Enjoy and USE!

P.S. Here is the transcript:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
… I get asked about. There you go. You can make sure you approve the recording for you guys. So everybody, give me a… We’re going to use this and transcribe this and use it for many other purposes, so everybody put on visual for a minute here a little bit, and or give me a verbal thumbs up that it’s okay to use your transcription in our blog posting, books and other things. Thumbs up, and or verbal, if you’re not going to be on video. I want hear you say that it’s okay to use you and you’re giving away your rights forever and all eternity, for all kinds of other things, for our conflict resolution.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I got thumbs up from everybody. Literally, if you ever do anything, by the way, that is a funny thing I was reading about. It’s not that important, you’d probably never get sued on this or anything, but lawyers are now recommending that when you do recordings on things, you say, “In this universe and elsewhere,” for getting approval from people. I know that that’s actually not really necessary, but some lawyers are recommending that. Because for example, when iTunes became something, people didn’t have permission to use recordings on media like that. And so, people were getting lawsuits presented for, “We didn’t give you permission to use my music on digital media.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Well, they had permission to use their music in all kinds of cases. Nobody won those lawsuits, but now lawyers are chicken. But anyway, don’t let lawyers run your companies. All right, good, so we’re going to record this and use it and transcribe it probably. But we only have an hour to cover something that could probably be a two, three, four day, five day seminar. And so this is covering a lot of ground. We’re covering ground that’s going to be covering conflict, not just… I think you’re going to find a lot of use for this, not just in your business, with interacting with your clients, and I’m going to be pretty agnostic in terms of clients. A lot of you guys are martial artists.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I really appreciate having our chiropractic clinic here as well too today, because if you have some questions, it’ll help us give a broad perspective. But I do believe a lot of you’re going to take this for your own interpersonal relationships and how you’re dealing with conflict. And I invite you to think about it that way, because if you can use some of the tools that we talk about today for your interpersonal relationships, it will help you expand, because who do you have the most conflict with? The people closest with you. The closer people are with you, the more conflict matters.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
The more you care about people, the more the conflict’s going to be important. The less you care about them, the less conflict’s important. So we’ll talk about this. And as I started out today, this could be a 12 hour workshop, and I will probably do some follow up workshops on the details of this. By the time we get to the real resolution part, we’re going to use up quite a bit of time, because you need to understand why conflict happens first, and that’ll help you with this. Another piece of this is many times you read about conflict resolution and there’s very simple rules for dealing with it. There’s very simple, “Well, do A, B and C.” In fact, there’s an ABCs of conflict resolution they teach teachers in schools.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And it is not so simple to really truly deal with conflict resolution, that’s why most of those systems don’t work. So we’re going to talk about why they don’t work and what the problems are with it. Anyway, let’s get started. I’ll probably talk fast, please interject with questions. Just get off mute, interject with questions so I can make sure you guys get covered what you want. I know you guys are all very smart and we’ll have some really good questions about this. For our martial artists, conflict is… this is the precursor to escalation into fighting, so we really need to be good at understanding this so that we have a good foundation for everything.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
For healthcare professionals, guess what the number one place for conflict is. In emergency rooms. Number one place for conflict, more than police officers. Now police officers get more severe conflict, of course. They get shot and killed and have worse problems. Healthcare professionals, number one place for conflict. This is a pretty serious thing in a lot of spaces that you wouldn’t expect. So let’s get to it. Get some paper out. This is what I always tell people before we do something more serious workshop, and you should do it with anything I teach. So get some paper out, we’re going to cover some things.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
You don’t need to read my bio, blah, blah, blah. This will be for something else. You guys know me, blah, blah, blah. Okay. The process of conflict. So this is what we’re going to cover today. And this block diagram is going to be the foundation for everything. So we’re going to cover the categories of conflict, what causes conflict and what are those categories? Really important. Am I just frozen or is it just me? Everybody good? Okay.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Good.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Categories of conflict. We’re going to cover bad conflict. The next step is going to be, what constitutes bad conflict, why conflict continues, and in your interpersonal relationships, why this happens. And also in work. The results of bad conflict. So why does it even cause any problems? I mean, you can argue with people, but what’s the issue with this? And then we’re going to go over good conflict. So you guys also personally resolve conflict really well, very frequently, but why or what are the components of it?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And so when you start resolving… We’re going to talk about resolution of conflict and how you do this really well, and then what the results of good conflict are. Why is it good and what motivation we have to resolve conflict. So here’s kind of the breakdown of that. We’re going to cover difference between conflict and bullying as well. You guys know me with bullying and my expertise there. So we’re going to make sure we understand the difference, because that’s really important. And then all these things, I kind of covered that.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So one piece of this, with conflict, sometimes if you guys have ever been in an argument with somebody or fight with somebody or conflict with somebody, and you go, “Geez, I can never get this resolved. Those people…” There’s that kind of person that you never can resolve a conflict with. Anybody you ever had that person? No. Is it just me? Yeah. So we’re going to talk, if we have time, a little bit on personality disorders. Now there’s a big distinction here. Don’t identify somebody as a personality disorder just because they don’t agree with you or just because you have a long conversation or conflict with them.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
But there are some people with personality disorders that conflict resolution tools will never work with. Okay, so everything I teach you today, we won’t have time to go in. There’s a whole nother series of how to deal with conflict with personality disordered people. I went through a whole day series on this. And that’s how to deal with the drama and manage and mitigate it. We’re not going to go through that today. There’s work you can do with those kind of people. And some of those people you’ll have in your lives. It actually covers 17% of the population.
Speaker X:
Geez.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That’s a lot, right? That means your clients, customers, people in your life, 17%. That’s a high number. As many as 17%. But let’s say it’s 10%, 10% of people, none of this stuff’s going to work with. So you’ve got to understand how to mitigate the drama. And we won’t have time for that today. That’ll be another thing you guys can… You guys will probably message me afterwards and go, “Please, can I have…” Because those are the ones that will drive you crazy, and we’ll talk about… So if some of these rules don’t work, that may be the what’s happening. Okay. Quickly, bullying versus conflict. Anybody remember the rules of what constitutes bullying?
