“Active Listening”
© Susan Todd-Raque
It is often rare to experience a month of one’s life without being faced with conflict. Definitions for conflict include disagreement, to be contradictory, fight, battle or have incompatibility with another’s idea. In a previous article I had questioned how could it be that in school two of the most important activities we engage in our lives, marriage and rearing children, are not taught in school. I want to add a third, teaching a class on how to help people resolve conflict resolution.
Let’s begin by identifying situations for which the most common conflicts probably occur in a month’s time. If you are spouse, it is probably safe to say you will have a conflict with your partner. If you are a parent, especially of a teenager, it is likely you are going to have many conflicts with them, and, alternatively, them with you. At your job, there are many different ways conflict can happen. It is likely there will be occasional conflict with your boss or supervisor. If your work involves the public and customer service, this oftentimes creates difficult situations.
There are common threads that can help to make resolving conflict become a learned skill. I think foremost is being sure the person with whom you are in conflict with knows you understand their point of view. It is kind of like a fair bet when either person is willing to take the other’s odds. How often do you find one willing to do that?
In any conflict it is human nature to want the edge in the argument. This is often what happens when a conflict never gets resolved. Each person in the deliberation wants the other person to capitulate. And often, the more one person thinks the other is not listening to their point of view the more entrenched in their point of view they become, hence more unwilling to listen. The best way I have learned to accomplish helping the other person know that I am listening is what in the mental health business is known as “active listening”. You can’t do this when you just “pretend” to listen. You should be able to repeat back the other person’s opinion in such a way they say to themselves: “(he/she) really understands my point of view.”
Then once a person understands the others’ point of view, either person can conclude the only resolution is to “agree to disagree” or to move toward a compromise. Certainly there are situations when agreeing to disagree only “kicks the can down the road”, leaving it unresolved and it festers often into a bigger conflict. In other situations agreeing to disagree is a perfectly acceptable resolution. Often this approach leads to future solutions. There are, for example, other situations, like when you tell your teenager they can’t do something, and they attempt to engage you in an argument to get you to change your ruling, when agreeing to disagree is a resolution and boundaries stay firm.
When one refuses to compromise you have to consider whether you are actually losing by winning. To compromise one need to accept by each side giving up a little, in the long run you both get more. When this happens both parties win by losing.
