Navigate Conflict: How to Understand Each other Better

How can you navigate conflict in the workplace before it becomes toxic?

Key Takeaways📍
🧠 Embrace Intellectual Humility: the importance of recognizing knowledge limitations and being open to learning from others.

💬 Assume Positive Intent: a key habit is assuming that others have good intentions, which can help reduce misunderstandings and build stronger relationships.

🎭 Use Humor to Diffuse Tension: Learn how using self-deprecating humor can help ease tension and a more comfortable environment for difficult conversations.

In this episode, Gostick & Elton are joined by world-renowned expert on civil discourse, Steven T. Collis, a professor of law at the University of Texas and author of the new book, Habits of a Peacemaker. Stephen shares invaluable insights on how to navigate challenging conversations and conflicts, whether at work or in our personal lives.

Speaking about reducing stress, let's talk about Magic Mind. It's the world's first mental performance shot, a little bottle full of nutrients that's all natural and wonderful. You can subscribe for monthly delivery with free shipping and cancel anytime. https://magicmind.com/gostickandelton and receive a 20% discount with GOSTICKANDELTON20 

🌟 LET'S STAY CONNECTED…

• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

#WorkplaceConflict #CivilDiscourse #ProductiveConversations #ConflictResolution #AnxietyAtWork #Leadership #MentalHealth #SelfCare #PositiveIntent