Gerald Dunn:
Intent to do harm.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Right. Very good. Oh, it didn’t go up one, two, three. You were going to be perfect. I skipped it. Intended… I skipped it ahead. Master Dunn, you were perfect there. Intended to hurt, repeated, and there’s an imbalance of power. I skipped ahead for you. Sorry, you were going to be the star of the show. So there’s an… The key thing here is there’s an imbalance of power. So we’ve got to be careful distinguishing conflict versus bullying. And this is where teachers have a lot of trouble with this. So teachers in school, they think everything is either… When they get educated about bullying or bullying becomes a buzzword, they think everything is bullying.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
But a lot of times it’s just conflict. Kids are having an argument. Kids are fighting. Or adults are fighting or whatever. But if you’re like, for example, the boss at work, you have an imbalance of power automatically. If there’s no intention to hurt, it wouldn’t be considered bullying. So you’ve got to be really careful about the difference between bullying and conflict. And bullying’s a whole nother webinar, which we have a whole hour and a half webinar on that. If it’s not bullying, then usually it’s conflict. It’s missing these characteristics. If it’s bullying, the process of managing, it would need to be different. We then have to make sure the person that’s doing the bullying gets taken care of and managed, and the person being bullied is taken care of in a different way.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That’s a matter of comfort, management. The person that’s bullying gets reeducated. And then maybe there’s a consequence with that. That’s completely different management. You can’t use the tools that we’re talking about today in a bullying situation, just as if the personality disorder situation, these rules won’t work. Okay. Everybody with me on this, kind of how that would be different? So we can’t use what we’re talking about today in the bullying situation. That’s another process. Okay, couple little quotes. You guys can, if you email me later or you watch the recording, you can see some of these quotes.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So here’s some quotes about conflict. You do need conflict, and we’re going to talk about why conflict’s really important for processing things. Here’s a few quotes. I won’t spend time on these, but one of the things that people talk about is, “Well, we’re trying to get conflict down to zero.” But that’s not really true. There’s no growth that happens without conflict. If people don’t have conflict, so for parents with kids, and they try to reduce conflict, you see some of these parenting manuals, and they don’t… Master Sanborn, didn’t you say there was some family that you know that… What was the example?
Laura Sanborn:
Yes, sir. My sister’s in-laws try to use positive affirmations rather than correcting kids.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And how did that go? So if they’re climbing up the walls and pulling books off the shelves, what do they say?
Laura Sanborn:
Something like, “Oh, you should read those books rather than pulling them off the wall. You should sit on the couch rather than climbing the furniture and climbing up the bookcases.” Just giving them something else to do that doesn’t solve the problem of a kid who’s tearing your house apart. And it went horrible for a whole weekend.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah. So that would work if it worked, but if it doesn’t work and the kid says, “Yeah, but I’d rather throw the books, it’s pretty fun to throw the books,” then that wouldn’t be a very good… You can see how that kid wouldn’t grow up. They would get older, but they wouldn’t grow up. They wouldn’t learn how to manage conflict. Preschool ethnographic studies will show this too. Schools that have the kids manage their own problems, but also correct them when they’re getting out of hand, do a lot better than schools who are over-controlling or under-controlling.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
People get stuck in developmental stages if there’s zero conflict. This is for child studies. They get stuck in early developmental stages when the parents are not managing conflict properly and so on. So there’s all kinds of issues. This is a big one. This is in work environments and in personal environments. So a lot of times we see problem happens, doesn’t get dealt with, and because everybody’s upset. So the solution is nobody talks. And we’ll talk about what this is called later. But so everybody’s upset, so they can’t really solve the problem. Problem just gets deferred. But never gets [inaudible 00:12:24]. So what happens?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Resentment, problems, unresolved issues come up, and then people get mad, people get mad, but it never gets resolved. So in it encourages future… Resolving conflict creates continued resolution of… Resolving conflict creates better tools for resolving conflict in the future. Unresolved conflict devolves relationships and causes more problems because you’re always pissed off about the thing you didn’t resolve before. So I think you guys can see what the issue is. If there’s more conflict… And John Gottman who’s a relationship therapist, and I don’t mean to keep bouncing to relationships, but successful relationships, and this applies at work too, the guy does work, not so much customer management stuff, but also inner relationships at work.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
But when they measure successful relationships, they don’t have any less conflict than relationships that are about to get divorced. It’s about the same amount of conflict. It’s just that the ones who are successful resolve their conflict better. They have about the same amount of conflict, but they resolve it more frequently. Okay, so that’s something to think about. All right. So here’s some data on this. This is good for you guys to note, especially you guys doing any, I think Master Reeve, you’re going to do some business work with some of this.
Diane Reeve:
Yeah, sure.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah. Managers spend 25% of their management time resolving workplace con conflicts. Isn’t that amazing? Dr. Hurley, you’d probably agree with that, right. 25% of your time resolving workplace conflicts, that’s a huge number. 67.5% of marriages failed because of a breakdown in communication. Here’s one that was a big stat. 60 to 80% of performance problems were about relationship and conflict issues, not from competency or training. Okay. And then here’s the big one. This is about how much money is lost to conflict. That’s $16,000 for each employee. $16,000 for each employee that had low morale.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So a low morale employee costs you $16,000. That’s an average. Okay. So here’s the process. This is what we’re going to learn today. And the graph looks complicated, but we’re going to break it down and it’s going to make some sense. It’d be pretty simple once we get down, I promise you. But we’re going to go fast, so you may have to rewatch this. And I’m going to do some… I’m going to probably do some follow up work with this. I’m not sure what format, but we’re going to go pretty fast today, but please ask questions. We’ll try to stay on time. So first, categories of conflict, what causes conflict? There’s a few things.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Four main things. Preference problems. So this means we have legitimate differences of opinion. I like it this way, you like it that way. I want to do something, and you want to do something else. That’s pretty straightforward, right? I just want to do something. This could be your employee want to do one way, you want to do it another way. Now you’re the boss, you could pick a different way, but resolving… We’ll talk about how do you resolve this in a minute. These are just identifying the types of problems you have. Or you and your spouse, I want it this way, you want it that way. You and a and a client, I want it this way, you want it that way. And how you resolve that. Okay.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Perception problems. So these are inaccuracies. A lot of times these come out because of communication issues or misunderstandings. We’re not communicating clearly. Guys, this is like in my counseling work, this is the number one thing. People just don’t do a very good job of communicating well. Is my audio going okay, because I keep seem to [inaudible 00:16:27] freezing?
Laura Sanborn:
Yes, sir.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Audio is consistent, okay. I won’t stress about it then. So misunderstandings, communication. And believe me, the number one phrase I hear that people make a mistake with, you probably should write this down, “I hear what you’re saying, but.” So whenever you say, or the other person says, “I hear what you’re saying but,” the words I hear what you’re saying mean you didn’t hear what they were saying. Whenever you say the words, “I hear what you’re saying, but” or, “I hear what you’re saying,” and then say something else, nobody heard what anybody was saying.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So this is a common thing with misperception. What do we teach in life skills of leaders, in the class, and when we teach [inaudible 00:17:15] is, reflect what they said instead of saying that phrase. So this is a really, really common one, okay. Let me show you the categories of conflict. This is from that John Gottman guy. Oh, this is process problems I’m going to show you. So bad conflict problems, and we’re going to… Bad conflict traps. So buttons getting pushed, people irritating other people. And by the way, I find this a lot in our schools and our businesses, somebody comes in and they say something like, “Hey, I want to cancel, or I don’t like your service,” or something like that. And it upsets us, right? I mean, we get upset because that happens.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That can be a button getting pushed because we become defensive about it. Or somebody complaining about something. This is a business reason. I’m going to show you a little video that talks about four kinds of process problems. So here we go. Let’s see if this plays pretty good, unless… Okay, let me see, I think I got to… Bear with me a sec. Oh, I need to enable the video, and we’re back.
