When you feel that you have been verbally attacked, it is incredibly difficult to think of the right words to calm the situation and disarm a verbal aggressor. Developing power phrases for use in various situations can help you get past this mental roadblock so that you can respond calmly and quickly in a wide range of situations.

In working with workshop participants and coaching clients to find good ways to address specific, emotionally charged situations, I have learned three power phrases you can use in a wide range of situations to disarm a verbal aggressor and turn the direction of an escalating conversation.

Here they are…

If I were you, I would feel exactly the same way.

Let’s say someone expresses a strong emotion and it looks like that emotion could be a barrier to effectively communicating with them. Acknowledging their emotion is a powerful tool to show that you understand their perspective even if you do not necessarily agree with it.

Part of the power in this statement is that it is absolutely true in all cases. If you were the other person, you would feel exactly like they feel because you would have their life experience, education, culture, gender, etc.

You may be right.

When someone comes at you with strong words of criticism or condemnation, you can often disarm the attack by acknowledging that they may be correct in their judgement. You do not necessarily have to agree with their assessment to say that they may be right.

If necessary, you can add to this statement to also offer your counter perspective by bridging from your acknowledgement of their position to your position with the word and. It would look like this: “You may be right, and…” (Important note: beware of the tendency to use but in place of and in your statement.)

Of course I am.

This statement is a new addition to my verbal toolkit by way of my colleague John Little.  In a recent Ultimate Communicator workshop, we were discussing how to respond to strong personal attacks. For example when someone says: you’re an idiot, you’re totally wrong,  etc. In our discussion, John suggested the phrase: “Of course I am.”

I love it! This approach totally removes the push back you offer the other person when they verbally attack you, and it gives you room to turn the tide of the aggressive conversation.

As is true with most communication techniques, the specific words you use will depend a great deal on several factors. For example, some of the considerations are:

• The relationship between the two parties
• The political or social environment surrounding the communication, and
• The physical setting of the parties during the communication.

So, while I do not believe that these phrases are completely universal, they can be great additions to your communication repertoire that help you better respond to verbal aggression in a positive way that leads to resolution rather than escalation.

Do you have some phrases that help to turn a heated conversation in a positive direction? If you do, please share them in the comments section below.

From what I could tell, he was engaged in a bit of a conflict conversation.

I could also tell that he was making a common mistake that rarely, if ever, leads to conflict resolution and almost always leads to conflict escalation. Based on the bits and pieces of conversation that I overheard, I think the person on the other end of the phone call was making this mistake as well.

The symptoms of the mistake manifested as:

• Justifying behaviors
• Explaining why he was right
• Showing the other person why he was wrong
• Rehashing what had already happened
• No focus on what to do the next time this situation occurred to make it turn out better

The root cause of the problem stems from focusing on the past rather than the future. I wrote about this challenge previously in my post about the 7 Deadly Sins of Conflict Resolution.

If you want to guarantee conflict escalation, keep revisiting the past — past statements, past actions, past reasons, past thinking, etc.

Talking about the past is like throwing out an anchor. It stops forward progress and keeps the conversation stuck in problem discussion rather than problem solving.

Problem discussion becomes negative and accusatory, if it goes on too long.

Problem solving is about finding ways to set and meet mutual expectations and how to interact with and behave towards each other so that conflicts do not recur.

If you want to productively resolve conflicts, move quickly to a future focus. Only stay in the past long enough to understand how the miscommunication or misunderstanding happened, and then look for ways you can interact with the other person in the future to stop the problem from happening again.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in the ABC’s of Life series on forgiveness. Today, I got a comment from Aled Davies with a link to a post on his blog about 5 Steps to Forgiveness.

I really liked what I read over at Aled’s blog, and it got me thinking: one of the key components I see in the 5 steps he wrote about is patience.

The patience to:

• Slow down your emotional response
• Consider that the other person might actually have a positive intention rather than a negative one
• Carefully consider what might be the other person’s perspective

I have noticed that people who are able to successfully resolve conflicts generally exercise great patience with others, with themselves, and with the process of reconciling differences. They seldom push or rush either the other person or the process, and they work to remain open to alternative explanations for events rather than assuming people meant harm by their words or actions.

While I am not always patient with others, that is my goal. As Benjamin Franklin said:

Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.

Personally, I would love to be a genius at something, and resolving conflict seems like a good, productive area to be a genius about.

Won’t you join me in pursuit of conflict resolution genius by working to exercise greater patience?

Have you ever seen or been involved in a conflict conversation where one person said: “I knew that you were going to say that!”

If you have, you probably noticed that the conflict intensity escalated from that point forward.

