Whether you’re having a challenging moment with family, friends or colleagues, you can navigate conflict and bring more peace and productivity to your life by using 5 tips with the acronym RESET to reboot your relationships.
R – Reach out to people. Be the bigger person and start a dialogue. This is often tough to do when you are having an issue with someone. First, figure out the best time for you to talk —clearly, it’s not when the listener is in the middle of something important or totally distracted. Focus on the problem you are trying to solve—not the person. For example, if you feel that you’ve been left out of an important conversation, “How can I be sure to be at the next one?” Don’t place blame, look for solutions. Have a plan and be open-minded.
E – Establish boundaries and lead by example. Model excellent conflict resolution skills and show people how to forgive, fix, and move on. Showing gratitude and being willing to apologize are powerful tools to disarm conflict. Also, extending grace or giving someone the benefit of the doubt when you don’t have all the facts will go a long way.
S – See something- say something. Acknowledge that a problem exists, communicate, and tell someone that something that they did or said impacted you. This can be uncomfortable because confrontation may not be your dominant conflict communication style. In my experience, overusing a “wait and see” approach or shying away from an issue does not always work and many conflicts won’t just fade away with time. Instead, embrace your inner firefighter and try to extinguish the spark before it spreads.
E – Experiment. There is no one size fits all approach to conflict resolution. Sometimes you must try different approaches to solve a problem. Think of it as a recipe that sometimes needs a little more paprika or salt to reach your desired outcome. Regardless of your approach, accepting a person’s perspective is a critical first step to resetting your relationship. This means that you should try to see things from their eyes to engage in collaborative problem solving.
T – Trust your instincts. Conflicts won’t always be resolved overnight. Persist and stay the course. If the relationship is valuable to you, you must be willing to invest the time to manage or resolve the issue. Sometimes long-standing issues can be resolved in one mediation with a skilled mediator. Other times, it may take longer to reach the point where everyone walks away from the table with a resolution or at a minimum a better understanding of where the breakdown in communication occurred.
With RESET, you will be on your way to rebooting relationships.