Video:
You’re so selfish.
Video:
What an idiot.
Video:
It’s not my fault we’re always late.
Laura Sanborn:
We’re not seeing the video.
Video:
Forget it.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Oh, you’re not seeing the video?
Laura Sanborn:
No, sir.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Sorry. You heard it.
Laura Sanborn:
Yes, sir.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I was partway there. Okay, here we go. Thank you for letting me know that. All right, here we go. Third time’s a charm.
Video:
You’re so selfish.
Video:
Ugh, what an idiot.
Video:
It’s not my fault we’re always late.
Video:
Forget it.
Video:
Criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Dr. John Gottman calls these negative communication patterns, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, because they’ll lead to the end of your relationship. In fact, he can predict this relationship failure with over 90% accuracy if the behavior isn’t changed. So what can you do? Well, at the Gottman Institute, we understand you might not even know you’re communicating this way, or you might not know how to control it. But if you practice the following four research based antidotes, there is hope for your future.
Video:
Criticism attacks the character of the recipient. Instead of focusing on a specific behavior, the antidote to criticism is to talk about your feelings using I statements, then express a positive need. Contempt is an expression of superiority that comes out as sarcasm, cynicism, name calling, eye rolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humor. Contempt is the greatest predictor of relationship failure and must be eliminated. The antidote to contempt is to treat one another with respect and build a culture of appreciation within the relationship.
Video:
Defensiveness is self-protection through righteous indignation or playing the victim. Defensiveness never solves the problem and is really just an underhanded way of blaming your partner. The antidote to defensiveness is to accept responsibility, even if only for part of the conflict. Stonewalling occurs when the listener withdraws from the conversation without resolving anything. It takes time for the negativity created by the first three horsemen to result in stonewalling. But when it does, it can become a habit. The antidote to stonewalling is to break for at least 20 minutes, calm down, then return to the conversation. Spare your relationship from certain destruction. Learn more about eliminating the four horsemen by visiting…
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay, you can go there if you like. So anyway, those are all relationship ones, but we could probably… There we go. We could probably categorize those as well for each one having a business one. So criticism, contempt, stonewalling, defensiveness. I think defensiveness happens a lot if somebody criticizes us in the business, right? So it’s real easy to go, “Well yeah but,” and then we start having a reaction to that. So we’ll talk about what to do right, but that can be something that pushes our buttons a little bit and gets us upset, or we want to respond to it. So we’ll talk about that a little bit later.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So let’s, oops, I didn’t… Process problems. The next one is pressure problems. I’ll talk about it because apparently we didn’t get… There we go, pressure problems. So pressure problems is the fourth one. And pressure problems may not mean anything’s wrong, you’re not specifically doing anything wrong, but it means that the environment or something bad is happening. You’re stressed about money, you’re stressed about new… Maybe the client is stressed about money, the client’s stressed about new… Maybe they’re stressed about… They’re just tired and now they act like a jerk. So somebody acts bad because of one of those categories.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So the four categories again were, if we look at the chart, preference, perception, process, and pressure. Those are different ways that might initiate some conflict, so something bad is happening. And pressure is a common one. You’re in the middle of doing something at your business, and then somebody comes to you and says something and then you react. And you may not react as good as you might want to, and then it starts escalating in conflict. So now we’re going to talk about… Any questions about that? It kind of broadly covers four categories, but it can mean a lot of things. The reason that… I’m sorry, let me go back for a second.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
The reason this is important, is if you can identify which one it is when you’re in the middle of it, and we’re trying to focus on our business now, but also in your personal life, if you can identify which one of these it is, it helps slow you down a little bit in understanding either why they’re upset or having a problem or you’re upset or having a problem. If you can identify, “Hey, this is a…” we just have a preference issue or we have a process issue that we’re… That was defensiveness. I was shown defensiveness or they were, “Oh okay.” I can slow down a little bit, and then I can maybe make a different choice about what to do next.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And the choice can be responding instead of reacting, and then we can turn into the good conflict that we’ll talk about how to resolve. Okay, questions? No. Okay. I’m going fast. Next one is bad conflict. So bad conflict is this box. And when I show people this box, almost everybody can relate to this. This is when something bad happens, you’re upset, they’re upset and something happens and there’s a reaction. And then it pushes somebody’s button. Somebody gets upset about it. And one of four things are going to happen, but mainly, there’s going to be somebody’s button pushed and then they’re either going to get upset, they’re going to shut down, they’re going to, in their… in the fight flight freeze situation.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Can anybody relate to that? Buttons get pushed, the other person gets upset, you get upset. The parent gets mad. The client gets mad. The student gets mad. Whatever happens. And look, there’s no humans that don’t have buttons, we all have those. We all have things that get us upset. And these are based in normal human psychology. We’ve all got reactions, and they’re reactions to danger. These are like you’re back in the stone age and there’s a saber tooth tiger running, and you have a reaction. This is normal human reactions. A lot of them are built in. They’re built into our normal psychology. And so that’s why they, for the most part… I think I talked to somebody yesterday who was…
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I think it was one of you guys, yesterday, and I heard the words, “Well, when that happens, I just can’t help but react to it.” And yeah, that’s why we want to understand the perceptions and slow down a little bit to reacting, to get out of this trap, because this is a trap that we can get into. The reactions… Oh, let’s see. Let me scoot ahead here. And everybody knows this one. So I’m going to scoot ahead to this what the reaction can be. So there’s four kinds of traps, and you can, or three kinds, sorry, you can identify. One is, and you should write these down, one is the loud one. You could figure out which one you guys, you usually end up in the loud one. That’s when everybody’s in fight, right?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
It escalates. You’re upset. They’re upset. It keeps on escalating. It keeps on escalating. It keeps on escalating. It keeps on escalating. And then it ends up being a big fight, and it probably… Somehow it ends when everybody gets tired out. The silent version is, and this one’s, I think, is almost kind of worse, there’s some conflict and you know it’s not going to be resolved, and then everybody retreats. And that would be okay if your normal operation would be… And by the way, in business this happens a lot, where somebody doesn’t want to train or somebody doesn’t want to participate or somebody doesn’t want to come and see you as a patient, and they just don’t show up anymore.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That’s a version of silent, bad conflict. They weren’t happy with service. They just never showed up anymore. You never talked to them again. And they just went away. You don’t even have a way to connect with them anymore. I would rather make sure we’re active in connecting with them. But in interactions with employees or staff or people, or people in your personal life, it would be okay if you had a conflict and then later you talked about it and resolved it and everything was okay. That would be okay. But if you withdraw and then it never gets resolved, well, it got solved because we never really talked about it, we never really did anything about it. That always leads to resentment and issues [inaudible 00:27:55].
