Explore every episode of the podcast Conflict Owner's Manual

We recorded this episode before this week's political assassination, but as I listen to the recording before posting it, that's what I think about. If we reduce a human being to just their politics, or to a single trait, or to one note of their personality, we lose more than we can possibly 'win' (whatever winning might even mean). So, can you disagree, or have a conflict with someone and not have it degenerate into a fight? We discuss how.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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You can practice conflict competence almost anywhere, using every interaction, even characters' dialogue in cartoons. Using two cartoons as examples, we analyze the scripts for the opportunities to understand each other that the characters missed. (Please accept that we changed the character names).

show notes:
Cartoon #1, Between Friends, by Sandra Bell-Lundy 
Parent: Wear your boots. It’s snowing.
Child: I’m not wearing boots. It’s spring.
Parent: But it’s snowing.
Child: But it’s spring.
Parent: But it’s snowing.
Child: But it’s spring.
Parent: What do I have to do to make them understand?
Child: What do I have to do to make them understand?



Cartoon #2, For Better or Worse, by Lynn Johnson

Deborah: I see your sister is going away to university
Tyson: She’s not too excited about it though. She doesn’t want to leave her friends.
Deborah: Yeah, long distance relationships don’t work out too well.
Tyson: Deborah, you know I’d go to school here if I could, but I can’t.
Deborah: What makes you think I was talking about us? You didn’t hear what I said.
Tyson: I heard what you didn’t say.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Some conflicts expand beyond their origin story, so you lose track of who started the conflict, and what your original conflict conflict goals were. That's conflict creep, where conflict exceeds the simpler scope and more limited objectives you had when the conflict started. After a conflict creeps, parties forget about solving the problem, and just want to win. So, how do you stop conflict creep? Using John Paul Lederach's six stages of conflict escalation, we look at how you can recognize the stages, and stop conflict creep.

show notes:
Lederach, J. P. (1999). The Journey Toward Reconciliation. Waterloo, ON, Herald Press.
conflict escalates through six changes. 
1, people place blame instead of accepting responsibility. 
2, everything that’s wrong replaces the simpler issue that began the conflict. 
3, language becomes accusatory, generalized and defensive. 
4, people seek allies, and categorize others as friends or enemies. 
5, people believe they're justified to react to the latest insult and aggressions.
6, no middle ground remains, and people stop communicating.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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What skills help in a conflict where you're willing to talk but the other person is avoiding you? We discuss conflict styles, so that you can choose what's most conflict competent to use in the context, situation, and relationship. 

show notes:
episode 46: How to decide whether to engage in, ignore or avoid conflict
episode 50: What you miss when you respond the same to every conflict

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Even regular folks like us are affected by this era of polarized conflict. It isn't just politics and social media that has become polarized in how conflicts play out. What does it mean for our personal relationships and ourselves personally when we fall prey to polarizing conflict in our personal relationships?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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You have at least five conflict management styles available to use, depending on the context and the relationship. Your conflict competency is using the most appropriate conflict management style for the situation, and the outcome you hope to achieve. But you likely use one or two conflict styles you're most comfortable with. We discuss the conflict style known as competing. When is competing an appropriate style to use, and when does competing not serve you and your relationships well?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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What does a good wellness program at work offer? The 2024, Wellhub State of Work-life Wellness Report lists some of the benefits of a good wellness program. Mostly missing is the benefit of a good conflict management system. Here are tips for discussing a conflict management system design at work, even before you get the job, because the stress of conflict is incompatible with wellness, unless it's well managed.

show notes: 
https://wellhub.com/en-us/resources/work-life-wellness-report-2024/

Episode 31:  Is conflict competence a "soft" skill?

