How to Stop Conflict from Turning Ugly

[00:00:00] Rachel: I heard recently about a breakthrough in couples therapy. It seems that if you give both people ecstasy, that’s MDMA before they go to therapy, they have a better outcome. Now, I’m not saying do ecstasy before therapy. That of course, is still illegal in this country, but it was really interesting to me. Why on earth did it seem to have good results?

[00:00:24] Rachel: Now, I did a bit of literature for research and I have found a literature review about it. I’ll put the, uh, the link in the show notes. But it seems that taking MDMA builds more interpersonal trust. It’s better for empathy. It reduces the perceived threat. You have much, many more pro-social feelings. You see the other person, you feel connected to them, you are bonded. It’s less about me and more about us. Basically, your ego has gone out of the door.

[00:00:55] Rachel: And so the couple are able to look at the problem and just actually solve the problem, and it’s less about defending their own corner. And even the most argumentative and opposed couples seem to be able to find some common ground.

[00:01:10] Rachel: So today I want to talk about conflict and the moment that this conflict turns toxic and is there any way we can take a leaf out of those couples’ books without having to resort to MDMA?

[00:01:26] Rachel: And no, this isn’t just another thing about how to have healthy conflict or leaning into the hard conversation. And on previous podcasts I’ve talked about the fact we need more healthy conflict, and in fact, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the second dysfunction is a lack of conflict. We’ll put a link to the podcast in the show notes if you want to listen to that.

[00:01:46] Rachel: I’ve realized something that we don’t need more conflict in our teams or our workplaces. What we need is more disagreement, the kind of disagreement where we stay connected, we stay empathetic and calm where we don’t get defensive, bruised, and we don’t get that emotional hangover afterwards.

[00:02:05] Rachel: This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I’ve chosen today’s topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you’re up to feeling energized and inspired. For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don’t forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:02:32] Rachel: Now the perceived leadership wisdom is that good teams have healthy conflict, and maybe that’s true in theory, but I think healthy conflict is really, really difficult. I know recently there was a time where something had happened. I was really upset about it, but I thought I’d sorted myself out. I thought that all I was doing was going and giving some feedback to somebody. But obviously that didn’t last very long. I got really, really triggered halfway through and it ended really, really badly.

[00:03:01] Rachel: And if you’ve ever been part of some healthy conflict that left everybody feeling really icky and very tight-lipped and awkward afterwards, even if they were really nice on the surface, you’ll know exactly what I mean. So it’s not conflict we need more of. It’s disagreement that doesn’t destroy trust or ruin the relationship.

[00:03:18] Rachel: And as a side note, and I’d like to say this right up front in this episode, we are not in control of how people take things. If you are giving them any sort of negative feedback or implying that anything about their behavior or what they’ve done has maybe caused harm to somebody, then, then they might react badly. And we can’t control that, but we can control the way that we give the message.

[00:03:39] Rachel: So we can’t control how people respond, but we do need to be careful. But because we are so worried about this in healthcare, we either completely avoid disagreement or we go in far too hard. Now we have been trained to be right, to always be in control, to hold the emotional load for everybody else. So upsetting somebody, it is really bad form. And so if you’re in a caring profession, if you’re a doctor, a nurse, a senior leader, or another healthcare professional, upsetting someone makes us feel we’re not good enough or quite a lot of shame.

[00:04:13] Rachel: We also know that being right is really, really important because we can be blamed if we are wrong, if we didn’t know the right thing. Therefore, we can become very defensive very, very quickly if we think we’ve done anything wrong.

[00:04:26] Rachel: And so when somebody, just so much as as questions us, our first reaction is defensiveness. Even if it’s a simple, why did you do that? In fact, just now, uh, someone in my family was making themselves the cup of tea. They got the milk out of the fridge, and I said to them. That is the wrong milk bottle. That’s all I said. That is the wrong milk bottle. Why? Because it was a milk bottle that had come this morning, not two days ago. Our milk goes off really fast. I wanted them to use the one from a few days ago. They got really defensive because I had told them it was the wrong one.

