Conflict Resilience summary

As you deepen your awareness of your ability to detect conflict – and your capacity to hold space for it – you’ll begin to spot areas where growth is possible. These might include long-simmering tensions in a friendship or relationship, or a more immediate challenge at work that requires a difficult conversation you've been avoiding.

To begin shifting your approach, choose one area of conflict you’d like to work on. It doesn’t have to be the most urgent or overwhelming – just a situation where you feel stuck. Then, let yourself explore the feelings that you’re having around this situation. It’s likely you’ll identify several feelings at once, sometimes contradictory. That’s normal.

Becoming more mindful of your own emotions is key to overcoming the biggest barrier to conflict resilience: your own brain. Remember those 100 billion neurons in your brain dedicated to detecting signs of danger? They can trigger the sympathetic nervous system before you’re even aware that it is happening. This is the system that protects us from danger by triggering the Five “F” responses in dangerous situations: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester.

Most people tend to rely on one dominant response. So if you run from conflict, then flight is your main strategy. If you let conflict simmer, then you prefer fester. If you rush in to please people, you fawn, and if you escalate before even thinking about it, then fight is your thing. The rest will freeze, incapable of doing anything until the danger has passed and they can soften again.

In the journey so far, you’ve done some mirror work, to understand your own conflict skills and tolerance without judgement. You’ve also encountered chair work, embodying the process of exploring the complexity of your own perspectives in difficult conflicts or conversations. You’ve also learned how taking a pause and shifting from reaction to active listening can interrupt the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester response – making it easier to stay grounded and connected in the moment.

The next step is putting it all into practice. But here’s a caveat: just trying something different in any high-conflict situation is going to feel awkward at first, especially with people you are close to. All relationships have histories, and both sides may feel stuck. Don’t interpret awkward silences or puzzled expressions as signs of failure, but change.

At every stage of conflict engagement, there’s one final insight that can help you approach even the most complex negotiations with greater confidence and less stress, and that’s understanding your best alternative to a negotiated agreement – often referred to as your BATNA. In simple terms, it means knowing what you’ll do if you can’t reach an agreement.

So before asking your boss for a raise, for instance, and going in with a specific number in mind, take time to consider some alternatives. That way, instead of walking away when the boss says, “Sorry, I just can’t pay more in this economy,” you can pivot to more productive ground.