Effective Conflict Management and Emotional Fitness
Dealing with challenging/aggressive individuals.
Effective Conflict Management
Can Conflict management be acquired on a one day training course? This simple answer is No. At best all a one day course can provide you with is a tool box to go out and practice with whenever the opportunity arrives to resolve a challenging confrontational situation.
Emotional Fitness.
To resolve conflict effectively you need to be able to approach the challenge with a positive state of mind. You need to be Emotional fit.
As we develop we acquire habits some will be good habits (positive) whilst others will be bad (negative). This is an area which is often overlooked during many Conflict Resolution training courses
Just think about this for a moment. How effective do you think you would be if you were not feeling good about yourself whilst experiencing a challenging confrontation. Equally how effective would you be if you did not feel good about the other person.
To deal effectively with challenging behaviour you need the following.
• Knowledge: E.g. .the knowledge to identify triggers in self and others
• Skill: The ability to deal with these triggers in self and others.
• Desire: The willingness to change any bad habits.
Without the desire nothing will change and the individual will get what they have always got when engaged in a confrontational situation.
This element of emotional fitness is often overlooked in most Conflict Resolution training courses (even in the nationally accredited competency tested training courses). This I find surprising when you consider the resent research carried out by NICE identified that over 67% of assaults on NHS staff committed by patients were a direct result of the initial conflict being badly addressed by their own staff.
Logically then if the issue of emotional fitness is not addressed during any Conflict Resolution training then only 33% of the training will be effective.
An emotionally unfit person is much more likely to re-act in a negative way rather than to respond in a positive way. The former is a reaction which comes from our reptile brain whilst the latter is a reaction which stems from our intelligent brain.
An individual who is efficient at handling conflict will always be engaging their intelligent brain, and thus able to access their own “tool box”
In my subsequent articles I will be looking more closely at Emotional Unfitness, how to identify this in self and other and control measures to address this issue.
We will also have a look at the tool that can be acquired through good Conflict
Management training to effective handle an escalating conflict situation.