[00:05:02] Rachel: Now that’s a really, really stupid and very, very small example, but it just shows how the most innocuous of things can get this defensive response in us, particularly if we’re expecting criticism or we’re just so used to being blamed for stuff. What happens is our ego wakes up.

[00:05:20] Rachel: Now, I think our ego is just like a rottweiler, a really vicious dog. Now, this dog doesn’t mean to be vicious, but it has been trained to protect itself and to protect its owner. It will bark and snap and snail at anybody.

[00:05:36] Rachel: And your rottweiler is ready to defend you, to defend your reputation, your identity, your behavior, your worth, as a doctor, your worth as a person. And we slip into defensive rottweiler so, so quickly.

[00:05:52] Rachel: The other night I was just talking to my family about perhaps the need to spread out some of the housework, like emptying the dishwasher. And I was talking to one of my children about it and they started answering me back a little bit and I started thinking, well, hang on a sec. I’m being totally taken for granted here. This just isn’t fair. I could feel myself getting more and more defensive and cross, and as a result started being much more accusational in tone, which got their inner rottweiler out and they started to say nasty things to me, and I was just about to respond even more harshly when a little voice in my head said to me Rachel, whose side are you on?

[00:06:33] Rachel: Because there I was defending myself, telling them about how I needed to be appreciated and how unfair it was that I had to do all the housework. But I ended up attacking the very people that I would walk over glass to help. You know, I would stand up for them in any situation. I would bail them out of anything ’cause I loved them so much. But here I was attacking them over not emptying the dishwasher. Whose side was I on? And afterwards, I just felt awful. I felt really ashamed that I’d lashed out.

[00:07:05] Rachel: Why do we do this? Particularly with people we really, really love and we would defend to the hilt? and also our colleagues at work. You know, if someone else complained about them, we’d probably defend them too. And this is a real challenge because conflict is about you against me. When we disagree, it’s us against the problem. And so when your conflict turns toxic, it’s probably not about the issue anymore. It’s about you, it’s about your identity, it’s about who’s right and who’s wrong, it’s about who’s better. And most arguments I have been in end up in who’s the biggest victim?

[00:07:46] Rachel: You know when you try and give feedback to someone and they come straight back at you going, well, well, you did this to me the other day and well you did this. And it’s like, who has been wrong the most? And when we talk about the drama triangle, we always talk about the fact that whatever role you start off in, whether it be rescuer or persecute or victim, you always end up being a victim, because eventually when you are rescuing, efforts don’t work, you end up being the victim. When you’re badgerd as a persecutor you feel that’s really unfair, you end up as the victim. So we end up in conflict in these who’s the biggest victim arguments.

[00:08:20] Rachel: And that is your ego, because it’s like this big, loyal rottweiler. It’s fierce, but it is protecting you. It’s absolutely convinced it’s keeping you safe. And the trouble is it can’t really tell the difference between a real attack on you and someone just disagreeing with you. And in healthcare, I think our rottweilers are extra jumpy because there’s so much work coming at us and we’re so trained to be responsible for everything and in certain systems that we work in, there’s chaos and the systems themselves are toxic.

[00:08:55] Rachel: We’re also supposed to be upstanding citizens who knows what’s what. So if we feel that it’s been insinuated that in any way we are wrong, we’ve not done the right thing, or maybe our motives were a little less than honorable, or we, we feel the need to defend ourselves to the hilt.

[00:09:14] Rachel: And we can get really, really obsessed with this right versus wrong, which is why I just love the, the poem by Rumi. One of the lines is beyond right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Because when we can’t bear to be wrong, our inner rottweiler, it’s basically living on red alerts where it’s ready to snap at anything at any point.

[00:09:35] Rachel: A colleague recently told me about a situation in her radiology department where there was a locum who came in and he had a bit of a, a strange and difficult manner and was rude to one of the colleagues. But that colleague then, because her ego had been challenged, started to nitpick everything that this locum did, report him, get everybody else to report him. And my colleague said she looked and actually he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Nothing that she wouldn’t have done anyway, but this tendency of bullying, because basically somebody’s ego had been bruised.

