Please enjoy this excerpt from my next Blossie @work book:
Keep Cool in Hot Situations…at Work! Coming this July(-ish) 😊!
No time to read? Listen here!
On a warm, sunny morning, you drive to work, listening to your favorite music and thinking about the day ahead. Feeling focused and positive, you arrive at your job and settle in, sipping your coffee and planning the morning.
Then the phone rings, or you read your email, or someone stops by, and suddenly things take a radical turn.
Someone emailed your boss (instead of you) to say he doesn’t like the layout you already approved for the company’s home page. Or an angry customer has gone all the way to your District Manager to say you were rude to her. Maybe a sale you were sure was a slam dunk stalled overnight. A joke you told was taken out of context and an important colleague isn’t amused.
It’s only 9:30, but your day, a moment ago wide open and full of possibilities, has narrowed to a pinpoint: damage control. Depending on your personality, you may have immediate emotional and physical reactions: nervousness, muscle tightness, rapid heart rate, sweaty hands. For the moment at least, conflict has sapped your strength and pick pocketed your peace.
Does this have to be just a typical work day? Can you control the number of conflicts you have to face? The way you react to them?
No. Yes. And definitely.
RELATED: The Anatomy of Peace, Fourth Edition by The Arbinger Institute
Time to choose
We use dramatic words to talk about conflict, phrases like “boiling over” and “flipping out.”
Conflict can feel like a beast, grabbing us by the shoulders and demanding to know: “Which side are you on?” or maybe…
- “Whose story do you believe?”
- “Who are your real friends?”
- “Shouldn’t you be watching your back?”
- “Don’t you owe Bill a favor?”
From minor misunderstandings to major blowups, conflicts spread quickly and sweep wide, pulling in everyone in their path and making it impossible to think about anything else.
Yet the question isn’t if we’ll face conflicts at work, but when. Any time we’re working together with people who have diverse experience levels and skills and interests and strengths and goals (that would be every day), there will be clashes.
Whether you’ve been knocked down by conflict in the past or you’re looking for solutions to the hot situations you’re facing today, you don’t need to run from conflict, ignore it, or beat it back with a stick.
Beautiful someone, you’ve got better choices.
Welcome to Keep Cool in Hot Situations…at Work!
By the time you turn the last page of this book, you’ll have the tools you need to handle hot situations in ways that save your sanity, build your reputation, and strengthen (yes, strengthen) your relationships. You’ll go to work relaxed and confident that you can manage any conflict the day decides to lob at you.
Inside are practical tips for building your conflict management skills in three ways:
In Part 1: Dare to Think Different, I challenge you to take a fresh look at conflict. Far from the spirit- and career-killer many people fear it is, conflict can be an opportunity. Look closer, and you may see that a certain disagreement is really evidence that you’re spending time with other goal-oriented people in challenging situations. Play through the pain with class and poise, and you earn a reputation for being solid and dependable, regardless of circumstances.
You can’t conflict-proof your life, but you can do a lot to minimize the number of conflicts you face. In Part 2: An Ounce of Prevention, I’ll show you how to head unproductive conflict off before it has a chance to arrive at your office door.
Of course, there will be times when you’ve simply got to face a conflict head on. It’s real, it’s intense, and it’s right now. In Part 3: From Here to Harmony, the rubber meets the road with strategies for keeping an already hot situation from spinning out of control and ending it constructively.