Mindful Monday’s

Transcript

Michelle

Hello and welcome to Mindful Mondays. My name is Michelle Precourt, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. This is episode 20. That's right 20 times we've done Mindful Mondays while ticking this one off the list and this is called Ready to Engage: Shifting Your Conflict Mindset. Before we dive into our questions today, I invite you Cherolyn, I'd invite all of our viewers to pause, take a moment to reflect on where you're calling in from the indigenous lands on where you're calling in from the community that you live and work and, and have a lot of fun and I suspect, I'm calling in from the unceded lands, the unceded territories of the Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh people. And I feel really honored and blessed to continue to learn what they have taught us over millennium, about the lands, their teachings, so much, so much to learn and continue to learn. And I come with much gratitude. This is also known as Squamish, British Columbia. I invite all of our viewers here to share in the chat where you're calling in from, so we can get an idea of where you are across the country, and around the world. We've had viewers, of course, calling in from coast to coast here in Canada, but also our southern friends in the United States and even internationally. So please do share in the chat. And if this is your first Mindful Monday, well, let me tell you what it's all about. We're here the third Monday of every month, and I talk with experts like Cherolyn, who I'll be introducing right away, with a variety of subject matter experts on HR, what I like to call, HR hot topics. There's lots of talk about the world of human resources and employee relations and labour relations for that matter. I brought in experts to talk about corporate culture, career-related stress, and mental health at work, and today, we're here to talk about conflict. The thing that many of us like to shy away from and I suspect Cherolyn is going to tell us more about why maybe we shouldn't be so intimidated. So, Cherolyn Knapp, Hello Cherolyn. First of all, let's say hello, how are you today?

Cherolyn

Hi, everyone. Hi, Michelle. It's really nice to see the names, some familiar names, and some new names popping up in the chat and good morning, everyone.

Michelle

So Cherolyn is a conflict resolution consultant. She's a mediator. She's a workplace investigator. And she's a lawyer based in Victoria. Cherolyn has worked in HR and business management roles before becoming a lawyer, she was practicing civil, employment, and human rights legislation for over 15 years. And for over the last three and a half years, we have had a similar journey there Cherolyn with our consulting, for three and a half years, Cherolyn now assists organizations to understand conflict, she unpacks disputes. And really, it's about forging stronger paths forward, which again, resonates with the work that I do here at Mindful HR Services. And the other piece that we have in common, of course, Sherlyn is that we are both members of CPHRBC, and the Yukon, which is how we came to know each other. So thanks again for joining us today.

Cherolyn

Thanks very much for having me.

Michelle

So, let's dive into this. This conversation is about conflict. And I do want to say hello to the folks in the chat, please continue to drop in say hello, tell us where you're calling in from, and if you have any questions for Cherolyn share those as well. So, Cherolyn while those are coming in here, tell me, tell us what are you noticing in your work as a mediator, investigator, and as a coach?

Cherolyn

Thanks, Michelle. I think I'm noticing what a lot of people are noticing because I have these conversations frequently. People seem people seem activated. People are having a tough time in their workplace relationships, there's tension. When you get talking, I mean, remember that the people I meet are people who find themselves in workplace investigations or mediations or needing coaching or you know, participating in training and that kind of thing. So, they were already integral conflict situation. But I noticed that folks are having a hard time. They might feel bullied, they might feel discriminated against. And, and it's very difficult to see a way forward. I can say lots more about that. But that's, that's the first part that I'm noticing is that there's a, there's a level of activation that I think we probably many of us have experienced this right from the pandemic, people got stretched. I think of the analogy of like an elastic band that is keeping your frozen peas closed in the freezer. And it's been in the freezer a little too long, and you open your freezer and there's peas everywhere. And so we're like that elastic band, like we've lost the ability to stretch we you know, when something difficult happens, poof, you know, there's, well not literally pees everywhere, but we know that there's a brittleness and the loss of elasticity to our you know, when things get difficult when we get activated. We can go from zero to 100 pretty quickly.