[00:10:07] Rachel: So before we talk about how to manage conflict, it helps to understand just why it feels so, so bad. See, when somebody challenges you, your brain doesn’t see, oh, discussion or alternative point of view. It sees criticism and that means danger that you might not be part of the group anymore, they might not like you. There might be some threat to your status in terms of whose opinion is the most valid.

[00:10:31] Rachel: The amygdala is trained to see danger everywhere. It’s trained to keep you safe, not to keep you happy, and it’s much, much more likely to tell you the stories of you are not okay, they’re criticizing you, or you’ve done something wrong. It is interesting, isn’t it? When someone says to you, can I just give you some feedback? I don’t know about you, but my rottweiler comes up straight away ’cause you know that there’s going to be something negative there. I don’t automatically think, oh, that’s really interesting. I automatically feel defensive, justify myself, I look for reasons why they’re wrong or why they shouldn’t have given me that feedback or why that was inappropriate, rather than taking it for the gift. It is.

[00:11:09] Rachel: And the other problem with our amygdalas is when we are under threat, we go into our sympathetic nervous, so and so, the blood leaves your prefrontal cortex, your rational bit of your human brain, goes down into your big muscles so you can fight, flight, or freeze. So at that point. You can’t really take things well anyway. Your thinking becomes very, very black and white.

[00:11:29] Rachel: So that is why we’re often really bad at handling feedback, not because we’re bad people, not because we’re not self-aware, but because your nervous system is telling you that your survival is at stake. You are not overreacting, you are overprotecting yourself. Because the amygdala’s job is to keep you safe. From humiliation.

[00:11:52] Rachel: And when we talk about the ego, I think it’s really a combination between your left very logical brain and your amygdala. It’s that bit of you that identifies as you, yourself, very individual, very different from anybody else, and you wanna keep yourself safe from humiliation, from blame, from rejection, all those things that usually would’ve got you kicked out the tribe when you lived in caves.

[00:12:18] Rachel: So it’s a really ancient system, it’s not very clever and your amygdala, It just can’t tell the difference between a tiger about to attack you and a slightly passive aggressive email. And actually when people get really defensive, the more your rottweiler barks, the more scared you actually are.

[00:12:35] Rachel: Now I have made the mistake of, of marking this as evil, like how bad I am for reacting like that. But your amygdala’s not evil, your, ego isn’t evil, it’s just a bit of an over enthusiastic bodyguard. So don’t beat yourself up about that. You know, look at it and go, oh, of course I’m reacting like that. This is what I’m thinking. It’s there to protect your self.

[00:12:57] Rachel: What do we do about this? Well, I, I started think of myself as the dog and its owner, and I would rather be the wise owner. So I don’t wanna kill the dog, it’s there to protect me. It’s there to wake up that wise owner if there’s a threat. And the wise owner is the conscious part of you, the bit that’s, that’s observing the self going through the motions. The, the wise part of you, the wise owner is grounded, it’s compassionate, it doesn’t react to stuff.

[00:13:24] Rachel: And it can be separate from the ego, it can be separate from the self, and it’s really helpful sometimes just to think of your wise self as separate from your aggressive barking Rottweiler, or your passive aggressive chihuahua. And your wise self is the bit that can think clearly and then choose how you respond. When you are the owner, you are in control and you’ve got some choice, but when your dog is running the show, you actually don’t feel like you’ve got a choice and there’s absolute chaos.

[00:13:53] Rachel: I think my inner rottweiler is oversensitive. I think that might just be my personality disposition. It might also be part of the rejection sensitive dysphoria I have as having had ADHD in all my life. Feeling like I’ve been slightly misunderstood or being impulsive and cause problems for people and say people reacting against me. So I do react quite strongly to situations.

[00:14:17] Rachel: But recently I was with a family group when one of my relatives was really quite rude about ADHD. They said they thought it was a a total fad. Now I have a completely different opinion about that. This is not what this podcast is about. I could feel my heckles rising.