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And a lot of times I hear, “Well yeah, but it… No it’s okay. We just dealt with it. It’s okay.” Often it isn’t. So, that’s a silent version. And then there’s the mixed, and that one is one person continues to escalate and the other person withdraws. And this can switch. This person here finally gets fed up and they start fighting back again, and the other person withdraws. And this can switch back and forth. So there’s the four versions, loud, silent, and mixed. Anybody relate to bad conflict, where this happens and you get upset? Maybe you guys never do that, but I know that’s not true.
Laura Sanborn:
Is there a fourth one, because that’s three?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Right. And sometimes this happens in business. Parent comes in and they’re upset, they’re loud. Our job first, is identify what kind of problem we have. Okay?
Laura Sanborn:
Sir, that was three. Is there a fourth one? You say there’s [inaudible 00:29:02].
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
No, there were three. I started, I said four, but then I went back to three. There’s three conflict trap versions. So the trap is if we escalate, if we both go silent, or if it’s mixed.
Laura Sanborn:
Okay. Got it.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay. So the results of bad conflict are… The problem with it is we have unresolved problems… Need a different color. Unresolved problems, more distance. So then we don’t talk again. You get less work done. And mainly, this is a big deal here, is broken trust. Broken trust, you’re not going to trust the person. Okay, so those are the biggest things. And the more times these things happen, the less your trust is going to… the more you’re going to have unresolved issues. Okay. So now we’re going to go to… go back here, to good conflict. Remind you guys of the whole picture.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So here’s the whole picture again. We went through categories of conflict. We did this. We went through bad conflict. And now we talked about results of bad conflict. So we went through here. This was super fast. Okay guys, we went super fast through all this. Now we’re going to start talking about how to resolve the conflict. Questions so far? I’m trying to stay on track. This is what we like to spend a lot of time on, but for our time here. Okay, so to have good conflict… Now, you guys have all had good conflict before. You’ve all resolved stuff with people. And when you resolve stuff with people, it’s all worked out fine. You’ve either compromised or you’ve come up with a better solution or things have gone good.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
We want to identify this process and where it’ll help you identify where things might have gone bad and slipped into this bad conflict trap. Let’s see how that is going to work. So there’s five prerequisites for reasoning and having good conflict. And these would be important maybe to write down and make some notes on. One is humility. So that humility prerequisite is, and this one’s the hardest one I think, is being able to say, “I could be wrong, you could be right. Let’s talk.” The hardest time to do this is if you’re in the middle of conflict, you’re in the middle of having a fight and being able to say the words, “I could be wrong, you could be right. Let’s talk.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Now, it’s important to remember, and the hardest thing for people to get is this doesn’t mean I’m saying I’m wrong and you’re right. I could be wrong. You could be right. Let’s talk. You don’t even have to say that out loud. You just have to operate this way a little bit. I could be wrong. You could be right. Let’s talk. Having humility. The second is awareness. So the awareness question is I see where I’m wrong. Being aware that it’s possible for me to see where I’m wrong. Now, [inaudible 00:32:22] personality disorders don’t have these tools. They would always think they’re right. They don’t understand. Like somebody with narcissistic personality disorder, “Well, of course, I’m right all the time.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And that term, by the way, is overused a lot. It’s often overused because you just don’t like that person and they disagree with you, so they’re narcissist. They just don’t agree with you. Or you argue with them a lot. So be careful spreading those terms around when I throw them out, but awareness would be I can observe that I’m wrong sometimes. I’m observing that I’m wrong. I see where I’m wrong. Okay, that’s another tool. Sometimes you have to be able to see where you’re wrong. Doesn’t mean you’re always saying you’re wrong. It just means I can observe that I’m wrong.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Responsibility is… My clicker goes. Okay. Man, I’m skipping ahead. All right. It bothers me when I’m wrong. So one of the other tools is if you’re responsible, “It bothers me when I do make a mistake.” Somebody with a personality disorder, wouldn’t bother them. This is a little bit extreme example, because we don’t see these very frequently, really uncommon, but somebody with like a sociopathic personality disorder or a sociopath, not a personality disorder, that would be an extreme example. But somebody with a borderline personality disorder, it wouldn’t bother them if they’re wrong. If they’re wrong, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference. So awareness, “I see where I’m wrong.” Responsibility is, “If I do make a mistake, it bothers me.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So there’s some concern if I do make a mistake. Empathy would be, “It bothers me when I hurt you.” These definitions are pretty important. So it bothers me. These aren’t definitions, these are just statements you could make about it. So it’s the capacity for participating in another person’s loss or feelings. I understand what they’re feeling. And the last one is really important. It’s reliability. So I have an understanding when I’m wrong, I’ll change. And you can believe that if I’m wrong, I’ll make a change. So these five things are prerequisites for being able to resolve conflict on both sides. And all we can do is take responsibility for ourself on these things, is I could be wrong, you could be right, let’s talk.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
To me, that’s the number one. I see where I’m wrong. Let’s see… And then let’s have conversations. Responsibility, it bothers me if I’m wrong. It bothers me when I hurt you when I’m wrong. I’ll change. So those are the five prerequisites. Now this doesn’t mean that you are admitting guilt or wrongness or anything to resolve conflict. Obviously, if you’re resolving a conflict, a client comes in and they’re bitching about something and complaining about something, it’s your company, you can decide where you’re making a mistake or where you’re doing something wrong if you are. But you have to run your company the way you want. You’re going to make them happy, but you’re going to work on resolving the conflict. This allows you to have some tools to have the conversation. Go ahead, Dr. Hurley, you had a question.
Dr. Emily Hurley:
I have a question. Is personality disorders encompassing or related to people that are considered on the autism spectrum?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
No.