Michelle

Yeah, yeah. So, I'm chuckling at the pea analogy. Because as a vegetarian, I like peas. But I've had that experience too. But joking aside, joking aside from the peas all over the place. Yeah, I tend to agree with you that there seems to be this heightened energy. And, you know, sometimes I will think, okay, is it something that I've done? Or is it something bigger? That has nothing to do with me at all. And, you know, I even think about where we are seasonally. Some people may be thinking, like, What are you talking about Michelle, but it goes back to the Indigenous people and the teachings that they have for us around the shift in the environment. And it does impact us change happens every day. I live in a community where I see the ocean come and go. And that happens every day. And right now, there's, at least for me, anyways, there's just energetic push of, you know, growth coming out of the Earth's surface.

Cherolyn

There certainly are relief right now I'm noticing people's mood, they're changing because of the longer days where we live, right, we've had our, our shift into daylight savings time. And so we're seeing more light in the day. And I think people came through a dark winter. And that I think the seasons do have an effect. And I think if we can pull the conversation into thinking about sort of the people in our organizations to thinking about those of us who are leaders, or HR, human resources professionals, that we're not immune to those difficult feelings, either right? We can find ourselves being emotionally hooked. A lot of people in human resources or people and culture rules have been working really, really hard for the last three years, right? Like it may have felt like, there has been no break because of labour market shortage challenges and dealing with public health orders. And, you know, now that we're sort of through the super difficult stuff, they're still putting organizations back together, or organizations that aren't going to make it so it's, it's a lot of stress. And, and so I think we have to understand as leaders and human resources professionals, how that impacts us, and therefore how we engage in conflict when we run into it, or when other people bring conflict to is for us to handle. And, and thinking about it, thinking about it like Okay, so what is conflict mindset? We said that this, this discussion is about shifting conflict mindset. And so, I have a couple of things to say about that. One is to think about how do we even picture conflict. The way we culturally handle conflict in North America sort of comes to us as with colonial traditions, and patriarchal conditions, and it's an adversarial system. Our labour relations systems are adversarial. Our judicial system is adversarial. And so, we developed a way of thinking about conflict that what you do when you're in a conflict is two sides, advanced a very strong position, and maybe a third party decides who's right and who's wrong. And then you move forward, but there's a different way of looking at conflict, which is just that we've got a problem to solve, we share the problem, we may not agree on the problem, we may have very different perspectives on what the solution is. But we all need to sit down and really think about this problem. And so that that's the first shift of mindset is, how do you even think about conflict? Do you think about it? As I'm in opposition to somebody, we're butting heads. And so, you know, Michelle, you disagree with me about something. And so, you're my problem. And, and maybe I'm not very nice about it. So, I'm your problem. And so that's a very, it's a very binary way of looking at it, it's a closed system way of looking at it, like there's only one right and one wrong, and someone has to prevail. And so, you know, where maybe we cut up a pie in an unsatisfactory way. Another way of looking at it is that we have a problem to solve. So let's identify what that problem is. Set it on the table, give it a shape and a color and, and dimensions and roll it around and in bring our different perspectives to there. And so that's it, that's a totally different way of thinking about conflict. And it's a way that's also less stressful, right? It's not that I have to defend myself or defend the way I see things, it's that we're going to actually try to say, okay, so we've got a challenge. Let's deal with that together.

Michelle

So, my question to you, because you said something really key about this identification. What does it take to get to that step?

Cherolyn

How do you identify what the problem is?

Michelle

Well, even just that, oh, Cherolyn, you and I have a problem. Can we sit down and talk about it, that identification? Then I need to have a conversation with somebody.

Cherolyn

Yeah. Yeah. So that I would say is the second part of this, which is, what part of our brains are we using at the moment, if we're emotionally activated, we're using that fight or flight part of our brain, which is not the thinking part. It's the doing part, right? It's the reactive, I need to save myself from danger part, the part of our brain that is activated is busy saving ourselves from danger. We're not engaging in complex, nuanced, sophisticated communication, we're engaging in pretty, sometimes unnuanced communication and ineffective communication. We're certainly not doing much collaborating or problem-solving. And so, we need to work on first identifying, hmm, I'm activated. So, knowing what does that feel like for me when my buttons get pushed? What happens when I get my backup? And we know like we, we all have a physiological response when that happens to us. And so, getting to know ourselves and go, Oh, I have that feeling right now. My heart's racing. For me, it's that my heart races and I also feel like my, you know, my heart might sink into my stomach. I breathe faster, I might go a bit red. And yes, certainly a feeling of panic starts to set. When I'm in that mode, I have no business trying to talk sensibly with anybody, I should figure out how to exit a situation and figure out when I can, when, and how I can get myself into a mode where I can access my complex problem-solving abilities, right? That's a different part of the brain, where I'm not in fight or flight, or I'm like, okay, so what is it that we need to talk about here? And how are we going to talk about it in a way that we can really hear each other? So once you notice you're activated, take steps to either you know, to go, because let's face it, like once we start heading up the escalation, mountain or whatever, right? Like our heart rates go up, our adrenaline starts coursing through our veins, you can't just shut that off. That's, that's a physiological process that actually needs to run its course. And so how do you do that? You know, you might need to go for a walk, you might need to do some deep breathing. You need to notice it and take steps to then be able to deactivate so that you can get into that problem-solving part.

