Tag Archives: Conflict Skills

Helping Yourself to Happiness

Posted on by
Reply

Last Monday, I met a sincerely happy young mother who had recently been laid off from a well-paid job in the computer industry. She shared that after losing the position her sleep had vastly improved and she was elated to have time to pursue her dreams. She called herself “The Upside of a Down Economy.” With a severance package to cushion the transition and pay for mediation training, Ms. “Upside” was providing her services as a volunteer in small claims court.

Meanwhile, a lead article in the New York Times just a few days earlier began, “Anne Hubbard has not lost her job, house or savings, and she and her husband have always been conservative with money. But a few months ago, Ms. Hubbard, a graphic designer in Cambridge, Mass., began having panic attacks over the economy, struggling to breathe and seeing vivid visions of “losing everything,” she said. She ‘could not stop reading every single economic report,’ was so ‘sick to my stomach I lost 12 pounds.’ The article explains how many are struggling with sleeplessness, anxiety or depression from riding the uncertain financial markets. 

So is the new mediator mom somehow superior to Ms. Hubbard? Why are some people fairing better than others? There are surely a number of factors like a severance packages, spousal income, or the relief of finally losing a job (“The other shoe dropping” so to speak) that can increase security. Yet, how are some people truly happy while old sustaining structures crumble around them? 

Turns out there may be tricks to help us cope, which I’m suspicious Ms. “Upside” employs.  In the attached video, Daniel Gilbert presents some fascinating research on we can train ourselves to be joyful, regardless of our circumstances. By synthesizing happiness, we can more readily adjust to changing times whether or not they bring natural causes for joy. 

So, if it is the best of all possible times or the worst, Dr. Gilbert suggests we can adopt important attitudinal shifts to buoy our spirits and increase our chances for survival.  Thus, I hope you “like” my video choice…and the week ahead!

Where are we?

Posted on by
Reply

Last weekend I added another way to describe the importance of seeking another’s perspective when you find disagreement. Being a soccer parent in Montana has its challenges. When your children “travel,” you don’t head across town as do my friends in Minneapolis or Washington, DC, instead you hit the road at 5 am to drive across the state. The older the kid, the farther you must venture and the earlier in the year they start playing. Thus, the season began in earnest on Saturday for our teenaged daughter with games scheduled in Billings, about 2 ½ hours east.

April 4, 2009

April 4, 2009

Yet between Friday and Saturday morning we received about 18 inches of snow in our neighborhood outside of Bozeman. It drifted across the roads and without a snowplow, I wasn’t going to make it out of my driveway.  There was also a winter storm alert for our destination. Games had been cancelled all over the state. So, the three fellow soccer team families in our neighborhood decided at midnight to forgo 4 AM snow blowing and possible dangerous driving conditions since it seemed impossible that the games wouldn’t be cancelled. There are limits.

We awoke the next morning to even more snow and emails that the games were scheduled as planned! Weather.com continued to report winter storm alerts and the transportation department tough road conditions, yet all the other team members were on their way to Billings. How could that be?

This situation then began to remind me of watching a mediation. There’s usually a time during a dispute where one party insinuates that the other must be a little crazy or irresponsible. But for a mediator, this moment should be a sign that everyone might be missing critical information.

Thankfully, after shaking my head in disbelief, I recognized I must be missing something. After making some calls, I learned that downtown Bozeman had received a few inches not feet of snow and the farther east you drove the less white stuff you’d see. Ringing a friend already cheering on the sidelines, I learned that the fields were completely dry. “Winter storm alert” in Billings meant only cloudy skies, not dumping two feet as it did south of Bozeman. The same term was used for both cities with very different results. From our winter wonderland it had seemed impossible that there would be relatively warm and dry weather 60 miles away until I spoke with someone who had just made the journey.

After my faithful spouse dug us out, the girls and I headed east to make a second game. Arriving at the fields, it was my turn to explain to the other soccer parents why our late arrival had not been…well, lazy or irresponsible! With a dusting of snow on their vehicles before leaving, they were as confused that we hadn’t made the trip as I had been that they had. From Billings we had seemed a bit crazy…just as they seemed from home!

I now hope to mumble, “they must be in Billings” when I reach that tough spot in a mediation when perspectives diverge, or in my own disputes, so I will ask more clarifying questions. I’m guessing those who know Billings, Bozeman, or Butte for that matter, are smiling as they read this since these towns sport not only unique ecosystems, but also very distinctive, and sometimes opposing, personalities…yet, don’t we all?