Transcript

How can you navigate conflict in the workplace before it comes toxic? Hello, I'm Chester Elton and this is my co-author and dear friend, Adrian Gostick. Thanks, Chester. Our guest today is a world-renowned expert on civil discourse who draws on his expertise to share 10 practices that any of us can use to encourage more productive conversations around difficult topics with our co-workers or anyone in our lives. As always, we hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life. And with us is our new friend, Stephen T. Collis, a professor of law at the University of Texas, Hook Em Horns. Before that, Stephen was a research fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. As an expert on how to address the most divisive issues facing the world today, Professor Collis lectures around the world, building bridges between people on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. He is the author of the new book, Habits of a Peacemaker. Welcome to the show, Stephen. We're delighted to have you on the podcast. Stephen Collis, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me issues in our society from abortion to LGBTQ plus rights, from racism to religious liberty, freedom of speech and yet you say in the very beginning of your book that your conversations have never developed into shouting matches and are always productive. So for those of us who can't seem to get through a family Thanksgiving without having an argument nowadays, can you give us some high level advice about how to start to have more productive discussions? more productive discussions. Yeah, you know, and some people might be wondering, well, why do I go around talking about all those topics? It's because I'm a First Amendment scholar and the freedoms of speech and religion, the right to assembly, all of those freedoms intersect with all of these other really divisive issues like LGBTQ plus rights and abortion and just, you know, racism, protesters, things like that. So we're regularly having conversations. And for me, what I realized, and what was the impetus for this book, I was walking, I was going around all over the globe talking about these topics, exploring them with people, and I realized I was having productive conversations. These were great conversations. And it got me thinking, what is it that I and the people I'm talking with are doing that are making these conversations possible? What are the habits we're employing, and how can we then pass those on to other people? And that was what the impetus for the book is. So the high level thing I would say to your listeners is, it is possible to have productive conversations about hard topics. That's, if they can just accept the half, it's a great first step. And by hard topics, I'm glad you mentioned Thanksgiving. Because I don't just, it doesn't need to be these political high button issues that, you know, I talk about. It can be, I love the name of your podcast, Anxiety at Work. It can be dealing with a difficult manager, dealing with a difficult employee or colleague, dealing as a parent with children, right? There's lots of techniques that can be used. There's a lot of quote hard topics out there that have nothing to do with politics that we could all use better techniques to address. Yeah, it is so interesting. You know, you talk about, it is so divisive right now. And we tend to vilify those that don't agree with us. You know, they're dumb, we're stupid, we're good, they're bad and so on and so on. You point out in your book this habit. It's one of my favorites actually is assume the best about people and it's one that I try to practice. It's not always easy because you can easily be attacked and feel like, well, if I'm being attacked, I should respond in kind, right? Right. But walk us through the concept and your interpretation of assuming the best about people. Yeah, you know, most of us kind of wander through life thinking that there's three kinds of people in the world There's the people who agree with us and then there's fools or monsters, right? That's like that's kind of how we like go around thinking and it's certainly how we behave online But we know deep down that can't be true. Like, you know, we know our So the question is, what could possibly be driving them? It's really critical to spend time trying to understand other people's motivations. I spend time in the book exploring how we all have different motivations. We all have different gut level psychological reactions to things. Oftentimes if we really spend some time, if we stop assuming that people are fools or monsters and spend a little bit more time trying to figure out kind of what their end motivations are. We'll often find out that we actually share the same goals. What we disagree on is the methodology. And it can really change our perspective. And I'll just ground this in something outside of politics you know when my wife and I got married my wife said And again, I don't remember where she got this principle from it was one of the best things that's ever happened to me and her She said I want in our marriage to always assume that the other one When we're doing something that we have a good reason for this. I can tell you there almost always was, and 99.9% of the time it has saved our marriage from all sorts of conflicts that I think we might have otherwise slipped into. That's awesome. Yeah, mine is, I forgot. That's usually my excuse. I started out reading the book and I burst out laughing when I read the first line, which is, most of us need to recognize that most of the time, we don't know what we're talking about. I just thought, what a great line. Chester and I, we've written 20 books. We struggle a lot with that first line and that's a great line, but help us understand this about this, and you call it the habit of intellectual humility. The title of the book is Habits of a Peacemaker and its 10 Habits. Really what it is is 10 principles with a whole bunch of actual sub-habits. We will all realize if we stop and think for just a minute, is that we really don't know anything about anything. So there's something called the knowledge illusion that scholars have found, which is, it suggests that humanity as a whole has amassed an incredible amount of knowledge. But any one of us actually has almost zero percent of the knowledge that's out there. How everything in there was constructed, what the molecules are doing, what the materials are made of, how are they holding themselves together, right? What does the atmospheric pressure have to do with that? What were the rules and regulations around making all that work? What countries was it all? You start to ask those questions and you're going to realize very quickly just where you're sitting right now you have about 