Dealing With Conflict

Sometimes life throws some punches at you. Sometimes people throw punches at you, most of the time without mal-intent. Sometimes you have to throw some punches out in order to make progress.

Hopefully all of you are familiar with the value of conflict. It's uncomfortable; it's humbling; it's hard to experience. Perhaps most notably, it's hard to learn how to be good at it. It's not like we can go out looking for practice, we just have to deal with it whenever it comes around, and pretend we're ready to learn from it: roll with those punches, and take them as they come.

Here's An Example

The Context

It's 2012. I am living with a magnificent musician, and trying to work on more music myself. We both are enthusiastic ukulele players, and proponents of similar brands of kitsch.

Neither of us is playing as often as we want to, and we are both pretty dirt poor. Christmas is coming! But, who has the money to buy gifts for family and friends? Not us.

What'd you say? Hey, great idea! Let's record a Christmas Album. We'll choose songs, and practice together, and record, and it'll be collaborative fun, and good practice.

The Conflict

It was both of those things, but unfortunately, this gentleman and I had opposite work schedules, and we ended up having to collaborate remotely despite the fact that we lived with each other.

Add on to that that we both had very different ways of working. I very much value flexibility and adaptibility in my workflow; while balancing one personal project with a few professional projects, and the rest of cooking-cleaning-sleeping-working life, I tend to need a bit of wiggle room in my plans in order to get everything done well. I find that I am more likely to get discourages by missing scheduled time or deadlines when I am rigid in my planning, and thus less liely to get as much done.

My roommate, on the other hand, functions at his best when he sets a rigid schedule, which he can work agressively at keeping, and outside of which he knows he has the time to relax.

We learned a lot about ourselves and each other working on this project, but we were both frustrated with our apparent lack of progress for a while. It took way longer than either of us expected to find a happy medium between our ways of being productive.

As the deadline (Christmas) approached, we both got more and more stressed out, and things came to a head.

I could tell there was tension between us; I have learned through so many lost opportunities and failed attempts, the value of initiating confrontation with positive, productive, intent, so that's just what I did. I approached him about it.

The Climax

Despite our best efforts to be equitable, considerate, and kind, we both were intially irrational, and emotional in airing our greivances with each other and with the situation. We fought, and then things got a little to intense, and closed myself up in my room, feeling as if I had really messed things up, and wondering if my feelings were exaggerated, while he took a walk.

By the time he got back, we had both cooled down a bit and were able to actually talk about the situation, and our feelings productively. We apologized for some of the things we'd said, and we hashed it all out; we were honest about the things the other was doing that were bothering each of us, and we were both open to our own mistakes as well.

The Conclusion

While I will be forever glad that I confronted him about the tension between us, I have done the same in so many other situations to no avail. It takes a commitment to each other to be able to take that kind of intimate conflict management and be able to turn it into something productive.

And, honestly? If I could have done anything different, I would have talked to him about it way sooner. Also, I would have made more of a determined effort to accomodate his own style of working into my own.

Ultimatley, I learned a lot about myself, and about my roommate. But I also learned a few important details about how to manage emotional conflict. One of the most important of those is to know you're own reactions. It takes practice for me to find the right balance; I can't blame myself too much, because when confronted, many people will avoid blame instinctively, and it becomes difficult to find a mutual and lasting solution to said conflict. If I enter into the resolutive process knowing too well that I tend to blame myself too much, I risk getting to self-defensive.

It's important to be able to think through your feelings before confronting someone about emotional conflict, but it's also very good to be able to detatch during the process. The ideal is to be able to feel and express your emotions without letting them take over. I can understand why DBC is such a huge proponent of meditation: emotional familiarity, and being able to be thoughtful about one's feelings are invaluable skills in interpersonal communications and conflict resolution.

Incidentally, you can hear our finished product here.