It Takes a Year

Posted on by
3

Six months ago turbulent financial markets gained national attention. From a journal entry I wrote last September…

 ”Every friend I have seen in town over the past days brings up the falling Dow and failing banks as a conversation topic. This was not supposed to happen. They are struck by how very smart Harvard MBAs constructed this mess and the government let it all occur. What can they trust? As I type, I wonder what the effects of this mass loss of faith in our government and the financial system will yield in the days and weeks ahead. What would this paragraph say six months from now?

Carrie explains, ‘I lived outside of San Francisco during the large earthquake of 1994. I remember friends struggling for months afterward since the ground had moved underneath their feet. Somehow it didn’t bother me since I believed it could and had prepared for an earthquake such as the one we experienced. But, now with the economy falling apart around us, I feel like the ground is unstable and I understand for the first time their panic.’

Fantasies of hording money between the mattresses filtered in as I drifted off to sleep last night. Before bed after the Dow lost nearly 1,000 points over two days, my husband Bruce sat on the couch, face lit by his black Mac Book and scanned online newspapers. He read off to me the Wall Street Journal headline ‘Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.’  A CPA and tax lawyer, his radar is tuned to the financial markets, and I rely on the blips and beeps that appear on his screen to send off my own alarms. Although a man of understatement most of the time, I could tell even he was concerned.  While visualizing hording soup in my basement, I can hear my alarm system is screaming, ‘warning, warning…’”

Six months later, I still have periodic soup stocking fantasies depending on the week…and WSJ headlines. I wish I did not.  I’d rather consistently possess optimism and poise with a dash of clarity, but that seems beyond my reach.

Six months has a special connotation for me as a mother.  I usually got disheartened about a ½ a year into each child’s arrival. After our first son,  I remember thinking, “I should have lost all this baby fat by now,” “We should be settled into this new family configuration,” and “Why is this still so ridiculously hard?” Six months is a long time to endure chaos and confusion; by then I have used up most of my just-muscle-it-through reserves.

To survive, my logic became if our culture’s standard mourning, or better said, “adjustment” period historically was a year, then shouldn’t I give myself the same? We knocked off an old life when each new baby arrived. The metaphoric gravestones could have read:

  • Young Couple – RIP June 1989.
  • Family of Three –  B: June 1989, D: March, 1991.
  • Moving from one-on-one play (two adults to two kids) to zone defense — June 1994 (I was raised in hockey country)

For my children – if any of you have read this far –  what we got in exchange was worth more than any loss we experienced.  There was never a need to wear black, although, I do like how I look in that color. Understand that by recognizing that we were in an adjustment period culturally prescribed as a year, I relaxed and let go the need to have it all together.  As an older, wiser mother once told me, “You are not supposed to be graceful during this phase.”

Signs of six-month financial chaos exhaustion are appearing in my circles. It seems we are asking similar questions including, “Shouldn’t have this mess figured out by now?” and  “Why is this still so ridiculously hard?” Yet, we could have a memorial service for a past leader in our community, Mr. Stable Banking Industry – From 1935 To 2008.  As we adjust to our new family configuration without our dear “big brother,” I realize I need to allocate a full year. Someone wonderful may appear to fill our past protector’s position, but in the meantime, I’ve still got a six-month excuse to be less than graceful as we traverse this uncharted territory. Know that I accord you the same.

 

Adjusting to Unwelcome Changes

Posted on by
1

 

March 9, 2009

March 9, 2009 -- After Gas Line Explosion

It was a tough week in Bozeman, Montana. Start with a worsening financial picture and then add a major gas line explosion on downtown Main Street Thursday morning. Five historic buildings burned to the ground, two others sustained major fire damage and dozens of windows were shattered in the surrounding blocks. All of the five-block downtown bore scars from the blast.

Main Street Before

Main Street Before

 

 

 

 

 

By Sunday, one casualty was officially reported, although the town grapevine could have told you within hours that Tara Bowman, the director of Montana Trails Gallery had gone to work early that day.  Given the extent of the discharge and the damage, the town is still in awe that there was no other loss of life or injuries. Up to a mile away, friends reported thinking a truck had plowed into their house. Others watched debris propelled 300 feet in the air from their offices. In a federal building four blocks away, the force had Forest Service employees convinced that an elevator cable had broken and sent a car crashing four floors.

Though impossible to surmise how a town feels, let alone a single individual, I keep running into confusion, sadness and frustration at the grocery store and the coffee shop. Yesterday, a friend returning from a non-profit board meeting exclaimed, “Folks are really worn out. The stress is getting to them. I haven’t seen so many people biting one another’s heads off.”  Attempting to answer, “How did this happen?” “What does this mean?” and “How do I process loss and relief at the same time?” is a draining process.  The past weeks have tapped internal reserves, which helps me understand why reactions of anger or even rage naturally accompany any major adjustment.

