[Blog] Handling Conflict

by Sam Chand

It doesn’t matter who you are—everybody experiences conflict. Conflict is normal, natural, and neutral. What is conflict? It’s about expectation and reality. The greater the distance between these two things, the greater the conflict. This means we have to create expectation before we can experience the reality.

In most conflict resolution cases, we deal with the reality, rather than asking ourselves what the expectations were, and what happened there. While expectations may be clear in the mind of the communicator, they may not have been received with clarity by the recipient.

Conflict resolution is about creating better expectations? We want to start with what happened, not who or why—if you go there, you’re only going to escalate the conflict itself.

Whenever you have conflict, stop, rewind the tape, and ask yourself, “Was my expectation clear?”