[00:14:33] Rachel: But it was a nice day. We were out with a group of us. It probably helped that I was sitting in the sun with a lovely pint of beer. And I could just look at this relative and rather than getting cross and upset and defensive, I remember thinking oh dear, you poor thing. I wonder what’s happened to you for you to think like that and for you to actually say that and and think it’s okay to say that.

[00:14:55] Rachel: And so I was able to respond in a wise, I think, manner. In fact, yes. Some of my relatives came up to me afterwards and said, wow, Rachel, how did you, how did you stay so calm in that moment? But I was able to recognize what was going on. I was able to step back and be that wise owner, not be totally identified with my ego rottweiler. So in the future, how can I remember to do that sort of thing? Well come up with a, a little way of doing that and it spells the word lead. So think about getting your dog onto a lead.

[00:15:25] Rachel: So how do you keep hold of the lead when your rottweiler starts barking? Well, L stands for label. It. It’s really helpful to label it, saying, ah, that’s my rottweiler coming out. When you feel the heckles rising, just wanted to bark and snap, label it, that is my rottweiler.

[00:15:40] Rachel: And even just naming stuff takes you from automatic, from unconscious, from being below the line to conscious and being above the line. So you’ve picked up the lead. You are not the rottweiler, you are the wise owner of the rottweiler.

[00:15:55] Rachel: Next we’ve got E. That stands for exhale, pause and exhale. You know when you are frustrated about something, often we go, that does something. A long exhale actually activates a parasympathetic system. And side note, Jill Bolte-Taylor, who did that brilliant TED Talk called My Stroke of Insight, all about what happened when she had a left brain stroke and could only think in her right brain, it’s really worth checking out. We’ll put the link in the show notes. She’s written a book all about, all about this sort of thing, all about the neuroscience, the neuroanatomy of what’s going on in the brain.

[00:16:30] Rachel: She says, when we get stressed, when our amygdala triggers us into a reaction, well, those hormones that are going round, they only last for 90 seconds. So it’s like the snow globe is completely shaken up, but in 90 seconds that will settle down. Just 90 seconds. Unless you keep rethinking that thought. It’s actually, it doesn’t take long to consciously exhale, get yourself back into parasympathetic

[00:16:54] Rachel: Next, A, ask. Ask this question, and I have found this question to be the one that really helps. Whose side am I on? If I’m in a massive argument with my other half or my family, whose side am I on? I’m on their side, even though at the time everything in me wants to go, I’m the biggest victim. It is your fault. No, ultimately I’m on their side. I’m on our side.

[00:17:19] Rachel: Now if genuinely you are on your side, they’re on their side, then it is genuinely a conflict and probably something that you are not going to be able to resolve very easily, and you probably have to shift into something else completely. But we are talking about disagreements where there is a resolution. So just asking whose side am I on flips them from me versus them to us versus the problem, from defensive to collaborative, honestly, it’s been a game changer for me.

[00:17:49] Rachel: So L stands for label. IT E stands for exhale. A stands for ask, whose side am I on? And D, depersonalize it, because our ego comes out when we feel that our ourself is under attack. And one way to do this is to separate the person from the problem, and that is the first step in the interest space relational approach that they talk about in the wonderful book Getting to Yes, which is really great book all about negotiation.

[00:18:18] Rachel: Separate the person from the problem. If you could state what the problem is without any person involved, what would it be? If I use that really trivial thing about the dishwasher, if I was personalizing, I’d say none of my family ever entered the dishwasher, they leave me to do it. That’s a very personal problem. If I was to depersonalize it, it would be the dishwasher needs emptying every day. We need to find a fair way of allocating the work, right? Separating the person from the problem. Just doing that makes a world of difference.

[00:18:49] Rachel: And if you replace some of the judgey stuff, like, well, why did you do that? You replace it with curiosity, like, oh, that’s interesting. Help me understand your thinking behind that, you will get much, much further. You’ll stop their rottweilers from coming out. So you wanna get away from your rottweiler running the show to the owner running the show, when people can actually really breathe again. And that keeps the relationship safe long term.