Conflict management systems, examples, https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/preventing-and-managing-team-conflict/

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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We continue exploring the conflict management styles you have available to use, depending on the context and the relationship. Your conflict competency is using the most appropriate conflict management style for the situation, and the outcome you hope to achieve.
You have a choice of five broad categories of conflict management styles, but you likely use one or two conflict styles you're most comfortable with. We discuss the conflict style known as compromising. When is compromising an appropriate style to use, and when does compromising not serve you well?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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You use your conflict competencies in every conflict. You can choose how your conflict competency and managing conflict work together. The key is your awareness of your conflict management mindset. Here are a few tips for powering the mindset that will help you do conflict better and improve the quality of your relationships.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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There is no 'best' conflict management style to use in all contexts and for all relationships. Your conflict competency is using the most appropriate conflict management style for the situation, the context, and the relationship.

You have a choice of five broad categories of conflict management styles, but most likely you usually default to using only the one or two conflict styles you're most comfortable with. We discuss the conflict style known as accommodating. When is accommodating others an appropriate style to use, and when does accommodating not serve you well? 

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Sometimes, even when you try hard to resolve a conflict you hit an impasse. There are many possible reasons that a conflict resists resolution, and one is when your communication styles are so different that you become impatient and frustrated with each other. You want to find a way forward, but you just can't seem to understand their approach to the problem. Here are some conflict competencies for dealing with this communication mismatch.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Being able to analyze conflict is one of the most important conflict competencies. You will want to know what's really going on, underneath the issue that seems to be what the conflict is about. If you understand what the actual conflict reveals, not the surface issue someone is yelling about, you have a better chance of coming up with the right questions to solve the right problem. But, how do you learn conflict analysis skills without creating a conflict for practice? We use popular culture, in this case, the TV show titled "Plan B". It's an excellent example of characters desperately trying to fix relationships while solving the wrong problem.

show notes:
Episode 67: Is trust a necessary ingredient for managing your conflicts?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Tyson and I are grateful to have Conflict Owners Manual listeners ranging in age from teen to seniors. Who is too young and who is too old to improve their conflict competence? Only you can decide when you're ready. But, there's one more consideration. Conflicts also age. The common wisdom is that managing a conflict early is easier, but that doesn't mean an old conflict can't respond well to your conflict competency. Here are some suggestions for how to be conflict competent at any age you and your conflict are.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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When others verbally attack you, it's hard to keep your cool. Three common but ineffective arguments an opponent might use against you are: 
1. ad hominem attacks, (attacking you personally rather than discussing what you said)
2. "straw man" arguments, (misquoting you and attacking you for the misquote as if you'd said it) and 
3. simply being a jerk. 
We offer strategies for being conflict competent, even during the many ways you might be misquoted, misunderstood, accused, and called out. We don't recommend that you verbally attack in retaliation.

Show notes:
Episode 56: What's the disconnect between your intention and the impact?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Some conflict competencies are subtle and invisible to others. Two skills start as small differences in your approach to conflict that lead to a big difference in outcomes. One skill applies to your mindset, and what you believe. The other skill applies to your behaviour, and what you do. Together, these two conflict competencies are powerful tools in your conflict competency toolbox.

Show notes:
Episode #5, How to change the other person in a conflict.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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What would your situation look like if you weren't afraid? Fear is a 360 degree driver of conflict, from starting conflict to escalation, to creating impasse, to preventing implementation of an agreement. There are conflict competencies for meeting the fears that hold you back from having difficult conversations. We discuss some of those conflict competencies, and demonstrate how they might improve the quality of your relationships.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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No one is born conflict competent. Over time, we learn complex communication. The quality of our relationships improves. In this second take on what skills we wish our younger selves had known, we move up a decade to slightly more advanced conflict competencies: perspective taking, and graciously accepting that loving critics give feedback we might need to hear (even if we don't like it).

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Conflict competence improves quality of relationships. Building community improves quality of life. In this era of loneliness, where friends are so important, are your relationships dependent on your friends having opinions you agree with or like? Here are some strategies for sharing conflicting points of view (POV) without it causing conflict. Improve your conflict competence, have friends, build community, improve quality of life.