This type of statement is aggressive. It says that how you anticipate another person will react is a forgone conclusion rather than an expectation. It leaves no room for the other person’s autonomy and self-control. It subtly places you in an intellectually and emotionally “superior” position relative to the other person.

Saying that you “know” what someone else will do or say is like saying that you can unzip his head and know what’s going on even before he does.

If you want to create more conflict and escalate the emotional level of your conversation, tell someone that you “knew” she would react however she did.

If you want to leave room for conflict resolution and effective communication, strike this type of comment from your conflict repertoire and apply these seven ways to improve your communication during a conflict.

In conflict situations, many of us struggle to maintain a fair and objective perspective about the other person.

We assign all kinds of bad motives and intentions to their behaviors before we slow down long enough to really understand their perspective.

This weekend I found a quote that offers a way to avoid this problem.

Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.

– J.M. (James Matthew) Barrie (1860–1937), British playwright. Rectorial address, May 3, 1922, St Andrew’s University, Scotland. Quoted in Times (London, May 4, 1922).

I don’t have much to add to this quote. I offer it today as food for thought the next time you find yourself in a conflict.

Not all conflict is bad. In fact some conflict can actually be good.

The difference is whether the conflict is constructive or destructive.

The challenge is that the emotional energy, body language, and other external signs of the conflict can look the same to an outside observer.

So, how can you tell the difference between a constructive conflict and a destructive conflict?

Here are three tell-tale signs to help you distinguish between the two types.

1. Constructive conflict conversations focus on issues. Destructive conflict conversations focus on people.
2. Constructive conflict conversations focus on the future. Destructive conflict conversations focus on the past.
3. Constructive conflict conversations bring people together to solve a problem. Destructive conflict conversations create polarization and division within an organization.

If a conflict conversation is constructive, let it go to completion. It is likely to turn out well.

If a conflict conversation is destructive, use the Seven Secrets for Resolving Personal Workplace Conflict to move the conflict in a positive direction.

In a previous post on exercising your power of choice to get conflicts under control, I mentioned some specific actions to consider using to de-escalate conflicts.

In this post, I’m expanding on three of the actions with some additional thoughts on how to put them to work in your conflict resolution repertoire.

Here are three things you can do in virtually any conflict situation to improve the outcome.

1. Apologize

I seldom see conflict situations where all of the miscommunication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of intentions rests entirely on one person. You might not be totally at fault for the challenge that led to the conflict. Odds are, there is something you contributed to the early stages that helped it to escalate. Whatever that behavior, word choice or tone was, apologize for it.

Don’t apologize for how the other person feels or how they interpreted your actions. You can apologize for the action itself.

Apology is a powerful way to de-escalate conflict. When you apologize, remember that apologizing for your contribution does not mean that you have to take all of the blame. Just own your contribution.

2.  Forgive

Just as you should apologize for your contribution, be ready to accept their apology or ownership of responsibility. Resist the urge to take advantage of their show of vulnerability. Just forgive graciously.

In practice, you don’t even have to wait for an apology to forgive. You can forgive simply because you chose to do so. (And you can do it without holding it over the other person. Remember the gracious part.)

3.  Listen

As a general rule, people feel less angry or frustrated when they feel understood. When you listen without interrupting, correcting, or debating, you can help the other person feel understood. When you help them feel understood, you improve the odds of de-escalating the conflict.

I don’t propose that these actions are necessarily easy to do when emotions are high and the conflict is escalating. While they might not be easy to do, they are possible to do. And they are powerful steps you can consciously apply to help conflicts move towards resolution.

These situations caused me to reflect on what happens in conflict:

• How it gets started,
• How it escalates, and
• What you can do to de-escalate it.

I was also wondering if these situations happen in your life. Here’s what I mean, you know what you should do in a given situation, the situation occurs, and then you do exactly the opposite of what you knew to do.

Since I’m guessing that I’m not alone in this struggle, I thought I would interrupt my series of posts on Frequently Asked Questions About the DISC Model by mixing in a few posts on understanding the dynamics of conflict escalation.

Using this post as a starting point, we can then look at how to avoid or minimize this problem in our lives.

In this post, I will quickly show a model of what often happens during conflict escalation. By understanding the model, we can plan positive steps to back conflicts down after they start. I’m drawing some of this post content from a video course I am developing on resolving personal workplace conflicts. I’ll share more on that later.

The escalation cycle generally starts with one person (I’ll call them Person A) doing or saying something that the other person (Person B) perceives as a threat. Notice the key word: perceives. It doesn’t really matter if Person A meant their words or actions as a threat. It only matters if Person B sees the words or actions as a threat.

