How do you avoid high conflict?
Are you pro or anti-vaccine? Are you pro this or anti-that?
We seem to be pushed into one camp or the other and we end up getting ourselves in a tight corner. Is there a way to be part of a conversation and still neatly sidestep the argument?
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Re-release: How To Avoid High Conflict – Even When You Don't Agree With The Idea
Original: How To Avoid High Conflict – Even When You Don't Agree With The Idea
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
My niece Marsha would have been about nine years old and I used to pick her up from school every day at around 3pm. And as we're walking home, she says, you know, there was this kind of discussion today in school.
And I realized that the other girls were all wrong. Now the reason why she felt that they were wrong was because Martian I would sit and watch videos almost every day for about 20 minutes or so.
And she was and still is an avid fan of David Attenborough.
We'd gone into a lot of detail and discussion of one of the topics that he'd covered, then she got to school and she was speaking to all of these girls and found out that they were completely off the mark. She was just nine years old at the time and I was curious what would a nine-year-old do when faced with such a situation?
It's confrontational, isn't it? You see the world one way and the others, they're convinced that their way is correct. And this is the kind of situation that we find ourselves all the time these days. People have always had opinions. Usually those opinions were confined to a coffee house, a discussion at home, something like that.
Now of course we have social media, we have stuff online. As you know opinions don't have to be facts, they're just opinions. Even so what we believe to be true is true for us. And the way Marsha worked it out was to just walk away.
Most of us can't walk away.
We're trapped in a room, we're trapped in some kind of chat, maybe WhatsApp, or some kind of discussion, and we're trapped, and we can't get out of it. And here's a little tip. I tend to ask people on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being, I feel very strongly about it. What would you rating be about this topic?
So let's say it's about going for a holiday in the middle of the pandemic. What's your opinion on a scale of 1 to 10? And maybe that person says 10. Now what they think is that you're really interested in their topic and you're not. You're just trying to gauge is this something that I need to step into. When someone says 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, I kind of do a Marsha.
I tend to change the topics straight away.
And most of us don't do that. What we do is we get embedded in it. We have our point of view. They have their point of view. We go back and forth. And usually at this one time, nobody's making any sense. You'll find that the conversation is not a conversation at all. It is going off at different tangents. People bringing up multiple points.
It's kind of like an argument that you have, where people just bring up random points. and importance and you can't do that. So the way to do it is to just ask them on a scale of one to ten.
How do you feel about this?
And if it's anything but oh five, maybe four or three, then you're likely to have a discussion. They'll see the pros and the cons and you won't have this argument. I'm the kind of person that loves to be part of a discussion. Renuka, not so much. She won't get involved.
But if you're a person that gets trapped in the kind of situation, just use the simple formula. How important is this topic to you on a scale of 1 to 10? And the momentary source about 5, you want to just get out of it. Walk away. Change the topic. That'll keep you more sane. That's pretty much it. It's a simple tip, but it'll probably save you loads of hours. And a lot of frustration.
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