“Not this again,” you think to yourself.
You’ve had this discussion with Steve over and over again, and it always ends with both of you feeling frustrated about not being understood. You avoid each other for a couple of days and seem to get over it, but it always comes up again sometime down the road.
“If he would just listen, he’d understand where I’m coming from and we wouldn’t have to keep doing this.”
Steve is probably thinking the same thing.
When we have conflicts with others, whether it’s our peers, our boss, our employees, or our friends and family, we often find ourselves going in circles. You make your point, they make a counterpoint. You find their counterpoint to be invalid and explain this to them. They restate their counterpoint, you restate your point. They restate their initial counterpoint. Eventually, you run out of time, patience, or energy, and exit the conversation without a resolution.
In these circular conversations, we need to learn to tell the difference between a lack of understanding and a lack of agreement.
When we explain ourselves over and over again in a circular conflict, part of us is often thinking, “They must not understand me, because if they did, they would agree that I’m right. I’ll just explain again.”
You hear it now, right? One of the most common reasons we argue instead of resolving a conflict is that we think we have a misunderstanding when in reality, we have a disagreement. We continue to try to persuade, often to no avail, instead of exploring other options that could allow us to move forward.
When you find yourself spinning your wheels in a conflict like this, the first thing to do is to slow down and really listen, and specifically paraphrase what you hear. You might say something like, “I feel like I’ve gone in circles a few times, let me check and see if I’m hearing you right. I’m hearing you say that…(paraphrase). Is that right?” If not, get clarity. If you’re hearing them correctly, now they know because you just showed them. Next, you might ask them to paraphrase to see if they’re hearing you correctly. For example, “I want to make sure I’m making sense, what are you hearing from me in this conversation?” Then, clarify if needed.
Once that you’ve shown each other that you understand, check for alignment. Are we actually on the same page, and we’ve just been misunderstanding? Where do we share common ground, and where do we disagree?
When you’ve agreed on where you disagree, you have a decision to make: How are we going to handle the disagreement?
The options from here are plentiful, and I’d probably have to write a book to do them all justice. There’s also a lot of context that varies from situation to situation. For example, you might handle the disagreement differently if it was with a peer than if it was with your boss or someone you lead. But here are a few examples of how you might transition from the endless circle of failed persuasion into action planning that will get you un-stuck.
“You and I probably aren’t going to see eye to eye on this, but it’s just a matter of opinion. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time talking about this topic? And if we do talk about it, I want to communicate respectfully. Either way, I really don’t want it to get in the way of our relationship. What do you think?”
“We clearly see this differently, and we both seem pretty firm in our perspective. Can we talk about how we want to handle it so it doesn’t keep us from working well together?”
“It’s pretty clear that you think option A is the best, and I think we need to go with option B. It sounds like we’re both reluctant to budge and we’re getting stuck trying to persuade each other. I know we both care about this, but we don’t really have any choice but to make this decision together. Maybe there are opportunities to compromise or find another option we haven’t thought of yet. Do you see any options we haven’t considered?”
It always takes two to tango, but maybe you can be the person who initiates and offers to do a different dance together. That’s part of leadership and being a leader.
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