Show notes
Episode 64: How is self awareness a conflict competency?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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No one is born conflict competent. Babies don't negotiate, they demand. Over time, we grow up and learn people skills. The quality of our relationships improves. For some, with homes that nurture learning these skills, conflict competence comes early and easy. For some, like me, home wasn't a calm and conflict competent environment. My learning conflict competence was a long, slow and deliberate undertaking. After breaking up with my family at 20, I learned to appreciate them using my conflict competencies. Now, we're close and loving. Learning conflict competencies improved the quality of my relationships with dozens of family members. Here's what I'd tell my 20-year-old self, to speed up the learning process.

show notes
Episode 52: When conflict competency doesn’t work for you.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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If you find yourself sharing space, whether with a partner, roommate, family, or stranger, it's a good idea to agree with them on a conflict management plan. But, if you didn't have an agreement on how to resolve conflicts before you have a conflict, it isn't too late to invite the discussion. Here are some suggestions.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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The conflict competency I use most often is conflict analysis. You want to answer the right question and resolve the correct conflict, which means analyzing what's really going on. Look beneath the surface, and dig deeper than motives and personalities. These two novels demonstrate the types of analysis that get to the heart of the conflict.

show notes:
The two novels are:
The Man Who Saw Seconds, by Alexander Boldizar. (2024)
Blue Ticket, by Sophie Mackintosh. (2020)

Other episodes about conflict analysis are:
Episode #8, What is a conflict analysis?
Episode #10, How integrating ideas helps you manage conflict.
Episode #75, What movie, show or book shows conflict well done?

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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This is the third episode on what makes a good question in conflict situations. We look at the purpose you want your question to serve in the conflict you’re having. The conflict competence is to use good questions as an invitation into a conversation. We show you how. 

Show notes
Episode 72: what’s a good question when you’re calm may not land the same way on someone you’re in a conflict with. Here are suggestions for asking good questions in conflicts.
Episode 74: what’s a good question at the start of a conflict may not be the right question for a different time in a continuing conflict. Here are suggestion for asking good questions at the right time in conflicts.

A Conflict Analysis of Why: In conflict situations, questions starting with the word ‘why’ can make the conflict worse. Here’s why, outlined in my article A Conflict Analysis of Why: https://deborahsword.com/a-conflict-analysis-of-why/

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Are there times when trying dialogue is wasted time? A listener mentions our polarized political climate, and asks if dialogue is always the way to approach emotionally charged differences in opinion. If it's time to stop trying, how would you know? How would you quit trying? Here are some examples of conflict competent responses when dialogue isn't helpful.

show notes:
Episode 38. What's more effective than calling out someone you disagree with? I discuss Dr. Loretta Ross's book, Calling In: how to start making change with those you'd rather cancel.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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It's an accepted truth of the creative community that conflict is story. No conflict, no story. No conflict is boring, not drama. Or no dramatic story that anyone wants to read or watch. What are the conflict competencies we can learn from rewriting the script of the conflicts in stories so the characters talk to each other before the conflict becomes the story? We rewrite Romeo and Juliet so that it ends in a wedding rather than funerals.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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A good question is the right question for the conflict you’re having. You’ve heard the expression: there’s no such thing as a silly question. But, in conflict, some questions keep a conflict going, escalate the conflict and/or inflame hard feelings. Here are examples of good and not-so -good questions.

show notes:

Episodes 58, 60, and 72 discuss how to ask, use and follow up good questions. After listening to episode 74, browse to the others. 

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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We remember stories better than we remember lectures. Stories entertain, comfort, explain, build bonds, persuade, and teach, among other connections. How you tell the story of your conflict reveals your point of view. We discuss how differing points of view are integrated to make a more complete story of the conflict. We suggest you find a role model who inspires your conflict competence.

show notes:
Watch John Paul Lederach @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiP_mQamUoc.  Read his 28 books, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Journey Toward Reconciliation (Herald Press, 1999), Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (USIP, 1997), and Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse University Press, 1995).

