Conflict resolution for a more beautiful world

A few months ago my husband and I moved through a rough patch, and I observed something really interesting during this time. In my mind, he became my opponent. I would be replaying past conversations, or preparing for upcoming conversations, thinking about what I could say to essentially ‘win’ against him. To be ‘right’, and to show him he was wrong (yeah, I’m not proud!).

As I saw myself doing this, it occurred to me that even if I ‘won’ an argument against him, I wasn’t really winning. When positioned as opponents, there’s only one outcome for us as a couple and ultimately it’s that we both lose.

I talked to him about this, and consciously brought attention to seeing him instead as my team mate, with a common goal – relationship happiness, growth and expansion.

Immediately things started to shift, and we moved through some really beautiful growth and expansion together, and back into relationship harmony. Since, we’ve deepened our level of trust in really profound ways. We’re thriving.

I’ve been reflecting on this experience ever since, and how it shows up in the world of work (if you listen to any of my podcasts or webinars you’ll probably know by now how much I love bringing my relationship work into the context of the workplace, because hey, it’s all just relationships ultimately) with the irony being that many people are constantly being combative (aggressive or defensive) with their teammates, with their customers, with investors. It’s actually pretty normal in the average workplace, it’s so normal in fact, it’s expected. 

But, just like in my lovership, there’s no winning when we’re fighting against each other, instead of side by side for the common goal.

The amount of energy that goes into defending oneself against a boss, investor, co-worker and likewise in attacking someone for something… is a LOT. Because it’s usually also triggering past wounding and hurt. There’s plenty of emotions coming up, and all the energy is being spent focused on our ‘opponent’ instead of on solving the mutual problem, or on moving closer toward the common goal. 

At Growmotely, we made a commitment early on that ‘all stakeholders matter’ which means we won’t make any decisions to the detriment of anyone in our ecosystem. Growmotely is here to redefine work for humanity, that is our common goal and if we keep that front and centre, always working together toward that, I know we will all prosper.

It means remembering, whenever we might move through something challenging with someone within our ecosystem, to stay on the same team. We’re all here together to redefine work, how do we stay side-by-side and work together on a solution for the problem at hand? How do we speak to each other as teammates working together on a challenging problem?

When we can work together on solving the mutual problem, magic happens, solutions appear and we all win.

PS. If you’ve considered investing in Growmotely, we’d LOVE to welcome you into our tribe in this way. Find all the details on our campaign page.