Michelle

Yeah, I'm curious from our viewers here. How do you deactivate? What do you do? Do you go for that walk? Do you drink a glass of water? Maybe something a little bit stronger? I don't know. I'm not promoting that. But how do you deactivate? And I, what comes to mind for me as well, as you're talking about, that is mindfulness. Right, this idea of noticing. And once you notice self-awareness, I say it's a gift and a curse. It's a double-edged sword. So now I recognize that I'm being triggered with what Cherolyn is saying, Hmm, is that just the way it is? Or do I see it as an opportunity, this conflict mindset that you're talking about to take a look at the situation a little bit different? There's a comment here in the chat here that I'd like to share from a couple of folks here first. So, Tammy, thanks for joining us today, Tammy such a great point Cherolyn, you have to be able to identify our own emotions first. Yeah. And also here from Juliana. It's very insightful, the way you're recognizing the emotion as the momentary feeling instead of the whole reality of the situation. 100% Because the other thing that I say about conflict is, and maybe I said it earlier, it seems to be so much bigger in your own head. And if I can, I'd like to share a real example of one of those where this was a couple of years ago, I was co-facilitating an online workshop, which we were all doing a few years ago, everything was online. And we had an agenda, my co-facilitator and I, and on day two, the morning of day two, but an hour before we were going live, I get this text message from her saying, I can't do this piece for X, Y, and Z. So, as you were talking Cherolyn about a fight or flight in the danger zone. I went right into that mode, which is not untypical of my conflict management. You're okay, well, how do I fix this? Yeah, I don't want to go into danger mode of showing up without being prepared without an agenda item. So, I'm just going to fix it. And that's what I did. I got online; I recreated the agenda. I did all these things. I showed up, she showed up. No one was none the wiser, except that she was a little bit confused. Because I just took over, I thought, okay, well, no, no, it's okay. If you're uncomfortable, just take care of it. I'll just do it. I'll just, you know, I'll work through it myself. It's fine. Versus responding back to the text message, maybe saying, Hey, can we have a quick phone call about this? Because you're scaring the crap out of me right now. We're going live in an hour? I don't have an agenda.

Cherolyn

Yeah. And how many times we don't have a conversation that we probably have, because we're so activated, right? And we can only the only way you can imagine that conversation going is badly. And so you don't have it, instead of hmm. Okay. So, we need to have a conversation, and the conversation isn't - how could you do this to me? If we got some stuff to solve, let's collaborate. Let's work together. What are your ideas for what we do instead?

Michelle

Yeah, yeah. So, in that particular situation, it was a great personal teaching moment. Because in any sort of conflict, we even talked about this, there's always two sides. So, where's my accountability in that conflict? What could I have done different to maybe stymied that conflict or shifted the conversation in a different way? Yeah. I'm going to share online here. Dawn is chiming in, I asked the question, what do you do to step away? So deep breathing. 100%, there's lots of great breathwork you can do to really get into the diaphragm. And the other thing that I like about this particular technique is what I say a lot of times in conflict is it's about stepping away. So, while you're in it, it can be really hard to step away. But you can do some really subtle things in the midst of a difficult conversation like breathwork no one's going to know, you know, not unless you're like, you know, breathing heavy or something, which I wouldn't recommend.