Kathy Bickmore is author of numerous books, chapters, and articles, most recently as editor: Constructive Conflict Pedagogies for Building Democratic Peace, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), available free at https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350519749

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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A good question increases your chance to get good answers. How you think about a good question and its answer is different in the heat of conflict than how you think about questions and answers in calm conversation. What are those differences and how can you navigate from calm convo to questions that don't provoke more conflict? Here are some examples.

show notes:
AI offers this list of components of a good question, edited for brevity:

 A good question is
 • clear 
 • open ended. 
 • fit for the intended purpose. 
 • thought-provoking:
 • fair 
 • unbiased
 • fostering trust 
 • building rapport. 
 • relevant to explore information

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Having a mediator's mindset is a valuable skill in any job, not only in the job officially known as mediation. Conflict management is hard and a soft skills to add to your resume. We discuss the ways you can grow your conflict competence with your approaches to relationships, to conflict, and to life.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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You already have conflict competencies like good listening. But do you use your best listening skill in the heat of conflict? Here are three steps to help you bridge the gap between knowing how to listen, and using the listening skills you have.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Perhaps you've taken the course on how to have have difficult conversations. You know how to do it. But now, in real life, do you trust yourself to actually have those difficult conversations? We discuss self-trust building, the role of power imbalances that make it hard to communicate, and the risk of communicating your needs when the stakes are high. Self-trust will help you find the courage to raise issues important to you in relationships you care about. 

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Everyone has at least one conflict mental map; a picture in your mind about how you believe conflict should be conducted, and what you expect of those in conflict with you. But where did you form this conflict mental map?

show notes

Shoalts, Adam, A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land. Allen Lane, 2017, ISBN-10: 0670069469

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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"Trust exists in relationships in different types and amounts. Maybe your friendships have a comfortable, lasting trust between intimates. Or, maybe you don't trust a person at all but have to deal with them. Trust is nice to have, has to be rebuilt when it's broken, and can't be bought. We discuss trust building measures that you can apply to improve the quality of your relationships and to manage your conflicts.

show notes:
"Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives." Dr. Sissela Bok.
Fundamental attribution error/rule. Dr. Lee Ross
"Move at the speed of trust." adrienne maree brown

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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What you tell yourself about your conflict competencies is what you believe is true. Are you telling yourself information that will grow your skills? On the conflict competence continuum of skills, where you put your pin will influence and inform how you do conflict.

show notes. These scholars research how our beliefs shape our choices in life.

* Michael Rousell: Surprise! How Your Brain Secretly Changes Your Beliefs
TEDxSalem • January, 2019
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rousell_surprise_how_your_brain_secretly_changes_your_beliefs

* Doug Lipman: As powerful as stories are, the process of storytelling has great but overlooked power, June, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zmc-1rT8kQ

*Ethan Kross: Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don't Manage You, 2025

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Everyone experiences conflict, and has ways of dealing with it but some ways are better than others for improving the quality of your relationships. It's never too late to learn more and better ways. 
Tyson and Deborah share how they learned conflict management, what tools they use most (spoiler - for Deborah, it's conflict analysis), when they began their life's work in managing conflict, and in what ways their backgrounds in family and faith inform their practices.

show notes:
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
Bantam/Turner Books, USA, 1992, 266 pages.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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"Know thyself!" comes to us as philosophical wisdom from antiquity. Self awareness is a conflict competency that increases your adaptability. The self you know is a learning, growing being who strives for quality relationships. Self awareness can prevent conflict, make you more adaptable to manage different kinds of conflict with different strategies, and improve the quality of the relationship you have with yourself. The more we are able to adapt, the more opportunities we have to be conflict competent.
Here are three ways that you achieving self awareness improves your conflict competence.

Show notes:
Myers Briggs https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/the-16-mbti-personality-types/
Thomas Kilmann https://kilmanndiagnostics.com/overview-thomas-kilmann-conflict-mode-instrument-tki/
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/09/21/quiz-find-out-your-conflict-style
https://www.ethankross.com/ to manage negative self talk.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Everyone has a view of how the world should work according to themselves. Your view is a frame that your holds, among other things, your beliefs, concerns, values, and hopes. But sometimes, your frame rubs wrong against someone else's frame, and oops, conflict happens. That's when a reframe adds a valuable conflict competence. We describe user-friendly ways to look at frames and reframes.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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You have habits, everyone does. Habits are patterns of how you behave. Once you recognize how you usually or often react in a conflict you have identified your conflict pattern. Name your reaction pattern, the emotions driving that pattern, and the pattern you'd rather have. Name it, own it, improve it.