Shortly before she passed away in 2004, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross brought together three decades of pioneering death and dying work in On Grief and Grieving, “Anger is a necessary stage of grief. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal.”

The destructive power anger can emit scares us. People kill each other out of anger. They beat their loved ones.  They say terrible things that they should later regret. The heartless torture and murders in civil wars around the globe are much too similar to ancient descriptions of grief’s rage to interpret them as simply demonic. For example, in The Iliad Achilles is overcome when Hector kills his beloved friend Patroclus in the battle of Troy. Achilles refuses to eat or sleep before returning to battle to avenge the death, “You talk of food? I have no taste for food – what I really crave is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!”

 Yet, feeling anger is a whole lot different than using that passion to hurt another. I really appreciate the Biblical character Job’s authenticity as he grieved. Frustrated at God, he tells three friends why it is highly unfair that he has been treated so poorly. Translator Stephen Mitchell notes in The Book of Job that it appears Biblical scribes over the centuries tried to mitigate what seemed like blasphemy by tweaking Job’s words. Regardless, Job’s rage still shines through; he’s livid and he doesn’t care if he knows it. Yet, Job doesn’t strike his wife, insult his friends or kick his dog, he simply externalizes his anger.

How can we surface and safely release fury? Many cultures ritualize externalization of anger to move the grief process along. For example, in the Dagara tribe of Berkana Fasu communal water rituals are used to transform anger, rage, frustration and sadness. An angry person is seen simply as someone “on the road to tears.” In the Nyakyusa tribe of South Africa, the burial ceremonies include a war dance. An elderly tribesman explained, “We dance because there is war in our hearts. A passion of grief and fear exasperates us…Death is a fearful and grievous event that exasperates those men nearly concerned and makes them want to fight.” In America, Kubler-Ross ritualized the expression of anger by having grief workshop participants beat on mattresses and pillows until they felt relief.

The Buddhist tradition consistently counsels to just allow tough emotions instead of taking them out on others. Teacher Phillip Moffitt suggests in Dancing with Life  that we see tough emotion as a waterfall. By allowing anger, we stand underneath the torrent and let it wash over us. We allow ourselves to “be” in the struggle for a bit. Moffitt explains that in accepting the emotions of grief, we are better able to bear them and they can pass through us. During tough times, I try to schedule “waterfall time” where I give myself to being with the emotion and instead of trying to fix the problem. “Waterfall days” beat out “fixing days” in actually moving me through my struggles, but they aren’t easy. Facing emotional pain, can be well, painful!  

Like others around the world who have experienced similar events, sometimes weekly, I expect we will adjust. Meanwhile, my thoughts go out to the friends and family of Ms. Bowman and to those who lost their livelihoods or residences last Thursday.  I hope this finds you adjusting and fairing well wherever you call home. 

Playing with Possibility

Posted on by
1

In my pursuit of leaders who play well, I happened upon one who literally plays well every day as a musician and conductor of the Boston Philharmonia. I am entranced by Benjamin Zander’s philosophy of looking for possibility in every situation and in every person we meet. His book, The Art of Possibility, written with his wife Rosamund describes how leadership entails being “the relentless architect of the possibility that others can be.”  The book is now a well-worn favorite. 

I hope you enjoy Benjamin Zander and discover wonderful possibility in these interesting times. 

Powerful questions

Posted on by
Reply

Lately, I have been thinking that conversations work like doors. Sometimes conversations are “open” and through them we can see new possibilities. Other times you can feel a discussion closing down, locking out new information or diverse viewpoints.

Powerful questions have a great habit of re-opening constricted conversations. This week I ran across a short video from Thailand that asks two intriguing questions:  

  • What you are responsible for? 
  • What is your commitment?

 

Asking myself these questions has a centering effect when in stressful situations. They open my internal doorways. The two questions help me clarify what I can control and my appropriate next steps; I pause (a good thing in conflict) as I consider, “OK, what really am I responsible for in this situation?” and “What are my highest commitments?” And, as seen in the video, asking others can transform someone you believe you know well into a fascinating stranger. 

 I invite you to give them a try and welcome your insights!

Playing Well in Ecuador

Posted on by
Reply

I am always looking for leaders who resourcefully overcome huge challenges and create societal transformation in their wake. Some of our more famous 20th century conflict transformation stars would be Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and of course, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, there are many lesser-known courageous souls around the world who are continuing to play well and changing our landscape.

