The Power of Addressing Assumptions to Resolve Conflicts in Relationships (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: There are relationships that crumble in the face of conflict and I've often said that's such a shame because so many of them were just one conversation away from being restored and restored in a healthy way. When we think about conflict what lies at the very heart of it is the assumptions that we all make from day to day. Let me share an interesting story with you. There was an executive that flew into town for a meeting and she walked into the room and her colleagues were very upset with her, noticeably agitated, and their assumption was, wow, she was simply reckless with how she planned for this meeting. Now on the other flip side of that, she was very upset and agitated with them because how dare they start this meeting without me. They went through the rest of the meeting and the course of the week very irritated and agitated with each other and again what a pity because had they had one simple conversation they would have known that her secretary actually booked the trip and simply did not make the adjustment for the hour-time differential in another time zone. So again we begin to see how assumptions when we're discussing conflict trip us up again and again. Conflict naturally arises and it's a part of life stemming from differences in values, differences of opinion, and differences in perception. And what we know now beyond a shadow of a doubt that anything that we resist is going to persist. Think about it. We all have the dreaded task of cleaning out our refrigerator. We get to that bottom area where we put the fruits and the veggies and we say I don't want to tackle that. And we come back just a few months later or a few weeks later and guess what? Not only do you have the mess but now it smells and we still have to clean it up. So delaying the critical conversations, delaying that sit down is not the way to go in terms of managing conflict because we know the longer we wait the more it erodes the relationship. And we don't need that as we're pushing our work lives forward, as we're pushing our personal lives forward. If we can simply start to look at conflict as the state of checking out perceptions, we're going to be healthier in the long run. Because think about it. Perception is reality. People live out the realities in their mind. So when we have a conflict what we're doing when you strip everything away is sitting down to check out our perceptions. And that can be very powerful.