Dr. Emily Hurley:
Because I would recognize that some people that would struggle with some of these things might overlap with that kind of category as well.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yes. That’s a great question. That’s a great question. It’s a fantastic question, in fact, and a really good point. So somebody with a personality… Personality disorders and autism spectrum is a totally different diagnosis and they have different characteristics. However, your point being, that could somebody that had a diagnosis of autism, may they have trouble with some of these reasoning skills? The answer is yes, they may have trouble with… They wouldn’t have trouble necessarily with any of these reasoning skills, but they may have trouble with the conversation.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So it may be important to understand that when you’re having a conversation. They wouldn’t necessarily have any problem with humility or awareness or responsibility, empathy, or reliability. There’s nothing that says somebody with… And when we talk about autism, this would be a longer conversation, but that’s a set of characteristics that we kind of bundle together and give a diagnosis to so that we can provide services, help, and identify some things that we can then do some training with them. And they can have some ways to identify, and skills that they can work on. But it’s not really anything really wrong or bad, or having a… It isn’t really a disorder in a sense at all.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
With the personality disorders, they certainly are. I mean, they need some specific therapy. And these things become deficits that they have to overcome. In autism spectrum these wouldn’t be deficits, but getting to the point where there might be some communication breakdowns, that would be the issue. So getting through the communication breakdown, there may be some issues there, but they wouldn’t have any deficits in these areas, per se. Does that make sense? So there’s a couple differences.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
It’d be more like, I don’t want to use this example because it wouldn’t be appropriate in the volume or magnitude, but let’s say somebody had a hearing deficiency, totally different from autism, but somebody had a hearing deficiency. I mean, it would resolve conflict, while I might have to repeat myself if they had a hearing deficiency. There would be a communication breakdown there, so we may have to take that into consideration when we’re resolving conflict, so we may…
Dr. Emily Hurley:
What I’m understanding for example, would be like a person that may have autism, some might struggle with empathy, but not because they don’t care if they hurt you, but they might have trouble recognizing that they’ve hurt you. So it’s more of like, it can be more of the connection piece, not the inability to feel humility or have awareness. But just like you said, maybe the social aspect.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
No, I don’t think any… There’s nothing in normal diagnostic criteria with autism that would have a… that somebody with autism would have trouble recognizing they hurt you. They might be overly… They would in the sense, maybe somebody, maybe a child with autism might be extra focused on the thing that they’re playing with, right. So they’re extra focused on the thing that they’re playing with, so then they might not recognize they hurt you because they were focused on the thing they were playing with. Just used a kid because that’s a really good example. They’re extra focused on the thing they’re playing with, they might not recognize they stepped on your toes.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay. Well, in that regard, that’s true. But then if you say, “Hey, you step on my toes. Look.” They go, “Oh crap. I stepped on your toes.” Then they would notice that for sure. And there wouldn’t be an… It’s not an empathy deficit, it’s a recognition deficit. If that makes sense. So in the example of hearing, if there’s a hearing deficit and they didn’t notice that because of the hearing that they heard you coming and they ran into you, because they didn’t hear you coming or whatever, and you said, “Stop,” and they ran into you, that would also be a hearing… It wouldn’t be a awareness deficit. It would be a hearing deficit.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So I think you’re making a really good point though. And I think that’s something to consider. In all of these, there may be difficulty resolving conflict. So what she’s saying is really apropo. It may not be one of these issues, and we want to be careful, there may be things that we then need to be aware and consider. Somebody with the deafness example, if somebody had hearing difficulty, well, it would be harder to have a conversation with, for them too, and so we have to manage that if we’re managing some of these skills to have conversations. And maybe they get frustrated. If you watch a few, that CODA movie that just got all the Academy Awards, there was a lot of frustration there in that movie.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I didn’t see the movie, but I saw the trailer. The whole trailer was the frustration with the child that was hearing and the parents weren’t, and so that escalated some frustration because the parents couldn’t hear. And so there were additional conflicts because of that. That’s an interesting, a really good point. It’s a really good point. Let’s move on from that. And we’ll come back to that if we have time, but that’s an excellent point. Does that kind of cover what you were saying, ma’am? Dr. Hurley, does that kind of cover what you’re saying?
Dr. Emily Hurley:
Yeah, I think so. I don’t want to derail you from the main topics, but yeah.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah, let’s get on it, because we could go on… That’s one of my favorite topics too, so I could go on for a long time on that, bullying, and some of these other ones. So these are five skills, and it’s important like a lot of these, our awareness on these skills, are important to point out so that we get a good… we are identifying where we’re maybe breaking down our own skills or missing some of these skills when we try to resolve conflict. These are the skills, I want to be clear, we need to have so that we can resolve conflict well. If the other people or persons don’t have these skills while we’re trying to resolve conflict, if they have them it’s great, if they don’t have them, it may or may not be critical.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
It’s more critical that you have them when you’re trying to resolve conflict. Okay, so how does this work? So good conflict. Again, good conflict is the steps that we’re going to follow. So the first thing with good conflict and where the breakdowns usually occur, and we’re going to go super fast through this for our time that we have available, this is an order, so first step that we have is going to be… There’s a different color here. First step that we need to do whenever there’s conflict, is to narrow the problem. So if you’re helping somebody, maybe you’re mediating a problem between two people or you’re dealing with it yourself, first step is narrow to one issue.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Now this is this where things break down a lot, because if you’re talking to somebody about something, I say, “Well, I have a problem with X.” They say, “Well, you know what, that’s true. And I have a problem when you do X, I want Y.” That sound familiar? I don’t like it when you do this. Yeah, but I don’t like it because you do Y. Okay. Well, we have to narrow it down to one thing at a time. The biggest issue that comes up is that it’s thing one, and then we are trying to also measure thing two. So we have to narrow things down. Okay well, let’s deal with that first thing first, and then we’ll talk about the other thing. So narrowing things down to one topic is step number one.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I can’t emphasize that again. If you’re trying to deal with multiple topics, it’s very hard to resolve conflict. So one topic at a time. The second piece is the empathy piece. This is two. And empathy, and we’ve talked about this in other contexts, is about validation. And the validation skill in empathy is a lot of reflection, paraphrasing, and on both sides. So what this means is making sure we don’t use the phrase, “I understand what you’re saying, and this is my side.” It’s making sure we talk about, we reflect what the other person is saying, so that both people get heard. Before you can resolve conflict, both people need to be heard. That means both people need to rephrase what the other person said.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And sometimes this is very difficult. When I do my counseling work, I’ll ask… It’ll be something… I had one example where a lady, a man and wife, they were married and they just would not do this part, and I’ll use this example because I’ll never forget it, and I said, “Well okay.” She had a water bottle there. I said, “Okay, let’s try it with you and me.” I said, “Can you just rephrase what I said? I would like you to give me the water bottle. Just repeat that after me. Just say, ‘I’d like you to give me the water bottle.'” And she’d say, “Here,” and she handed me the water bottle. I say, “No, I’d just like you to say the words I’d like you to give me the water bottle.” And she said, “Here, the water bottle.” She just handed me the water bottle.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I said, “Okay well, okay, let me see if you can do that. Would you ask me for my water bottle?” And she goes, “Would you give me your water bottle?” And she said that. And I said, “Okay. So what you’d like is for me to give you my water bottle.” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay,” and I handed her the bottle. So we kind of did this back and forth. And she said, “Okay.” And I said, “Great. I’d like you to do exactly what we just did.” So then I said it back to her, and she just… Is everybody getting me? I said, “I would like you to give me your water bottle,” And she just handed me the water bottle. And she just could not get the idea of reflecting back what I just said it. It took about 25 minutes for her to do that, just with me, let alone her husband.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So this is a very difficult thing for people to get. With you guys in business, it shouldn’t be quite as hard because you can be the, I don’t want to say the adult, but kind of the adult in the situation. But a lot of times we don’t take the time to do that. So very much, we think that we know what they’re saying because we’re the professionals and we’ve heard, “I want to cancel, or I want this, or I’m upset about this client, or I’m upset about this service I got, or I’m upset about something.” You’ve heard that 15 times, 15 million times. So you just, “Okay. I processed that. I understood it. I know exactly what she’s saying. I know she’s upset about this.” Or I know that they’re upset about price, or I know this, so I think I know what they’re saying. And then you just barrel ahead without validating what’s going on.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Reflecting it, make sure they understand that you’re connected with them. So this piece of this can’t be skipped. It can’t ever be skipped. You should circle this about six times. You can never skip the piece of making sure the other person hears the whole part of what they said back to them. You’re always going to think that’s extra work, but it’s not wasted work. They have to hear what they said back to them, or they’re never going to feel like you connected with them. Now sometimes the challenge is to get them to do it back to you. Yeah, some of you smiled when I said that. Sometimes the challenge is to get them to do it back to you, but you start with it and then we can work on the other side. Okay, anybody have any questions about the validate piece?