Show notes
Juliet spoke to herself (Act 2, Scene 2) on her balcony, unaware that Romeo was hiding below, watching her rest her cheek upon her hand while she thought of him.

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. 
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? 
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Conflicts unfold over time to become patterns. We discuss the many opportunities to manage, shift, change and reframe conflict patterns. When you change the pattern you improve your conflict competence.

Tyson refers to adrienne maree brown: https://adriennemareebrown.net/2015/02/02/trust-the-people/ 

"if you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy." Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Does your attachment to your point of view make your good questions sound like judgments? Here are four steps to showing that your curiosity comes from your good intentions.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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It's election 2025 tomorrow in Canada, and we discuss conflict competence as a skill in every interaction, as well as necessary for democracy, electioneering, voting, and governing. 

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Defaulting to curiosity rather than judgement is conflict competent. But, what if that curious question still sounds judgemental? We show you how to ask conflict competent questions, so you can diffuse conflict.

The article the explains better questions than starting with the word "why" at this link: https://deborahsword.com/a-conflict-analysis-of-why/

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

A bias can make decisions easier. You don't have to think hard if you already know your bias for herbal tea and against caffeinated tea. But when biases cause conflict, or stop you from enjoying the company of friends who hold perspectives you don't share, you'll want some conflict competent hacks to overcome biased thinking. We discuss four of the most common.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Have you made a comment that you intended as helpful and been criticized rather than thanked? Depending on how you respond in the situation, the cycle of defensive reaction either escalates or is diffused. You can decide if a conflict happens or not. We discuss two useful conflict competencies and how to use them.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

You have choices about how and when you let the person you're in conflict with know that you're feeling vulnerable. Since your sense of your vulnerability influences the decisions you make in conflict, it's a conflict competence to be mindful of how vulnerable you feel, and how you choose to express or hide that vulnerability.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Everyone has a mental map of what conflict does or should look like, how it unfolds, and your ideal ending. Not everything on your conflict mental map is conflict competent. What may be on your conflict mental map as one of your strategies may not optimally belong there. Deborah discusses 'deflection' as one strategy that you might want to delete from your conflict mental map.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Feeling shame doesn't leave you much room for dealing with conflict. Shame fills a lot of space, crowding out empathy and perspective taking. How can you be conflict competent when you're beating up on yourself in shame? We give a few tips.

Show notes:

Brené Brown, in Rising Strong, writes that vulnerability is “the birthplace of many of the fulfilling experiences we long for—love, belonging, joy, creativity, and trust” (p. xviii) and that “Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage” (p. 4). 

“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true?” - Robin Diangelo

“Discomfort is a part of slowing down and becoming more present. If we acknowledge and pay attention to it, it means that we’re allowing energy to do what it does naturally which is conflict” - Amelia Meman

Send us a text. We love hearing from you.

Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Have you taken a conflict course and then not used what you learned? Here's what you're missing when you have the knowledge and don't use it regularly.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Maya Angelou said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Pretend you have a private studio audience cheering you on when you make people feel good. Even if people don't reciprocate your efforts to understand them, you still benefit in many ways from listening to them, showing empathy, and having conflict competence. We discuss the benefits that accrue to you.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

You may be comfortable avoiding conflict, which is one of the many responses available to you in conflicts. Avoiding would be your pattern and it can work well. Similarly, you may regularly default to one of the other responses, and that would be your conflict pattern. But, if you encounter a new situation, you will want more options. Here are some of the ways that having more conflict responses benefits you.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

The words people use can provide insights into what keeps a conflict going. It's a conflict competency to notice the past, present or future tense of words, including your own. Listen to people's word spacers, such as 'er' and 'um' and what words they emphasize or repeat. Even silence or pauses between words can be significant, such as Tyson's 7 second pause while he considers his words. Listening to the actual words, and how they're spoken, raises curiosity about whether something in their past, or context about their present, or concern about their future contributes to the reason(s) the conflict is sticking around.

Send us a text. We love hearing from you.

Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.