[00:19:13] Rachel: And by the way, side note, if you want to learn a great model about how to structure these tricky conversations once you’ve calmed down your rottweiler, well, we’ve got a model called the High Five model, and we’ve got a masterclass coming up called How to Deal with Conflict at Work. Um, it’s full of scripts and examples, so it’ll help you navigate these conversations and, uh, manage both of your inner rottweilers through the whole conversation. So if you wanna join that, the link is in the show notes, or if you wanna catch up on the replay.

[00:19:42] Rachel: But the first step in making sure that you are having a disagreement, not a conflict, and not making the conflict turn bad is to manage yourself. Put your dog on a lead. We next need to get on the same branch and we need to help the other person calm their dog.

[00:19:57] Rachel: I was talking to a mediator recently and I was saying how do you know when you can really move on in the mediation process? And she said in her experience, nobody was ready to move on in a mediation unless they knew that their point of view was fully understood by the other party. Even if they still disagreed, they needed to know that they were understood.

[00:20:17] Rachel: And I was chatting to a friend who’s a medical litigator, and she said that actually what we don’t understand is most patients aren’t after compensation. Most patients just want to know that they have been heard and understood, and that the mistake is not going to happen again.

[00:20:34] Rachel: Because people don’t tend to move forward until they feel a couple of things. Firstly, that they are understood, and secondly, that they matter. Once they feel understood and they know that they matter, they’re gonna feel much safer and their dogs can calm down, their rottweilers can just lie down.

[00:20:53] Rachel: And being understood doesn’t mean you agree with that person. It just means you value them and you can see their point of view. And there are some ways that we can show that we’re sort of on the same branch as the other person. So body language helps. Slow down, drop your shoulders, breathe and like just model that with your body language.

[00:21:13] Rachel: You could use the word we rather than I and you, but we, you can reflect emotion back to them. Like I can see this has been frustrating. I can see that you care really deeply about getting this right. And you know what folks? This is simple communication skills. You can do this ’cause you do this with patients all the time. You know, summarizing, checking, telling them that you understand.

[00:21:35] Rachel: So you can name what matters. Yeah, I can see that you are really trying to protect your team. Or let me just summarize this. Is this what you feel? Tell me when I’m wrong. You can invite collaboration. Yeah, let’s work this one out together. And one thing, one of my friends is brilliant at doing, which I’m not, is just using humor to diffuse stuff, make a joke, But beware, if you’re no good at it like me, then don’t.

[00:21:55] Rachel: Because one thing that, uh, Dr. Claire Plumbly talks about a lot and do check out the recent podcast with her is co-regulation. And this is something I only found about really, really recently. I wish I’d known about this when my children were really young.

[00:22:09] Rachel: If you have a calm nervous system, you will settle theirs. We all know how stressed you feel just being in the same room as somebody who is angry. You are modeling safely to somebody, and if you are calm in the room, you’ll lead the room. This isn’t woo woo stuff. This is real leadership under pressure.

[00:22:29] Rachel: So when we’re trying to stop conflict going toxic, we need to calm our rottweilers. We need to become the wise owner. We need to get onto the same side, and we need to help them calm their own inner rottweiler.

[00:22:44] Rachel: Now there are some mistakes that we can make in all of this. Number one, and I fall into this all the time, is thinking just ’cause we are right we are safe and everyone else should agree. And often we are right, but that’s not gonna keep everybody else safe. You can still be right and wrong in how you deliver it.

[00:23:00] Rachel: We also believe that staying calm is a sign of weakness and there’s some people that just believe that the louder they shout, the more their voice will be heard. And I think it’s the opposite. Being firm doesn’t have to be fierce.

[00:23:15] Rachel: We also think we don’t have time to pause, we can’t come back to the conversation or we just have to plow on. And when I’ve just plowed on without taking the pause, it’s always got even worse.

[00:23:26] Rachel: We also can’t blame our amygdala. Oh, it wasn’t me. It was just my, my amygdala flaring up. And to some extent, yes, we can’t control the way we are reacting. And Dr. Steve Peters calls this your inner chimp in the Chimp Paradox.

