An Easy Way to Deal with Conflict and Save a Friendship

There’s a little something you need to give up, but you can try it today and get results immediately.

A friend called me on Monday to share a discovery he made in dealing with conflict. It was a challenge that had seemingly plagued him for some time.

He and his wife had each been practicing this technique in various situations with colleagues at their workplaces. The results were stunning.

In one case, a woman had been making work incredibly difficult for my friend’s wife that she thought it would never end. Within days of trying this technique, the colleague turned around to become her greatest advocate and ally.

My guess is you’ll already recognize this and probably have been using these principles. There are three simple steps.

It doesn’t require a massive conversation to sort through perspectives. It could even be done by text message.

Here they are:

The key is you need to be sincere about what you are saying. The gratitude and apology don’t need to be huge, but they need to be meaningful.

Little did I know that within days I would have to use this. A friend and I ended up in a disagreement about something that simply wasn’t worth risking the friendship over.

So I thanked my friend for his willingness to raise the issue with me and then apologized for my insensitivity. I acknowledged his feelings, even though I didn’t agree with his perspectives.

The real key is humility. If you are fixated on wanting to make your point or be right, then almost certainly you’ll fail.

It doesn’t mean you need to give up your perspective on the matter you disagree on. It is a matter of determining what is more important to you — being right or building the relationship.

It’s funny how this technique arrived within twenty minutes of me needing to use it. Life is like that. Watch out for opportunities in the coming days to build better relationships with those you know and don’t know. You’ll be surprised at the results.

Related posts:

We all aspire to code better. If you don’t aspire to code better then you’re not a coder which — if you’re not paid to code — is fine, but if you’re a programmer… well, maybe you… shouldn’t be? It’s…

It may be early in this website’s existence to be pulling out one of the most popular tropes in wrestling, but I’m feeling particularly nostalgic today and figured I would put the old noodle to the…

They say the easiest way to learn something, is to teach it to someone else. I don’t know who “they” are exactly; but in this new series of work I will be exploring none other than the English…