Gerald Dunn:
Could I make one comment on that? I know sometimes people don’t actually know exactly what they said, they’ll misspeak. And so this way, when you reflect it back to them, you can make sure… it also tells them exactly what they said, because sometimes they don’t realize exactly what they said.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That’s right. Well, and I’ll tell you another piece of that. Sometimes what you heard is not what you think you heard. I mean, I know we’re convinced that we heard everything perfectly, but it’s not always that way. That’s the problem, is you think you heard it perfectly, but you damn well didn’t a lot of the time. What percent of language is verbal? About what, 7%, and 93% is nonverbal in other ways. So that combination of that is really important, but don’t even think about it that way. It’s about validation. It’s making sure they know I may disagree, but I understand your position. So the term here is I may disagree. That would be a good one to write down. I may disagree. And you don’t have to say, “I may disagree.” I just need to understand your position. I want to understand your position.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
That doesn’t mean you agree. You don’t have to agree. Okay? This part is the most important part of what we’re doing today. Everybody with me? All right, the next piece, once you’ve done that, now everybody… What should happen is the tone calms down. You understand them and hopefully they understand you. Now solving it. By the way, in business, it may not always work this way, because you may have to… I teach you guys for martial arts. Sometimes you have to say, “We don’t cancel for any reason whatsoever.” So you make sure that that’s out there. And then we understand each other’s position. So they need to just understand you. It’s not going to be… They need to understand that too, that there may be some tools that you use in this validation stage that’s actually to calm them down.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Because it’s not a negotiation there, it’s to calm them down. That’s the validation stage. So they’re clear on the position. You’re clear on the position. I understand how everything is in everything, but calm them down. Okay? So solve, let’s talk about the solve. Now this is the humility stage. I might be wrong, you might be right, and let’s talk. So in the solve stage, we’re going to have five possible outcomes. Five possible outcomes, and these are really important. And the first one is pretty obvious. The first one is a win-win situation. First one is win-win. You win, I win, we’re going to come up with a better solution for everybody. You win, I win, better solution for everybody. Okay.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Second one, and it’s best of both, “I understand where you’re coming from, you understand where I come from, we’re going to come up with a better solution for everybody.” That sounds great, right? Everybody’s good. And if we understand each other, we weren’t fighting, now we understand where we’re coming from, we come up with win-win. That’s perfect. The second one is the compromise. That’s what everybody says. Marriage relationships, people, business, everything’s about compromise. That’s okay. Win-win’s better. Compromise is second. I get most of what I want, you get most of what you want. That’s pretty good. I get most of what I want. And you get most of what you want. Everything’s okay. We’re pretty happy with that. It’s a compromise.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
The third one here is what’s really important, third, fourth, and fifth one, because you have to know which direction to go in this. Your way, I can’t win. It’s got to be one or the other. It’s going to be one way or the other. Might be, we’re going to go on vacation, we’re picking which way we’re going to go on vacation. It’s either going to be Florida or California. It can’t be both. It’s going to be Florida or California. I mean, a win-win could be we go to California and Florida, and we go on a two week vacation, we do both. But maybe we can only afford to go… We only have one week off, we can only go to one. We’re going to go to California or Florida, and one of us is going to win. Okay.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
On this side, your way, we’re going to do it your way, it’s acceptance. I’m willingly accepting it. I’m willingly accepting it. It’s fine. I’m happy with it. I’m going to have a good time. I’m going to be excited about it. This way is, “I resent it. Fine. We’ll do it your way.” Those are two completely different solutions. It’s going to be your way. Fine. I don’t like it. Okay. Two different solutions. Other way is acceptance, “Okay, well, I’ll get the next one.” Now that’s a… I’ll get the next one, we go to Florida next year as a compromise. That’s the partly both. But there’s only one solution. We’re going to paint the house green instead of yellow, probably don’t get two solutions. They’re not going to paint it green next year. Maybe, I don’t know how that would be. It’s only one way. Yellow’s going to be it.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I’m going to be happy with yellow. I’m not going to learn to live with it, that’s that’s resentful. Learn to live with it is resentful. I’m going to accept it. It’s important to know the difference, acceptance versus resentment. Two completely different things. Toleration is resentment. I’m tolerating it, that’s resentment. We don’t want that. Acceptance is, I’m given that to the situation. Master Sanborn’s going to pick out these new wood floors for the school. I’m accepting whatever she picks. If I go there and I don’t like them, she picked them out. If I go there and I don’t like them, it’s acceptance, man. There is no anything. I am happy with the wood floors. Even if I hate the wood floors, I’m happy with the wood floors. Whatever she picks is it. Okay?