 Thus, I wanted to pass along a Christian Science Monitor article on Nelsa Curbelo. A former Uruguayan nun and school teacher, Curbelo is successfully tackling widespread poverty and violence in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Either click on the hyperlink above, or go to http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0122/p01s03-woam.html 

 

Curbelo demonstrates the mastery of four critical cross-cultural conflict resolution strategies: 

  1. Gather information – At the beginning of any battle we are best served by paying attention and taking stock of the battlefield upon which we stand. For example, to tackle the problem of Indian independence, Gandhi spent over a year traveling on third-class trains and on foot, asking everyone he could — Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Brahmins, Untouchables and so on — about India and its needs. Similarly, Curbelo spent two years simply walking the crime-ridden streets of Guayaquil, asking and listening to gang members, families and other community members.
  2. Be Flexible – Focus on a goal, but keep the final product open to revision. Notice how Curbelo’s goal of mitigating poverty and suffering allows certain protections of the youth she serves to remain in place. She isn’t there to stamp out gangs or rid the streets of guns, just to effectively help.
  3.  Engage our creativity — The best solutions are both surprising and elegant.  As I wrote in a previous post on employing art, creative ways to express our truth packs extra power. By honoring that gangs are a source of community and identity, Curbelo was able to foster the forming of a united nations of past warring groups, complete with an inaugural celebration!
  4. Act Courageously – It’s one thing to know what is right, but another to do it. A conflict transformation star holds that everyone deserves a chance and basic support. I remember Maria Montessori, who in the early 20th century spent years working with Italian children who had been written off as handicapped or damaged. Montessori’s work went on to transform early childhood education worldwide. Curbelo’s community is now filled with those who now many in society fear or deplore. May her work will have the same wings that Montessori’s enjoyed.

 I hope you find the article of interest and inspiring!

Learning to Love the Mess

Posted on by
1

Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all. — Chuang Tzu

A dear friend recently shared a series of losses that he had suffered. As he explained how a terminally ill friend had become the “final straw” in breaking his foundational beliefs about death and his own mortality, I found myself strangely excited. In case you might find me a bit twisted, I hope you’ll understand that my enthusiasm rose from a deep belief in the power of confusion. 

I wouldn’t wish such tragedy on anyone, yet we don’t seem to become wiser when all is easy and understood. Really, why should we? If I have the world figured out, I don’t have much incentive to dig deeper. It’s as though crisis creates cracks that allows wisdom’s light to seep in. I trust that as my friend earnestly wrestles with how to deal with great loss and the inevitability of death, he is going to gather insight. Selfishly, I hope he’ll share his garnered prizes with us.

It feels like our core beliefs create a sort of scaffolding or something solid to stand on over the sea of uncertainty. “I am a mother,” “I am from Minnesota,” or “I live in a democracy,” might be some of the planks that support my identity or the lookout post I have built. But, with enough time, the wood gets worn. Tough times also have a habit of ripping up carefully lain floorboards, like the globally favorite, “The financial markets are secure.”     

When my core beliefs are battered and I can’t tie reality up with a nice bow, I can feel set adrift in that sea. Questions like, “Who am I? What do I believe? What should I do next?” become hard to answer. Life, or my interpretation of it, gets messy or confusing.

I’ve come to have an innate trust in this messiness. My perspective expands when life pushes me to move into a state of not knowing. The more I become comfortable hanging out in the confusion, the more clarity I bring back. Meanwhile, we all have a fundamental desire to get back to solid ground again; I like to know who I am, or pretend to anyway, and to believe that I know how this all works!

Hanging out in messiness as mediator has helped. Usually you will have two sides at the negotiation table that have completely different versions of what occurred in a dispute. A first impulse is to want to determine who is right and who is crazy. Yet, the mediator’s job isn’t to find the real truth, but instead to hold a confusing reality that is created by assuming that the opposing stories are equal. Allowing there to be irreconcilable differences opens the possibility of a third interpretation of the situation that the parties can create together.

Without firm footing on how the world works, or who I am, I notice that I slow down and better consider each step forward. It creates a rawness or necessary vulnerability, as I wonder what else I have been missing. It wakes up my compassion as I realize that we are all madly trying to piece together how to play well with very limited information. Also, if we take a cue from all the major religions, learning to love the mess is “right work” and one of our main life tasks.  So, I get hopeful when those I love dip into confusion, and look forward to the treasures my dear friend might uncover in that chaotic space.   