This perception of threat can take many forms, and it is likely linked to the anger process I wrote about previously.

Once Person B perceives a threat, they will probably move to anger and then behave in a self-protective way out of that anger.

Person A now perceives Person B’s behavior as a threat.

Person A follows the same perception-anger-behavior pattern and further contributes to the conflict escalation as shown in the video above and the image below. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
I plan to revisit the specific things we can do to reverse this cycle in future posts. For now, I’ll leave you with this observation: either person can take steps to de-escalate the conflict.

They can either:

Recognize the problem and change their behavior so that the other person no longer perceives a threat.

— or —

Question their perception in order to get their own anger under control.

In practice, the person taking responsibility would likely do both.

In an ideal world, both parties would take responsibility, stop blaming, and move to resolution. Even in our less than perfect world, either party can take the right actions and move to resolve the conflict with or without the other person’s cooperation.

Guy Shares Two Questions to Help
You Control Your Anger

A question that often comes up in my conversations and training sessions regarding conflict resolution is this:

How do I control my anger?

Great question. Sadly, it’s often the wrong question.

Anger is not really a primary emotion. It does not come first. It may come quickly. It just doesn’t come first. Anger is generally the result of something else.

If you imagine at your emotional container like a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage and sealed with a stopper, you can develop a simple model for understanding what happens when you get angry so that you can attack the anger at it’s source rather than trying to control it after it happens.

So, we have our emotional container represented by a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage. Now, we shake it up, and we get an explosion of foam. The foam represents anger.

Have you ever had a sink full of foam when you were trying to wash your dishes? If you have, you realize just how difficult it is to get rid of the foam. Well, anger is the same way. Once it blows out of us, it is really difficult to reign in and clean-up.  It would be better to stop the foam (anger) before the explosion.

One tactic for controlling anger at its source is to recognize that by removing what came before the foam, we never have to deal with it at all. Since anger is a secondary emotion, we can dig past it to the primary emotion behind it and deal with that rather than trying to deal with the anger.

In many cases, the primary emotion triggered by an event in our lives will be one of two things:

1. Fear, or
2. Hurt/Pain (either physical or emotional)

If we can learn to identify which of these is at work in us when we start to feel “angry,” we can deal with the primary emotion in a way that can remove or reduce it. When we do that effectively, we get our anger under control by never letting it get ramped-up in the first place.

Several months ago, I read the results of a study that said a key predictor of domestic violence was the inability to clearly articulate emotions. The strategy I am proposing here aims at improving your skills in the area of expressing what is really inside rather than letting it build to the point of explosion. When we back-up the chain of emotional responses to the key, underlying, primary emotion, we can often express our fear or hurt more clearly so that it never escalates to full-blown anger.

How do you apply this approach?

When you feel anger welling up inside you, stop and ask yourself these questions:

1. What do I fear?, and
2. What is causing my pain?

If you can find an answer to these questions and then express the emotion in a healthy way, you just might avoid the need to clean-up the foam of your anger.

(I don’t mean to suggest that getting angry is always a bad thing. It’s just often a bad thing, if you want to preserve relationships. I’m also not suggesting that this is the only way to get your anger under control. It’s just one way to do it. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.)

I’ve written about the power of apology in the past, and today I was reminded of the power of the words “I’m sorry” by a short article I read in the November 23 edition of BusinessWeek magazine.

As part of a larger article titled 10 Ways to Cut Health-Care Costs Right Now, I found item number 10 under the heading: Aplogize to the Patient.

This short piece quickly describes the financial impact of a program initiated by the Sorry Works! Coalition. Sorry Works! suggests that hospitals immediately inform patients and their families of medical errors, investigate the cause, change procedures if necessary, and offer a settlement if the heath-care provider is at fault.

In effect, they promote saying: “I’m sorry.”

According to the article, the University of Michigan Health System and the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago both reported significant (in the range of 40-50%) reduction in malpractice claims by applying the Sorry Works! program.

So, what’s the implication to workplace conflict resolution?

Just say, “I’m sorry.”

Very rarely have I ever been involved in a dispute with another person when they were totally at fault. In most situations, I have contributed to the situation in one way or another.

Rather than debate the what I did or didn’t say, what you did or didn’t say, what I did or didn’t intend, or what you did or didn’t intend points of the conflict, just say “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry for what I said or did. That’s it. No justification. No rehashing of the events. No blaming.

Will this always work? No.

Will it usually work? Yes – the reduction in malpractice suits proves it.

“I’m sorry” flies in the face of our natural need to protect ourselves. It’s often difficult to say, and it works.