Cherolyn

Sometimes you can exit a difficult situation and sometimes you can't, sometimes you must stay in the meeting. And so, there are things you can do for yourself, like put both your feet on the floor, breathe deeply, like, like, both Dawn and Youssef have mentioned in the chat to get back in your body so that you can then move away from that react reactivity, which just isn't serving at the moment right. The reactivity is there to help save our lives when there's actually a life-threatening danger. It's an important part of our brains. It actually causes us to feel traumatized that like, it makes us feel like something is terrible. And actually, if we can work to breathe, or, even, you know, go through 10 Jumping jacks, if you have to take a break from your meeting to just, like shed that energy so that you can come and say, Okay, what do we actually have to talk about right? Now let's figure out what the problem is. And let's solve it together. Because we're both smart. We can figure this out.

Michelle

Yeah, I pop this up on screen here from Youssef. So, taking a deep breath and take a moment to be mindful of what the story I'm telling myself right now versus what I'm hearing and listening. 100%.

Cherolyn

A little bit of it Brene Brown in there, right? Like, what's the story in my head versus, you know, this might have nothing to do with me, this is about what somebody else is going through. And so, noticing and digging into, okay, what's going on for you right now? Tell me more about that.

Michelle

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So fantastic. Love the comments in the chat here, I'm going to throw one more up here, from Petra, active listening. So, Petra is a colleague and friend of mine, and she's very, very good at this active listening bit. If you want to learn more about active listening, I encourage you to go and talk to her.  Repeating back does not necessarily, does not mean you necessarily agree with what has been said. Yes. 100%. So, this is where you can acknowledge, but it doesn't mean that that's where the conversation ends. I think that's what Petra is getting at.

Cherolyn

Yeah, that you can say to somebody, okay, so what I hear you're saying, is this? Did I get that? Is that where you're at? Okay, tell me more about that. Tell me more about what that means for you and about your suggestions for what we do instead to move forward. And that can be so powerful, because what we'll often do when we're activated, instead is, be so busy with how we're going to respond, right? Like, I'm not really listening to you, I'm not slowing down the conversation to figure out what you're actually telling me. I'm just in defensive mode, and I'm busy cooking up my responses in my head. So, slowing it down with active listening to say, okay, this is what I hear. Did I get that? And now what do we do? What are your suggestions for what to do, takes us into moving forward. If we're hung up on who's right and who's wrong, it, like we're just going be in an argument. Whereas if you can acknowledge each other and then say, okay, what do we need to do to move forward together? What does that look like? Then you start paving the path forward?

Michelle

Yeah, yeah. A lot of what we're talking about is how we, as individuals, deal with it, which I think is really important to have this conversation, Cherolyn. But I'm wondering if we could shift it slightly, to the leaders in the room, to the HR professionals in the room with us here today who are going to be going back to their offices and looking for strategies to cultivate a more healthier conflict mindset in their organizations. What can you share with our viewers on that today?

Cherolyn

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that we can be doing for ourselves as whether it's as HR professionals, as leaders, and for the people we support in your organization's right. Because many of us are in advice, giving roles of one kind or another. And so first of all, to notice when someone else seems activated, we're not going to tell other people to relax, okay, we're not going to say, gee, you should really calm down right now. But through active listening, we can say, hmm, I noticed that this seems to have brought up some really intense feelings for you. I want you know, here's what I'm hearing you saying, and then working to shift that conversation forward, as we talked about, and that's a skill. So that takes learning, learning some active listening skills, and sort of in the moment when you notice, either yourself or somebody else be having your buttons pushed, or feeling triggered, but to be able to teach that to your leaders to say, Hmm, could we all agree that when here's the culture we have in our place, when we feel our buttons pushed, we notice and we take a break, and if somebody needs to take a break from a conversation in our organization, that's okay. Because that's healthy. Now, that's not avoidance. That's not, we're never going to talk about it. It's a short break, to say, okay, you know what you've given me a lot to think about here. I appreciate you taking the time to do that. I'd like to go away and ponder this or digest this or percolate on this. And then could we set up a time to talk again tomorrow at nine o'clock, or what have you. Your organizational culture is we talk about things. But we don't, we don't always talk about things this instant. Because this instance might be the perfectly wrong time to talk about things. And we also don't fire off emails to each other when we're feeling upset. We, we think about them, we don't ruminate on them for six weeks. But we have a style of writing emails. And here's a tip actually, if you have a lot of high conflict situations coming up in your workplace, the High Conflict Institute is a really great resource, high conflict institute.com. And there are skills there, like for instance of writing an email in a BIFF format, which is brief, informative, firm and friendly. And you can like you can teach everybody this is the way we write emails in our organization so that we don't light each other on fire every morning, because we were annoyed thinking about something and, you know, wrote a nasty email about it, for example. So, I'd say like there are, there are techniques we can teach in our in our organizations, and we can build a culture around engaging in conflict in a healthy way as opposed to going after each other. And that's not the same as toxic positivity, right. Like, that's not saying there's no conflict. It's saying there is conflict. But here's how we do conflict in our place.