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
The next solution is wait. So we may get into conflict, we’re going to wait. We’re going to wait to decide. So the good version of that is it’s mutual consent and we have a time to bring it back up. The good way to deal with that is there’s a time to bring it back up. It’s mutual consent. We agree, “Okay, we can’t resolve this now. We’re going to bring this back up in an hour.” Remember the Gottman video, it’s going to be 20 minutes. Reasonable amount of time. There are some things maybe need to be a week later, or there’s some constraint that makes it different, but whatever, but a short amount of time to bring it back up, it’s mutual consent.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
It’s not, “I can’t deal with this now. I’m going to leave now. I can’t. Forget you.” Okay, not that, but mutual consent. The bad way to deal with that is there’s no expectation to resolve. That was that silent version of the bad trap, right? The silent version is no expectation to resolve. Can’t read my writing there. You stop talking about, don’t bring it back up. You hope it goes away. That’s a wait version. And then there’s the… The last one is the no way. You’re just not going to do it. We’re just not going to go on vacation. We’re not going to paint the house. We’re just not going to do it. So this is about focus. And you may just decide not to paint the house. That’s okay. And you decide you’re going to agree to disagree. That’s okay. We can just agree to disagree. We’re not going to paint the house.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Maybe you’re not going to have a kid. Maybe it’s a couple and you’re not going to have a kid. Okay, we’re going to agree to disagree. Now, if you’re not going to have a kid and you’re going to accept that and that’s the way it’s going to be, okay, we’re just not going to do it. Fine, people do that. That’s a pretty good example of what could happen. And then you’re going to have a good relationship, good family together. But if you decide not to have a kid and you’re pissed off and resentful, then you’re going to focus on that, focus on the bad, versus agree to disagree, focus on the good. Now this sounds simple, but understanding the different sides of this is really important. You have to be clear, “Okay, we just need to be clear on focusing on the good stuff.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And the same is true in the business decisions on this. The same is true on the business decisions. If we’re not going to grow into another unit, we’re not going to open another school, we’re not going to open another business. We’re not going to do this. Okay, great. Then we’re going to focus on the one unit we have. Or we are going to open another unit. The no way decision, I guess, would be better, we’re not going to open another school. Great, we’re going to be really focused on the one we’ve got. Cool. That’s perfect. That’s what we’re going to do, and be really, really focused. That’s the solution that we’re going to have.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay. Or we should have always done that. We really should have done that. I’m really pissed off that we didn’t do that. This is internal issues too. Any questions on the solve one? I find this very helpful that we have these five broken out. Which one is it? And then which direction on these last three are we going to be on? Are we going to be on the acceptance one, the if we’re going to delay our decision, are we going to have a focus time to come back to it, to make sure that we resolve it, or are we going to have… and we’re going to agree to disagree if we decide not to do something, or are we going to be on the pissed off resentful side? Good? Any questions on that? Nope. Good. You guys are good with no questions, because we had a lot to cover.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay, on the last two, these are really important. The last two are the ones that people blow off. You talk about a solution, you say things are good, everything’s fine. But the last two are the ones that people mess up. Remember reliability, that means I am… The responsibility or reliability about are I have some focus on changing and being consistent about changing. So specify means you’re going to have an actual who does what, so having an actual plan for things. Who does what? When are we going to do stuff? How’s this going to go down? Sometimes, by the time you get to the solve part, you’re like tired out, but you need to finish it with who does what? And then, the adjustment is what about when it goes wrong, especially when you’re dealing with conflict.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
This is probably the most important thing that people mess up. This is a big thing people mess up. So yeah, this is a great idea. We’ve got a good solution. You’re going to take the trash out and I’m going to do the laundry. That’s awesome. What about when you forget to take the trash out? What’s going to happen then? Now I’m going to be off and I’m never going to do the laundry and it proves that you were a big lazy bum. See, that’s when we should talk about, “Well, what happens if you forget to take the trash out?” Okay well, it’s okay for me to remind you and it’s okay for me to… I’ll take the trash out, but then you need to do the laundry, because I’m going to remind you to do that. You know that’s going to bother me. I’m going to be kind of pissed off about it.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah, I know that’ll bother you, You should be bothered if that happens. And talk about how that’s going to go. What’s the process? In a work environment it’s going to be more like, “Okay, if you don’t do that, if you…” Like in our case, we always do the numbers and the process and the closeout and stuff. If I came in and the school wasn’t clean at the end of the day, I would call Master… If I came in the morning, I would call Master Sanborn, I would know that there would be a process for that, of how we deal with it. That just hasn’t happened, but if it did, she wouldn’t be surprised if I called her and said, “Hey, the school isn’t clean. What the hell?” And then we’d talk about what the process would be to clean it. Somebody would have to come up there and clean.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
There’d be a plan for what would happen if it went wrong. So what’s going to happen if it goes wrong? Now you probably can’t think of every scenario, but if you think about what would happen if it went wrong ahead of time, then especially, in a conflict situation, if you don’t talk about it, what’s going to happen, the whole thing will blow up because you had conflict in the first place. And it’s going to break trust, because now, I was going to take the trash out, you were going to do the laundry. I forgot to take the trash out, now you’re really, really pissed off with me, because you were mad in the first place because I wasn’t taking the trash out. Now it proves that I’m even more unreliable. See, so those things can get messed up.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So we have some adjustment plans in place. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just what are we going to do? Okay, if we mess something up, it’s okay for us to revisit this and talk about it or we’re going to talk… How are we going to do, have a family meeting once a month for anything that is not in our plan. Or we’re going to have a staff meeting. When we get to staff meeting, that’s when we’re going to cover anything that’s not done correctly. Depends on the context. Okay, questions about good conflict. Nope? Everybody. I explained it so well. Okay, we’re almost at… We’re really over time a little bit, but let’s finish up.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So results of good conflict. If you have good conflict, it’s going to enhance better good conflict resolution as you go. So it’s going to help you solve more problems, you’re going to have good solutions to things, you’re going to feel better about your team, better about the people around you. You’re going to have closeness. So you’re going to have more closeness with the people around you, better team building. You’re going to feel better about yourself. There’s a lot of other contexts. Let’s see, I have some stats that… Well, I won’t read all the stats. And you’re also going to have more trust, that you won’t be stressed about stuff when you’re not thinking. You won’t be having to think and stress about all the things that need to happen and you’ll have just an overall sense of wellness in the group or the people or the particular situation that we’re talking about.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So there’s a lot of results of good conflict. If you remember, back to… I’ll show the first slide with all the stuff. Comparing this to bad conflict, all these problems, there’s a lot of good reasons to have good conflict. Now, one thing I get asked is, so I said narrow down the problem and you deal with one problem, “Well yeah, what about me? I had a problem and this person, we dealt with his or her problem. What about my problem?” Well, as soon as you’re done with the first problem, then you go back and you deal with the second problem. And if you get the skills to deal with problem number one, then usually dealing with problem number two goes really smoothly.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So, that’s how you deal with them, one at a time. Makes sense, right? I mean it’s not like rocket science. You deal with problem number one, and then you deal with problem number two. Okay. If this doesn’t work, so if all these conflict steps don’t work, first thing you do is you review the conflict steps. And when I’m working with a couple or different people on this, I’ll bring this whole chart out. I show them the bad conflict trap. I show them this trap first. I’ll show them this and I’ll say, “Hey, this seems to be what’s happening.” And almost everybody goes, “Yeah, that seems to be what’s happening.” Then they go, “Yeah, that’s what’s happening, so what do we do?” And then we talk about what to do next.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay, the first thing we’re going to do is figure out what one problem you want to solve. Then we’re going to make sure everybody understands how they feel about it, validate each other. Now how are we going to fix it? Okay, we’re going to do that. So how’s it going to work? That’s specify it. We’re going to specify it. And then what happens if it breaks down? Well, what do you mean break down? We’re going to do that. Nah, what happens if it doesn’t work? What happens if they don’t do this? Okay, good. Now let’s fix the second problem. That’s how it goes.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
So what happens if that doesn’t work for you guys, interpersonally? What can you do? Well, it’s not going to work all the time. So remember that adjustment phase, or the last phase. It’s not going to work all the time. That’s normal. Other possibilities, again, remember it could be bullying. So if you’re dealing with somebody that’s having a problem with this, is there an imbalance of power, is it repeated, and is it intending to hurt? Are they trying to hurt somebody? If trying to hurt somebody, it’s not really conflict, they have a control position over the other person, so it may not work. Or is it a personality disorder? And remember, you don’t have to really remember all these. If you want to look it up, if you’re interested in this, there’s three types. Oops.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
There’s three types. There’s cluster A, cluster B, cluster C. If you feel like looking up personality disorders, you can. Probably, the people you’re thinking of in your mind that have personality disorders, probably don’t, even though it’s relatively common. But it probably isn’t your spouse. Don’t worry. Probably. But anyway, the most common ones are the B, erratic and dramatic, and that’s antisocial, borderline narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. So you kind of know these people, you probably met some of them, where they are kind of in it for themselves and you’re arguing with them and you just can’t seem to… nothing seems to work right. That’s what you’re dealing with. So if it doesn’t seem to work, first of all, that’s pretty normal. Second of all, it might be one of these other two cases.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Any questions about that? All right, let’s wrap up. I was 15 minutes over. So again, this was way fast. If we have some more time, I’ll spend some more detail on the… And I may do another module on how to do the resolution of the conflict, and also the bad conflict. We went through conflict types. Why conflict resolution’s important. That data was big. If you remember back from how much money was spent on conflict resolution, how much time spent by managers. I hope that you got a good idea of bad conflict. This conflict types was really important because those four Ps, the process, preference, and those different types of conflict, that’s like the whole thing. If you can recognize the type, it’ll slow you down and help you figure out what to do next.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
You saw bad conflict, and it happens to you. It’s all going to happen, it happens to you too, just like me. But to get out of that, use the good conflict resolution skills, narrow things down, validate, figure out the solution, and then figure out how to… specify the plan, and then figure out how to adjust, and take some action. So you guys have some steps you’re going to do now. Anybody have any steps they want to share that they would do, or what main takeaways you got? Somebody put something in the chat. I probably should have answered that like an hour ago. That’s what I get for having chat and ignoring it. Any takeaways you got so far?
