Did you know that dealing with disagreements, conducting difficult conversations and resolving conflicts are skills that can be learned?

They are skills that can be learned just like public speaking, sales or leadership skills.

Your ability to respond to disagreements and conflicts as well as to conduct difficult conversations affects your happiness and success at work and in your private life, every day. 

I have today served two years as the Conflict Resolution Adviser for a global public speaking organization that I’m a member of. 

The organization is called Toastmasters International, and I’ve had the privilege to lead the Conflict Resolution Team at the organization’s fantastic District 108 comprising seven countries: Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Russia and Kazakhstan. 

It’s been a pretty incredible journey and and these are some of the lessons I have learned:

1. A conversation, a disagreement or a conflict is primarily about emotions. Facts also count, but much less.
   
2. People have a deep need to feel heard, to feel acknowledged, to feel seen. They need to have their emotions acknowledged. Until that has happened, they are not prepared to listen to your point of view. That’s the key to conducting difficult conversations and resolving conflicts.
   
3. We usually don’t like to take the initiative to address conflicts because we are afraid that speaking out may put us in trouble. We are afraid of damaging a relationship, our status in our community, or our position at the workplace.
   
4. Yet, when we don’t speak out about our frustration, we tend to act it out. The other party is usually aware that something is wrong even if we don’t take the initiative to resolve the conflict.
   
5. The longer a conflict is allowed to simmer, the more difficult it becomes to solve. I have seen many conflicts that have been going on for years before someone speaks out.
   
6. Most conflicts start small and are about relatively small things. Often they are about nothing more than well-meaning people misunderstanding each other. Then they easily grow when people start expecting the worst from each other.
   
7. I’ve seen people take disagreements to court, even conflicts about seemingly small things, because feelings have been hurt. The sad thing is that a court of law is not a place to get your emotions acknowledged. From a court you don’t get justice, you get a verdict. 

The good news, again, is that conflict resolution skills can be learned by anyone. It takes time and dedication, but it’s well worth it, and I believe it’s an investment that we all should make. 

If you’re interested in learning about how to deal with disagreements, a good place to start is to download the Conflict Resolution Guidebook that my team has recently published. You can download it on this web page: https://toastmastersd108.org/conflict-resolution-team/ or directly from here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODkWxLLqCtK6pin176xocNHTGz2JwZiL/view.

The guidebook is free of charge for anyone and I don’t even ask you to give your email address or any other information about yourself in exchange. 

The only thing I ask from you is to read it, apply what you have learned and share it with anyone you think might benefit from it.

I believe this guidebook may be useful also for Toastmasters in other parts of the world, as well as basically any citizen of the planet.

This guidebook is brought to you by the Conflict Resolution Team of Toastmasters International, District 108: Roberto Bolomey, Irina Četovičienė, Paweł Lachowicz, Michał Moroz, Ignas Prakapas, Vadim Vasilyev, Karolina Wróbel and yours truly.

So, once again, go ahead and download the guidebook from the link on this page, and benefit!  https://toastmastersd108.org/conflict-resolution-team/.