Why The Other Person Is Not Important

– By Dr Nav Ropra 

Are your staff not following instructions?

Is your partner fed up with you moaning about work?

Do conflict situations affect your health?

Want to clear your conflicts?

Every conflict you are going through is a representation of the conflict you have inside you and ultimately a mis-communication.  If your nurse is giving you attitude, your associate or principal is not listening to you, or your partner is fed up of your complaints then it’s time to wake up to the reality of the situation.

When we are stuck in the situation and cannot separate or create distance from it to look at it objectively, then we will be run by it.   Other people press our emotional buttons and can mildly annoy or infuriate us depending on the circumstances.  Our normal thinking can go out of the window and primitive flight, fight or freeze behaviour takes over.

The first problem is that we are ready to blame the outside and everything that is around us.  We can project the reason for us feeling upset or resentful about someone or something onto the other person and make them responsible for it.  For example, if your patient complains about a certain aspect of your care, and you have to respond to a letter of complaint, then the complexities of gathering information, presenting it in a legal format that the patient can understand can take many weeks or months of your time.  You may start to resent this situation and you may resent the patient or yourself for having done the treatment.  Stop right there!  Starting with what is needed to change in the other person and you are heading in the wrong direction.

If you are blaming, patients, staff or loved ones for the way you are feeling, then this will not change anything.  It will cause you to lose sleep, disempower you, affect your well-being, reduce your wealth and waste your life.  This is why the other is not important – because the focus is totally wrong.

Here are 10 tips on how to deal with conflicts:

1.  Thank the situation and the awareness that you are getting from the universe about your reactive emotional state.  Think of it as another opportunity for you to grow.  By doing this, you remain humble and grounded to the situation.

2.  Be willing to change your behaviour and learn from the situation.

3.  Take responsibility for your part of the conflict, complaint or criticism and have the courage to go through it.  Remember you are responsible for everything you say, everything you do, and everything that happens to you.

4.  If you can, expand your time horizons and give yourself more time to deal with it.  It may not need to be resolved straight away, and your response may change as time goes by, so remain open and flexible.

5.  See what you need to make things ok for yourself.  Chances are that you may already be feeling contracted and closed off around the situation.  Never let anything on the outside of you cause you to shrink and keep looking and asking yourself what it is you need to feel ok.  Ensure that the solution(s) you are considering are professional, honest, legal and authentic to where you want to go in life.

6.  Then ask yourself, what does the other person or people need for them to be ok.  This is the hard part!  It will require you to dig deep inside yourself and find a place where you want to come close with this person and resolve whatever issues are going on.  There is no point in coming from a place of self righteousness and wanting to change the other or prove yourself right.  This will not make things better and will probably escalate the conflict.  Seeing the matter from the other persons viewpoint is maturity.

7.  You may ask – well what if I get rejected?   What if they say no to my solution?   There is always the chance of this in any relating to another human being regardless of the situation.  This is the reality of dealing with conflicts and your feelings may get hurt – be willing to move through that.

8.  Re-negotiate the communication and keep on going back to that person with a willingness to resolve the conflict as a win-win resolution.

9.  If your step towards the other is genuine and has no ulterior motive to blame them or prove to yourself that they are not interested, then and only then be prepared to walk away from the situation with a knowingness that you have done all you can to resolve the situation for both of you.

10.  If you have done all you can to listen to and work with the other person in resolution, and the conflict still cannot be resolved, then the chances are that the other person does not know how to deal with it, just wants to pick a fight, or has hidden motives which you are not aware of.  Learn from the experience and change whatever you did the last time, so that it doesn’t happen again.

The key to resolving conflicts is to take responsibility, find what is important to you and also find out what is important to the other.  This is where the hardest part in relating during a conflict is and where Mastery of self begins.

(Part 1 of this article can be found here: http://www.drropra.com/7-essentials-conflict-resolution-practice/)