Free Yourself From Conflict! with Jen Goldman-Wetzler

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Dr. Jen Goldman-Wetzler discuss how to free yourself from conflict!

00:00 Open
00:08 Intro
01:50 Origin Story
03:11 What Is Conflict?
05:08 Patterns
06:33 Breaking Patterns
09:49 Do Patterns Change With The Situation?
11:16 Happy Ending
15:30 Dealing with Emotions
24:58 Little House on the Prairie
27:22 Where to Find You & Wrap

Links:
https://jengoldmanwetzler.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-goldman-wetzler/

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to SkyeTeam's "People First" with Morag Barrett.

- Welcome to this week's "People First" and the theme for our conversation this week is conflict. One of my pet topics because it is a topic and an environment I try to avoid. But my guest this week, Dr. Jen Goldman-Wetzler is the CEO of Alignment Strategies Group. She is the premier New York based consulting firm that helps CEOs and their executive teams optimize organizational health and growth. But the key here is that she is the author of "Optimal Outcomes," which I can see on the shelf behind you Jen. "Optimal Outcomes; Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life." See, the secret to success. I can't wait to learn more. And this book was selected as Financial Times' book of the month. She's a keynote speaker for Fortune 500 companies, public institutions and leading startups including Google, Harvard Law School and the United Nations. Ooh, I'm looking forward to some stories about that Jen. And a former counter-terrorism fellow with the US department of Homeland Security. She has a PhD in social organizational psychology from Columbia University and has taught conflict freedom at Columbia for a decade. Jen, welcome to "People First."

- Thank you so much. It's great to be with you.

- Well, as I said as somebody who personally avoids conflict wherever I can, sweep it under the carpet, pretend it never happened, I am looking for some words of wisdom from you as we go through our conversation. But as ever I want to start with the origin story. So when you were a little girl, I don't know. Were you sitting there imagining that you were going to become a counter-terrorism fellow? What did you want to be when you grew up?

- I was not dreaming about being a counter-terrorism fellow. I was very interested in design, in interior design and architecture. I loved looking at houses and I grew up in a like a little red apartment building at the end of a long street in Riverdale, in the Bronx, in New York. And so, looking at houses and, you know, designing rooms was a fantasy to me. It was not something that was part of the day-to-day for me. And so that really, you know today what I do is I design organizations. I design lives, I help people design their own work lives, their own personal lives, their own organizational structures and so, you know, that's how I think that there is some connection there from what I love to do as a kid.

- Okay, that's also, I was trying to think, well the most I can think of as conflict for interior design was arguing over paint colors and trying to decide is this little swatch going to look fabulous when I do the whole wall? So thank you for that. Well, let's start with the basics, conflict. What is conflict? How do you define conflict?

- Yeah, well, people have so many different ways of defining what is conflict and what is conflict resolution? You know, the interesting question to me has been how do we, why am I talking about conflict freedom as opposed to resolving conflict? So, to answer your question one way to define conflict is simply say when people who are interacting with each other have different points of view or different interests that don't seem to be reconcilable. And over the last 40 years, we've had a lot of research and a lot of practice come out about how to resolve that kind of conflict. And a lot of that has come, has been about win-win negotiation. And the idea that even if we, our positions are different if we get underneath those positions and look at what are the interests that each person involved has, the reasons why we want what we want, it can be easier to come to a win-win solution. My work is all about what to do when that kind of process fails, when that win-win negotiation just doesn't work. We've seen again, over the past many decades, time and time again, whether you look at the international realm or the business realm, or the, you know inside the home community realm, very often these best practices using interest based win-win negotiation just doesn't work. And so my work is all about looking at seemingly intractable situations, where we feel stuck and how can we free ourselves from those situations from the thought patterns, from the behavioral patterns from the emotional patterns that get and keep us stuck on those conflict loops.

- So where do we learn these patterns that get us stuck in the first place?

- Well, very often we learn them from a very young age. We learned them from teachers, parents, coaches, religious clergy, you know, anyone in our lives who is helping to teach us something about the world we are likely to get the messages from them. And sometimes it really is just the most obvious, you know nuclear family that we learn how to deal with conflict from there. And I talk about these as conflict habits. These are the ways that we learn how to approach conflict. So you, at the start of the show said, I will admit, I like to avoid conflict as much as I possibly can. So that is one of the four conflict habits that I write about in the book and that I work with. We either avoid it. We blame ourselves, some of us. Many of us blame other people. And finally in somewhat more counter-intuitively what I have found is that now after 40 years of teaching people how to collaboratively work with conflict some of us actually relentlessly seek to collaborate with other people, even when it's not working for us. So we can actually get stuck in conflict by trying to collaborate with other people when those other people are unwilling to cooperate with us, we stay stuck.

- So again, realize, even though my internal, my natural desire is to avoid it there are times where I have to face up to it and own it. And I know in the book you talk about eight practices and that first one is knowing your habits and patterns. So for me, as soon as my heart rate goes up I can feel that adrenaline spike and it's either fight or flight, more often flight. I then have to make a choice to do different. So how do we break these patterns and know when to push and when actually flight or keeping quiet is the appropriate answer?

- Hmm mm. Great questions. So, the first thing to do as you noted, and that's why it's the first practice in the book is about simply pausing and noticing how you are stuck, because without noticing that you're stuck or how you're stuck, or why you're stuck it really is impossible to break free of anything because you don't know what you would need to break free from. So the first practice is to simply notice your conflict habit and notice whoever is involved in your situation with you, guess what might be their conflict habits. Sometimes this is not so hard to do, right? There are four choices and it's often very obvious that you know either I'm stuck in a blame-blame pattern where...