0% of the knowledge available. Starting the conversation recognizing that and wanting to learn and grow and maybe tackle a problem together with someone instead of spouting out the 0.0001% of knowledge you have. Does that make sense? It does. You know, I think back to like the early settlers and pilgrims and so on. Those guys knew how to do everything. Like because if something broke down, they had to fix it. I look around my house, I have no clue how. I was befuddled with the toilet this morning. You know what? I have no clue how to fix this very simple instrument that we use several times a day. If I could jump in on that. I think it's funny you say that about the pilgrims because there is a line in the book I use that I actually thought was quite funny, but I never get the laugh I want when I tell it to people, but I'll read it. I tell people like, look, if the zombie, let's face reality together. If the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow, we're all going to die. And it's not going to be because of the zombies. because we don't have a lot of that knowledge in our own minds to survive the way people 300 years ago. We have other knowledge. We've got lots of other things, but we don't have that kind of knowledge. I think you're exactly right. We'd last maybe a couple of weeks if we're lucky. And that's just avoiding the zombies. You say we need to hunt for the best arguments against us and be open to change. Like how would you argue against yourself? I don't think that comes naturally to a lot of people because we spend so much time building up our arguments as to why we're right. How do you get people to adapt a more flexible mindset around that? Well, again, this is the power of a habit right I think every day you need to go search for sophisticated arguments against your position and and you're right if this does not come natural to us I was really disappointed I was in a meeting last year and we had a position on this particular issue. There's always an argument against our positions. Why don't you lay out the most sophisticated argument against your view?" Her response was, well, there are none, there are just no arguments. I was just like, oh my gosh, come on. We have to realize that there are always a cost. There's always a cost to any solution we have or any position we take. And figuring out what that cost is and figuring out who can state that cost in its absolute best form is critical to being a peacemaker and to knowing the best argument against ourselves. So you really do have to kind of ask yourself, what is my position on a particular issue? And then get into the habit of hunting for sophisticated arguments on the other side. And you're not going to find those if you're just scrolling social media or you're just looking at memes. You really need to be deliberate, and I provide resources in the book of places people can go. You need to be deliberate about finding sources where you know other viewpoints are going to be shared in a sophisticated way and then hunting them down. And I want to be clear, it doesn't mean those sophisticated arguments are necessarily going to defeat your position, right? You may not find them persuasive at the end of the day, but at a minimum, you at least need to understand them and know what they are, or it's really hard to kind of be solid in your own opinion. I love that, yeah, because we have such a confirmation bias nowadays. We just look for things that reinforce us, and the algorithms in our feeds just feed us more of what we love, which they actually should feed us opposite things. It kind of challenges a little bit too. This has been such a great conversation already, Stephen. Where would you point people to learn more about your work? Well, a quick Google search will get folks a lot of resources, just Stephen with a V and Collis, C-O-L-L-I-S, but they can go to stephentcollis.com also and they'll find all my books and where I'll be speaking in the future. I'm speaking all over the country at a pretty regular clip and so I'm out there and available. You know it's going to be interesting and thought provoking if you go and listen to Steven speak. I've been re-watching Ted Lasso recently and I love the darts match where he quotes Walt Whitman, be curious, not judgmental. Why is it important to ask questions, you say, to learn about people's motivations? What's driving them? How do we do that and why do we do that? David Morgan, Chief Executive Officer, Alphabet and Google This goes back to the idea of assuming what's best about others. Generally what you'll find if you start to ask people questions and I want to be clear here, not questions to force them to kind of justify their positions, but questions to ask, you know, well, why is that important to you? What are you worried about when you say you're, you know, let's say somebody comes in hot and heavy and they're like, I want to defund the police. Not asking them a bunch of questions to try to point out why you think that's a wrong approach because you may not even know what they mean by the words defund the police, but maybe ask more like, well, when you say that, what does that mean to you? What does that look like? And then what problems are you trying to solve by wanting to do that? When you ask those types of questions, I think what you're gonna find is they're probably worried about legitimate things to be worried about. And people who are on the opposite side who come in and say, no, that's the dumbest thing ever. We should never defund the police. Okay, what do you mean when you say defund the police? What are you worried about, right? I think oftentimes what you're gonna find when you ask those types of sincere questions is that most of us are often worried about the same things. Once we become aware of a problem that someone else is worried about, we might agree with them it is a problem. Now again, we might disagree about the solution, but asking those questions and not trying to make points right out of the gate will actually help us zero in on what the real problem is that perhaps our friends and colleagues and others are worried about. And then from there, you can actually make progress in having a discussion about it. You know, it's so interesting when you counteract that with questions, like you say, not accusatory questions, like, how could you be so stupid? Would be an accusatory question, right? How do you tamp down your own anxiety and your own emotion? You know, some of these hot topic issues, like you say, defund the police or the abortion issue and so on, the politics are coming up, the election is not too far away. How do you tamp down your emotions so that you don't go there? Is it just a discipline and practice? Well, again, there are habits we can engage