Conflict and Managing Personal Emotions

Yesterday my blog centered on managing conflict by establishing ground rules that help people work well together. Beyond that I did not go into strategies that individuals can be taught to use. To help you understand how the strategy I am about to present can work I will give a little personal background. I worked for a fitness company a number of years ago. Cocaine was a problem from the top down. Those who were not using coke were taking steroids. It was like working for Lex Luther. These folks were demanding moody and thought they were equal to superman.

One of the employees had a problem managing his temper. During one of his temper tantrums an old biker, I am talking the desperado kind, was working as a salesman for the fitness center. He watched the temper tantrum then walked over to his fellow employee and said, "If you ever do that again I will beat the crap out of you." These were not quite his exact words. Interestingly enough the person never displayed the loss of temper again. He became self aware after that. He was able to monitor his emotions, and decompress before losing control. In essence what the employee got was a crash course in something called biofeedback. He learned to be aware of the building up of negative emotions, thus he was able to modify the end product by calming down when he first noticed tension, thoughts of aggression, breathing picking up, and other signs of growing anger. The result was anger became a choice. He still expressed anger from time to time, but he was aware of the choice. Therefore, he controlled when he expressed anger.

Another strategy that is successful is to consider perception. There is program by Morty Lefko that centers on perception. The idea is the meaning that is given to events also forms our opinions and effects our emotions. See an event one way and a person can experience anger, another way and fear is the dominate emotion, or yet another and be unruffled by the event. This can be done quickly and with practice it can occur pretty much at the subconscious level.Imagine this scenerio, Joe at every team meeting notices Quincy is the first to speak and everyone goes along with his ideas. At first Joe feels inferior to Quincy. Later though Joe learns that perception is something that is under his control. Or as Morty would say, He gives the event meaning. Joe comes to see there can be a variety of reasons Quincy is vocal and people go along with him. It may be that he actually is keyed in on the project, and the others know it. It may also be that Quincy is insecure and so he is simply more vocal about his ideas and objections to others. It may also be that Quincy has an private agenda so he really is not more dialed in than anyone else he just knows what he wants. It could be that Quincy is better at verbalizing what is on his mind and the others out of laziness or intimidation going along with Quincy. None of these means Quincy has all the answers. There is a lot unknown about Quincy. The only thing that is known is he is vocal and people are going along with his ideas. The rest is assigned meanings. Meanings we give to the event. Morty has shown that we choose our perceptions and as we do we make decisions about how an event effects us. He has also demonstrated through his work with people that people can control their perception. The end result is an event does not have to make anyone feel inferior, angry, or afraid. Thus we can related better to others.

Tomorrow I will write about how we express ourselves can affect how well we and others work together.