How to stay calm in any conflict

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you are insulted, humiliated or ridiculed, remember this advice, and negative emotions will not be able to get the best of you.

One Eastern wisdom says: "It takes two hands to clap your hands." For a conflict to flare up, two or more people are needed. If one of them remains calm, there will be no incident. Checked. But how exactly do you keep calm?

There is such an anecdote:

- How do you manage everything and remain an optimist?

- I just don't argue with anyone.

- But this is impossible!

- Impossible so impossible.

It's easy to become such a person if you know one secret. Everything that the interlocutor tells you is a projection of his inner conflict. This has nothing to do with you. You just fell under the arm.

When any person says something like "You are a slob", "You are rude", "You do not understand what you are talking about", "Brake, look where you are going", it touches us to the core. What right does he have to say that? What did he think of himself? Why does he think I am like that? We are either offended, or we begin to conflict and defend our innocence.

Now imagine a different situation. The same person comes up to you and shouts: “I’m a slob,” “I’m a rude man,” “I don’t understand what I’m talking about,” “I’m a brake, I don’t see where I’m going.” Such behavior causes nothing but a smile.

So, any accusation of something to another person stems from the speaker's internal conflict. If he does not have a fad on this topic, a mental struggle, then he will not notice this in you.

A person always speaks only about what worries him personally. This has a very indirect relationship to the interlocutor. Any banter or accusation speaks only of what a person does not like in himself or with which he cannot reconcile. It's not about you, it's about him. Communication with you only reveals this.

Being engaged in conflict management, researching the origin and development of conflict over the past few years, I have never seen an exception to this rule.

So look at your reaction. Replace "you" with "me". And smile. As if the person had just publicly accused himself.

Agree, after understanding this issue, it will become easier to calmly respond. Just do not try to explain this to your interlocutors! This is not only meaningless, but also dangerous: people are sometimes not ready to perceive information about their own internal conflicts. Just listen, just smile. For many people, after realizing internal conflicts and their external manifestations, life changes, relations in the family and at work improve.

But pay attention: there is a downside to the question too. Observe what you yourself are talking about to others. For what reason are you ready to conflict? Why are you expressing your thoughts this way? What are you shouting to the world?

If you are talking about computer addiction to children, look at what you are addicted to and why it hurts you. If you are talking about the selfishness of others, it means that you have not reconciled with your own selfishness. Our behavior in conflict is always a cry of inner pain.

Knowing this issue has significantly changed my life, I hope it will help you too.