in. I love the name of your podcast, Anxiety at Work, because when I was back in private practice before I entered academia as a lawyer at a large law firm, I was an equity partner at a large law firm. I was just telling my wife the other day, I have regularly experienced anxiety, right? Where intellectually I can tell myself, I don't have anything to worry about, and yet I had this just sense of dread and worry, and every time an email came in, it would trigger something. Sunday night, you're like, I gotta go back tomorrow, and all my clients are gonna be emailing me. It was this deluge of problems. How do you deal with that, right? Because if you're in a state of anxiety or agitation, it's very difficult then to have healthy conversations about things. There's a chapter in the book where I talk about trying to develop inner peace, and there's a lot of practices people can engage in. First of all, you've got to take care of yourself physically, so exercise, good sleep is critical, right? But then there's other practices, a steady schedule of vacations, it's critical to recharge. And then things like journaling, long-form reading, meditation and mindfulness, spiritual practices. If you're a spiritually minded person, if you have some faith, research has shown that things like prayer and time reading things like scriptures or journaling about your faith can actually help calm you. Various breathing techniques, you know, where you'll say you breathe in for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, and then breathe out for four seconds can be really critical to just helping stabilize things. I have found a lot, I have others in the book, but practices like that go a long way. If I get out of a meeting that's left me feeling anxious, I'll come into my office and before my next thing, I'll sit down in a chair and I'll just practice prayer and breathing, get myself grounded again and then move on to the next thing. I would encourage folks to do that as much as they can. It really helps. You also talk about self-deprecating humor. Talk to me about some self-deprecating humor that Steve has used that helped defuse the situation. Sure, yeah. I'll go around and one of the areas I'm a specialist in is religious liberty law, which a lot of people have really strong feelings about and don't know actually anything about. And I'll tell them a joke right out of the gate to kind of just, because I'm talking to mixed audiences with very mixed views on some of these issues. And so I'll tell them right out of the gate, I'll say, here, let's break the ice, let me tell you a story. And the story is when I was nine years old, I was going to a summer camp. And I got about five of these, but this is one that I like to use. So I was nine years old, I was going to a summer camp. I lived in a town, a little town in New Mexico. My family didn't have a big home, so we all shared one bathroom and pretty much and I go into the bathroom and back then it was really cool for kids like me to spike up their hair. So I got the mousse, put it in my hand, spiked up my hair, pretty proud of myself, looking good. I walk out of the bathroom and right then my mom walks by and she starts sniffing and she's kind of like, what is that smell? And I very proudly pointed to my head and I said, it's the mousse and her eyes got really big and she grabbed me, spun me around, pushed me back into the bathroom, ran my head in the sink and started washing my hair out. And it turns out that what I thought was moose was actually her hair removal product, Nair. Oh! And all of my hair started falling out, right? And for the whole summer, people thought I had some horrible illness. Now that story is self-deprecating humor, but right out of the gate when I start with that, and I use it as an example, I say, look, we get in trouble in life when we think we know what something is and we don't and we have strong feelings about it. And that's true for moose and it's true for something like religious liberty or free speech for these issues, right? That helps people like, okay, this guy must not be a total monster. He's got a sense of humor. He doesn't take himself too seriously. Now let's have a conversation about what is religious freedom? How does it work? That kind of a thing. You know, you can do that, a prepared anecdote like that or you can just learn to kind of work in little things on the Fly and in conversations You know anytime I deal with numbers with somebody if we're having a conversation that involves any type of statistics I'll always throw out look man. I was an English major, and I was horrible at mathematics You know the little comments like that kind of help people realize like okay. He's kind of self-deprecating. He doesn't take himself too seriously It's really helpful way to to just keep a conversation going. Yeah, Chester always says he was in the half of the math class that made the upper half possible. That's nice. That's great. So, it's been a great conversation, Stephen. We'll let you go here, but give us a couple of big takeaways that you'd like our listeners to leave with from the beginning of writing this book to the end. What's changed in your thinking about becoming a peacemaker? The opportunity I had to write this book was the chance to really talk to a whole lot of people who are good at this. I define a peacemaker as someone who can have a productive conversation about a hard topic. Again, those hard topics can be political, but they can be family situations or work. What I realized is these people are across the ideological gamut. So this book is not about politics. It doesn't support the political left or the political right. These habits are something that anybody can employ, regardless of their personal ideologies and where they're at on the spectrum. And so there's people in this book whose examples I use who are across the ideological spectrum with whom I disagree on a whole lot of really important topics, but who have modeled the art of being a peacemaker. And so my hope is your readers will realize that these are skills that can be learned. You know, they can be, they're habits that can be employed, regardless of one's ideology, to be able to have better conversations just about the world around us. That's wonderful. Listen, what a great conversation. What an important book, probably more now than ever, to be able to talk about tough things without vilifying each other, without getting emotional, without, you know, making people feel like you're smart and they're stupid. