The Boss Battles of Conflict: no.1

Getting to the table

I love using my Substack as a way to process through ideas. This post is an attempt to address a question I (and others) have had with our Art of Difficult Conversations course: how do all these useful conflict skills map together?? If they’re a toolbag, what can we do to make it easier to reach in and use the right tool at the right time?

You heard it here first, folks. Let’s think about it together.

The weekend before last, I was working with a group of 25 college essay counselors at a retreat center in San Diego.

Geof and I ran a Fight Lab for the group. Now - in Authentic Relating terms, we call these folks Muggles, aka "people who haven't spent the last few years staring fascinatedly at their navels and talking with others about the lint." This was a mostly-female group in their 20s-60s who were almost all married with kids, hadn’t done personal growth work before, and were deeply conflict averse.

When we got into the lab, one thing became clear. Fight Labs are most useful for practicing difficult conversations, especially ones where others do difficult connection actions - accusing, stonewalling, overtalking, etc. - which make us do difficult actions in return: shrinking, defending, repeating ourselves, etc.

What Fight Labs aren’t adapted to is getting people to have the conversation in the first place. How does a conflict averse person get past the block to bringing something up?

From Abstinence to Assault: Consensual Nasty Communication (CNC)

For an exploration of conflict types and approaches, see the article above.

Generally, the more we have these conversations, the easier they get. But, starting that trend can feel almost impossible. We have so many fears in our minds:

• What if they don’t respond well?

• What if I screw up the good parts by bringing up the bad parts?

• What if I lose my words or perspective?

In the Art of Difficult Conversations, especially the new On Demand version (!!)

we cover a number of skills for starting the conversation, including how to structure it and how to take simple, less scary steps in. But, the course has so many tools that it can feel overwhelming.

This started me thinking…what if the skills for difficult conversations could be divided into parts of an argument?

I’m going to call these “Boss Battles”.

Take off your armor and talk to me!

Here’s how I see it:

Boss Battle 1: Getting them to the table

Boss Battle 2: Getting on the same page that there’s a problem (for you, them, or your us)

Boss Battle 3: Holding their reaction to seeing that there’s a problem/having it be brought up

Boss Battle 4: Exploring the issue

Boss Battle 5: Resolving the issue

I was going to write just one article to go through all of these, but now that I’m well past the paywall, I’m realizing that each has a world contained within. (Which, y’know, makes sense, given that we’ve filmed probably 5 hours of content and demos on each one :P)

So this will be the first of several articles on the Conflict Map. This one will address the problem the college counselors had: how do you approach and start the conversation?

If you’ve ever avoided a difficult talk, this one’s for you.