Playing Well with Art

Posted on by
2

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. – Pablo Picasso

I have an abiding fascination with how art can transform perceptions of our challenges. Although we may perceive the arts (painting, poetry, dance) as a cultured practice of creating beauty, historically artists have also acted as highly effective conflict transformers.    Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is a case in point. To protest a massive bombing of over a thousand Basque Guernican citizens on market day during the Spanish Civil War,  Picasso began the large mural fourteen days after the attack. The work’s subsequent tour through Europe in 1937 brought widespread attention to the brutality of the conflict and its collaborators.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

 

 

DIA blue horse sculpture

DIA blue horse sculpture

This week I enjoyed reading about how art was used to creatively protest…well, art! To comment on the new Luis Jimenez blue horse sculpture installed at the Denver International Airport, real estate developer Rachel Hultin solicited “protest haikus” (a 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable form of Japanese poetry) to provide to the Denver Mayor’s office. The 32-foot fiberglass piece with glowing red eyes and fully “equipped” had folks’ creative juices flowing. Over 200 poets added their two cents in classic form:  

Because of this thing/People think they are in hell/Instead of Denver

Ugly devil horse/horrifies the traveler/shames our fair city

Eyes redder than mine/ Little horse on the prairie / Welcome to Denver!

 The latest artistic effort to capture my attention is described in the attached YouTube video.  Paul “Moose” Curtis uses inner city grime as his canvas. Through his work, he creates beauty while raising awareness about urban environmental conditions. May you enjoy and employ your creativity!

 

Loving in New Ways

Posted on by
Reply

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki 

By nature, I am happiest when I am running, hiking or dancing around my kitchen. My children were dragged onto trails and ski hills from a very early age, I must admit, not so much so they would learn, but so I could get back to what I dearly missed. I’m also in love with learning and then sharing what I have picked up along the way. And I adore my family and friends and my favorite cup of tea and the quiet around our house and…there’s a lot to which I am very attached.

Threaten the above list and I get jumpy. Really threaten to remove my favorites, and I find myself in thrown into tough times. At the most dramatic level of loss, “If I don’t have what I love, what makes life worth living?” can become a scary question looming within us.

From a brain perspective, our limbic system, located in the center of our heads, controls our attachments. As authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon describe in A General Theory of Love, when we bond with someone or something, the limbic system emits a pleasing blend of chemicals. We like those chemicals and want to keep them coming. Think of the Labrador retriever outside the grocery store howling for her milk-buying human. If she could translate her brain signals into English, she might be heard to say “I miss my oxytocin, give me baaaaaack my oxytocin!

I like oxytocin, which courses through my cerebral region when I hug my children or cuddle up next to my husband. As I have also admitted above, I’m also a big fan of the endorphins that I emit when exercising.  The more I learn more about my brain, I must make peace with what might appear as a fairly healthy lifestyle, is actually another “better living through chemicals” advertisement. 

So, when I asked my aunt-in-law, who at 81 remains vibrant and fully engaged in life how she does it, her answer resonated deeply. Seven years ago she lost her husband. At an early age her father and mother passed away. Her brother died of a heart attack in his early forties and there have been other major disappointments along her path. Yet, I can talk with her about anything. She travels all over the world and is always up for a wild new experience. Despite all the loss, she also really, really loves me.

Her answer to my question was simple. “I don’t know really why I am in such good shape,” she told me, “but I have noticed that I have had to learn to love in different ways.” 

In these words, I first find the cross-cultural tenet of approaching every situation with an open attitude. The martial artists name meeting every challenge with an “I don’t know” as shoshin or fostering a Beginner’s Mind. Around the world it is posited that only in not knowing can we ever learn.

I was reminded of this snippet of wisdom as I taught the “Thriving Through Tough Times” course in January. One of the grandmothers clearly emitted my aunt’s joy-filled demeanor and was deeply admired professionally and personally by her long-term friends in the group. As we talked about surviving tough times, her friends urged her, “Tell Deidre The One Assumption,” “Yes, tell her, tell her.” She smiled and threw up her hands with a bit of a giggle and responded, “OK, the one assumption I always try to make is…that I don’t know anything.” As I made her acquaintance over the weekend, it was clear that she knew a whole lot more than I did, and in that lay the poetry.

My aunt in her response didn’t tell me not to love. She wasn’t saying to love less so it would hurt less when inevitable change occurs. Her subtle advice urged me to continue to love deeply, let those feelings and chemicals flow, but also to keep learning how to adjust to change. Keep learning how to love to dance, even if you find yourself with one leg, as Reynaldo Ojeda models in the attached video clip.
Find different ways to adore your loved ones even after they have departed your home or left this earth. Keep practicing new forms of love as those that we love change form.  I think that is one of the lessons, but I shouldn’t really “know” now, should I?