How best to resolve a conflict
Parent Post
Faced with hard problems,
Faced with hard problems, many people’s first instinct is to hunker down and crank out a solution.
Research reveals that changing your physical context can alter our thinking.
When you’re looking to resolve a tricky conflict of any type, you’re better off doing it while moving around.
Physical movement spurs mental movement.
Next time you and
Next time you and your co-founder are at each other’s throats or your executive team can’t agree on your next move or you and your spouse are days into a fight over household chores, don’t sit down for yet another discussion of who’s right and who’s wrong.
Instead, lace up your sneakers and get moving together.
Going for a walk,
Going for a walk, exercising, building something, playing catch, and running have all been shown to liberate us from dysphoric rumination and other types of adverse emotional traps.
You’re far more likely to unstick your thinking and resolve your trickiest conflicts if you and your negotiating partner get out of your heads for a while and do some sort of physical activity together.
On connecting the dots
On connecting the dots between movement and conflict, it was found that locomotion increased both the motivation and the likelihood to resolve interpersonal conflicts.
In the human conflict-resolution world, mediators, negotiators, other dispute resolvers, spend the vast majority of their time going deep into the analysis of our problems and very little time moving.
Thinking about your needs
Thinking about your needs and position and the needs and position of your negotiating partner is important.
But people have a tendency to get stuck at this analysis stage.
Getting up and taking a walk together helps break this impasse.
Physical movement jogs mental movement.
When our bodies are active, repetitive thinking patterns lose some of their grips and new solutions occur to us