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, so has Adrian, so it's really a delight to have you on the podcast. His name is Stephen T. Collis. He's a law professor at the University of Texas. His new book, Habits of a Peacemaker, available on Audible where fine books are sold everywhere and of course on Amazon. Pick up a copy. You need it, your neighbors need it, and as we always say, anybody can buy one copy. Buy a couple and give them to your friends. We hope you sell a million, Steve. Take care. Good to have you. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. You know, it's really interesting as we've wrapped up with Steve, you know, we talked about anxiety and personal practices. It's really interesting. You know, our sponsor, Magic Mind, I've been using Magic Mind for at least three months now. And I find that that ritual, that habit of getting those good nutrients, everything's natural, it really does calm my mind and set me up for a better day. You know, I know it's going to help me, it's going to reinforce stuff. I've recommended it to a ton of my friends, of how to use it and when to use it. I use it first thing in the morning. Although it's interesting, sometimes if I get a really long day, I'll wait until a little later in the day because you get about seven hours of what they call the flow. And it's really interesting, you know, as a sponsor, they've got a wonderful unique discount code. So, if you go to magicmind.com forward slash Gostick and Elton, and that's not the ampersand, it's actually Gostick and Elton, and you put in Gaustic and Elton 20, you get a 48% discount on the product. I just find that with all the stresses we're going through and all the stuff that's going on, the last three months when I start to get really anxious, knowing that I've got Magic Mind on my team just really helps. One of my big takeaways from Steve is take care of yourself. Take care of yourself first, take care of your mind, love that. And let's dig into what Stephen Collis told us today, a distinguished professor, tours the world talking about this. I love the questions to ask when somebody is getting heated, which my gosh, you're talking to a neighbor nowadays, you're at the store, you bump into somebody, you're a family, everybody is getting heated up about something. And I love these questions, specific things like, okay, why is that important to you versus, well, that's stupid. What does that look like? What does success look like in that scenario? What problems are you trying to solve? Really digging down and taking a little time with people to be a little bit more introspective, so powerful. Yeah, and what do you mean by that was a great question. It's so interesting, I was just on a holiday with a bunch of friends and family and it's this bike trip we take every couple of years. It is interesting as conversations come to these hard topics, how often you'll hear, they're just bad people. What Steve is saying is there's a reason for that. Dig a little deeper, be a little more curious. I love the idea about, you know, assume positive intent about people, you know. I like you say, you know, most of us think there are three kind of people in the world, people that agree with me and then fools and monsters, you know. They're not fools and they're not monsters. They've got a differing opinion. Get in there and figure out what it is that's important to them and things flow a lot easier and you take all that emotion and anger out of the conversation. I love that. I love this idea of looking for sophisticated arguments against yourself, against your issue. Why would you do that? We love confirmation bias. We love to feel like we're right, but the point is, remember our old CEO, Kent Murdoch, once said that, he says, �The leader in my team that I'm most worried about is the one who feels the supremacy of his or her idea is everything because we always need to challenge ourselves. I love that idea. When I do go to the news, I go to the left, I go to the right, I go to BBC. I want to see what international people are talking about because you need all the access. When people say, well, I don't know, you can't know what you can trust nowadays. Well, go to many places and that will help. I like what he says. We really don't know anything that we're talking about. Our knowledge of the world is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. Yeah, the knowledge illusion. I also really appreciated this. He said, look, you can learn to do this. It's not intuitive. When we feel like we're being attacked, we want to attack back. We want to defend ourselves and we feel justified in that behavior. Instead, as you brought up that great Walt Whitman quote from Ted Lasso, be curious. Why do you feel that way? What is it that's really important to you? I had a good friend of mine who's deep into politics. He would always ask me good questions like, are you a one issue voter? Is there just one issue that if you don't get agreement on that, nothing else matters? I thought, what a great question because so often we tend to be that way and say, look, this is the one thing that really matters to me. I know there's lots of issues. This one thing is a deal breaker for me. That was really enlightening for me in talking with him. So good question. Always, you know, we love the self care. And he had a long list of things he does. And not surprisingly, because he's involved in these conversations every day. So he makes sure he eats well, he exercises, he gets his sleep, he meditates, he prays, he breathes. And I thought, you know, you really do have to be very disciplined about that get your exercise feel good about just take care of yourself first. Yeah, love that Well, it was a great podcast as always You know when we think about the knowledge illusion somebody who has more than zero percent of knowledge is our producer Brent Klein I would say 10 20 percent of knowledge least of the universe the universe. Yeah, it really does We want to thank Brent. We don't think Christy Lawrence our producer I'm sorry our booker who helps us find such amazing guests and to all of you who listened in if you like the podcast Please share it we'd also love you to visit the culture works comm for free resources to help you and your team and Everyone around you thrive Yeah And we love speaking to audiences around the world virtually or in person on the topics of culture teamwork resilience Resilience give us a call. We'd like to talk to you and be at your event and as always by the book anxiety at work We also have leading with gratitude to the gratitude habit and many more follow us on LinkedIn We've got a great weekly newsletter, but that's plenty for you to work on Adrian as always It was a delight what an important subject Steve is talking about, you know Taking care of yourself being good to people and as always I give you the last word send us off on a high note. Well first and foremost be good to yourself until next time we wish you the best of mental health.