[00:23:41] Rachel: So to some extent we can’t control our amygdala reaction. However, I always think to myself, well genuinely, if the king had been there, would you have said that or reacted like that? I think we probably could have controlled it, but we chose not to.

[00:23:55] Rachel: We also dismiss some of this as fluffy, as fluffy therapy type nonsense. And I think it is anything but fluffy. In fact, uh, a couple of years ago I was delivering a workshop exactly about all of this and our immediate amygdala response to a load of GP trainers. And after the session, one of the GPs came up to me, he said, I’ve been a GP, I’m 65, i’m retiring next year. I have never heard this before.

[00:24:20] Rachel: This is the sort of stuff we ought to be teaching in med school. In fact, before med school we should be teaching it at school, at preschool, we should all be learning about this. This is just simple emotional education and it would’ve saved me all types of bother, I tell you.

[00:24:37] Rachel: But the last thing we should do is blame ourselves. Your dog is barking because it cares. It cares about the other person that cares about you, but you need to care wisely.

[00:24:47] Rachel: So you can’t often stop your inner rottweiler from coming out, but you can decide how and when you put the lead on it. So this week, why don’t you try noticing one dog moment, one rottweiler moment. Lead yourself through it. Label it. Exhale. Ask whose side are you on? And depersonalize the situation.

[00:25:08] Rachel: Once you’ve got your rottweiler on the lead, you can show the other person that they matter. You can show them that you’ve understood them. And just see how the energy changes in that interaction. And if you are in our FrogXxtra membership, then you can use your CPD reflective workbook to jot down some of these moments. And what changed for you.

[00:25:28] Rachel: We are all walking our dogs, managing our rottweilers all of the time. It’d be really interesting to compare notes on how we manage to keep them on a lead this week. So email me and let me know any tips you’ve got, any questions about this, any successes you’ve had, what you have done and what has worked for you.

[00:25:45] Rachel: Because this stuff is really, really important. How many times in a conflict have you protected your pride and snapped at somebody else and you’ve won the battle, but you’ve lost the war, you’ve lost the relationship, or you chose to stay silent? You didn’t reply, but inside your head, you were secretly thinking what a wanker. The other person thought that they’d won the battle, but they really hadn’t, even though you hadn’t got any comeback for them.

[00:26:10] Rachel: Neither of those are any good, but if you are able to get your dog onto a lead, get on the same branch as the other person, you are protecting your boundaries and you are connecting with the other person. You are becoming calm, and actually you’ll become the person that people trust when things go badly wrong. People will know that they can disagree with you safely, and if people can disagree with you, you’ll get better outcomes all round.

[00:26:35] Rachel: I’m so glad when people have disagreed with me politely, and I am able to engage with that disagreement because it always, always, always leads to better decisions. So next time you can feel your ego barking like a rottweiler, don’t fight it, but don’t feed it. Put it on a lead. Take a breath. Remind the other person that they matter. Because people don’t move forward when they’re convinced that you are right. They move forward when they feel understood. And the first step is calm yourself and managing yourself.

[00:27:08] Rachel: So if you wanna learn how to do this in real life conversations, stay calm and clear and kind, even when things get heated, join me and Dr. Sarah Coope for our How to Deal with Conflict at Work masterclass. We will teach you the full High Five model, how to start and structure and really steer these difficult competitions so both sides feel heard. So you’ll leave with some language, you’ll leave with confidence, you’ll leave with a bit of a calmer rottweiler, even when the world is barking mad. So you can find the link in the show notes.

[00:27:36] Rachel: And this, in my opinion, is one of the most important things to get right. I know that conflict avoidance is one of the biggest overwhelm amplifiers for leaders in healthcare. If we can get this right, we don’t just get better outcomes for our patients, we feel much less stress, we avoid burnout, and we can work much happier.

[00:27:57] Rachel: If you have somebody that’s either flying off the handle or never actually saying what they really mean, then why don’t you share this with them? You can get this on YouTube, and if you’re watching on YouTube, don’t forget to hit subscribe so that you can be notified about new episodes and new videos, and I’ll see you for the next quick dip.