angry, disappointed, frustrated, or wronged, we’re vulnerable. We want to protect ourselves and what we care about. But in order to effectively do that - to protect and strengthen what matters to us in the most sustainable way possible, to harness the good that can come from conflict and turn what might otherwise be destructive into something constructive - it is important to cultivate skills for engaging rather than escalating conflict.
The Insight approach – the theory behind Insight Policing and Engaging Conflict through Curiosity – invites us to work through five steps to more effectively communicate through conflict to find new, more sustainable paths forward.
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These steps require us to: Notice, Verify, Ask, Communicate, and Listen.
Let’s walk through these five steps – starting with the need to notice.
When we notice, we are recognizing conflict behavior in the moment.
Once we’ve paused to notice, our next step is to verify– to take time to verbally state back what we’re noticing.
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Once we’ve verified, the next step is to ask – to get curious to find out more.
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Once we’ve done the hard work of getting curious and discovered what is going on for the other person, what do we do? We need to communicate.
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Communicating opens dialogue that goes both ways. And in order for dialogue to get us anywhere, we have to listen.
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These five steps for engaging in conflict with confidence are vital. Each one builds on the one before it to open conversation and reveal what matters so that it can be engaged in a way that opens paths forward rather than entrenching defensiveness and harm.
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So next time you’re confronted with a conflict interaction, take a moment to notice, verify, get curious, communicate and listen.
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It may not be easy at first. But knowing what to pay attention to, how to get curious and that opening dialogue will help you harness the growth, learning and connection that can come from conflict will guide you through.