Michelle

What's coming up for me, as you're saying that Cherolyn, is sometimes the conflict is seen as one-sided. So many of us as leaders have to provide feedback. And your point about, it may be the wrong time to provide the feedback. A great opening question is Cherolyn. I have some feedback for you, would you be open to that? Right. And then well, actually, now's a really bad time. Okay. So, when would be a good time to have a discussion about our LinkedIn live broadcast, for example?

Cherolyn

Right. And, and also, maybe there are things I'd like to tell you, too.

Michelle

Exactly. Exactly.

Cherolyn

In HR and as leaders, we can get into this, like stuff goes one way, as opposed to let's have a conversation. I need to tell you some stuff. And I'd also love to hear from you about, what your perspective is on some things, because that's a richer conversation, then I'm here to impose my view on you.

Michelle

There's so much more that we could get into. I popped up on screen here that Cherolyn, one of the reasons I wanted you here today is that you're speaking at an upcoming conference on May 2nd, and 3rd in Vancouver. I'm really excited about the conference is being hosted by the CPHRBC and Yukon HR Association. The link is there. Cherolyn has so much more knowledge to share. You can also reach out to her directly via LinkedIn here, through her website. So much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Cherolyn. Any closing comments for our viewers that you might like to share?

Cherolyn

I thank you for the plug for the conference, it would be lovely to see any and all of you there, we're going have an hour-and-a-half breakout session on basically modernizing the HR professionals toolkit, conflict resolution toolkit, I think the thought to leave you with is to really, really think about how you picture conflict at all and think about that, actually, you can have a mindset around conflict, that it's just a problem to solve, as opposed to and I mean, might be a complicated problem to solve. It might require a lot of complexity. But that's different than I have to go head-to-head and duking it out with somebody. And once we shift that picture in our heads, we actually have access to a lot more richness in how we then deal with conflict ourselves and in our organizations.

Michelle

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I also want to give shout-out to Vraya Forrest. Vraya works for me here at Mindful HR Services. She's our digital marketing manager. Thank you Vraya for sharing all of these posts, working hard in the background. I really appreciate your efforts today. All right, in terms of closing our conversation, thank you so much Cherolyn for your wise words today. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Michelle

Excellent. I just popped that up on screen. So, anyone who's curious to learn a little bit more about this grant, you can find that information here. I also saw here that thank you to one of our viewers today, they shared the link chat dot open ai dot com. So, thanks so much for that if you just want to play, so to speak. And with that, I see that we're at time. I want to thank you so much, John, for your time, your energy and for sharing your knowledge today.

Cherolyn

Thank you for having me. This has been really fun. And I just love. It's been hard. I want to go back and read all the chat more because I know that people have really, that people are obviously really thinking about this topic for themselves.

Michelle

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much to all of our viewers. Many of them are regulars. I saw Elizabeth online here. I saw Barb online. Tammy is also a regular. Greg, Petra, thank you so much for being here with us today. To close I'd like to tell you about our next Mindful Monday, Thriving Through Change. It feeds in so nicely with the conflict conversation, because a lot of times as we change, how we communicate is a little bit different. So, we're going to change, we're going to discuss how change impacts us and as leaders how we can be better prepared for change and support those around us. So, that's on April, the 17th at 9am pacific time with Cathryn LeCorre Coaching. I'm really, really looking forward to that conversation as well. So, I hope that you can join us. Be sure to continue to connect with Cherolyn on your conflict questions. I always enjoy our conversations. Cherolyn thank you so much once again.

Cherolyn

Thank you.

Michelle

And until next time, everyone, be well.