Laura Sanborn:
Freezing doesn’t help.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
What’s that?
Laura Sanborn:
Freezing and walking away doesn’t help.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Freezing and walking away. Yeah, that’s called the silent one or the mixed one, depending on what the other person’s doing. Yeah, that doesn’t help unless you resolved it later, but still it probably doesn’t help. What would be better is let them know this isn’t… If you can’t be in the conflict at that moment, it’s okay to say, “I need to talk about this in a little bit when I’m calmed down. I want to do it in 20 minutes so that I can gather my thoughts. Is that okay?” And the other person may go, “No, it’s not okay, I’m upset and I want to keep going.” Well, it’s not okay with me, so I want to come back and talk about it in about 20 minutes. So, that’s what I’m going to do.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
And depends on the other person, whether they’re okay. If they’re not okay, then that’s okay, you can just do it anyway. But if you are going to control… We’ve always got… We can only control ourselves, so yeah. But if it never gets resolved, that’s not good. But you could come back in 20 minutes, then you can try to use this process. What other takeaways you guys got from this so far?
Joshua Booth:
Spending more time narrowing it down just to the one issue at a time.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah, that’s what I find helps the most. That’s what I found for me helps the most out of this, is what’s the one thing we narrow down, because almost everybody wants to go to two or three or four or five things. They want to try to hit multiple pieces here. And instead, they get bogged down in, “Yeah. I want this. Well yeah, but I want this.” What does A have to do with B? A lot of times they’re just completely unrelated. So what we need to do is stay focused on one thing and finish the process, then we can go back to the other thing and finish. And to be honest, what you have to do in your own work, is make sure you do come back to the other thing.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Don’t ignore the other thing that they were talking about, because that builds trust in the other person. If I say, “Hey, I don’t like it that you forgot to take the trash out,” and you go, “Yeah, but I don’t like it that you didn’t make the bed.” Okay, well let’s talk about the trash first and I’m happy to talk about not making the bed. Let’s do that. But if you go, “Well, I didn’t make the bed because you forgot to take trash out,” then it’s a fight, right? That’s bad conflict. But if we say, “Well, let’s talk about the first one first, and then I’d be happy to talk about the trash.” And then if you go through this process and you go, “Okay now…” I know that you want to talk about making the bed, and then you bring that up and you make sure that that does get covered.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Then you’re building trust. Now the other person knows that you’re not going to blow off the thing that they said. Now, sometimes when you do that they go, “Well, I really didn’t care about that. I was just mad that you… I felt defensive about the first piece.” Remember that Gottman video? The Gottman video is really good. It covers a lot of stuff. But narrowing down… But like for students, if they’re having a problem, “I don’t like that.” A lot of times I say, “Well yeah, but you came in late.” I didn’t like it that you didn’t cover XYZ. Well, you came in late. No, I understand, we didn’t get to cover that today. I noticed that…
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
It still is because you came in late, but we cover that first in class, so let’s talk about what the issue was coming in late. Or talk about the issue that you didn’t get to cover that. And then you’d validate each other. You’d validate them, “I know that you did come in late. Did you notice what the time was?” And then you’d both be validating each other, right? The process would end up being a little different. The validation tool is really powerful. And I think some of the… There’s more phrases than that, that we mess up, but one of the phrases is, “I hear what you’re saying,” or, “Oh, I get it,” or, “Okay yeah, but.” Some of you skip even, “I hear what you’re saying.”
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I think, the hear what you’re saying one is one that I think is funny. I met a lot of people I’ve worked with, I had to learn that one, because I thought that that meant they heard what they’re saying. And it doesn’t mean they hear what they’re saying. Well, it means they hear the words. I mean, because we do hear the words that people are saying, but there’s a difference between hearing those words and then repeating them, as Master Dunn said, when you repeat them then you’re making sure you and the other person connected. So there’s a difference between hearing the words, saying the words and making sure you and the other person connected about what they said. That’s a different thing. So we can use that. That’s a very powerful tool. Yeah, so get used to using that. If you get used to using that, practice with your students, practice with other people. There’s a lot of tools for that. Any other takeaways? No? Did you guys find this helpful?
Laura Sanborn:
Yes.
Speaker X:
Yes, sir.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Yeah?
Laura Sanborn:
Yes.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Good [inaudible 01:15:56]. Okay. What’s that?
Diane Reeve:
I said totally.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
Okay, great. I have an assignment for you. Write me a testimonial and email it to me, as soon as you get done with this call, we’re going to finish up here, write me a testimonial about you like the conflict resolution workshop, and use my name in there and everything. Just so I get some feedback. If you have any feedback you want to give me that you’d like to do more of something, then put that a little below that so that you… What parts of it you’d like to do more of.
Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:
I appreciate if you do that right now, after we finish, so that we remember it. Just like any of this stuff, if you do it later, it’ll get pushed off to the back burner because you guys are busy people. Look forward to doing any more of this if you want. We’re going to do some other… Let me stop the share here. But anyway, let me thank everybody for being here.