Lifetime Learning: 3/18/12

Causes of conflict - 115/365: Anger Management Style #1 (Photo credit: by Janine)

What are the causes of conflict? It is too late to think of the cause if you are already in a conflict. The best time to think of the causes of conflict is during peacetime so to speak.

How many times have you made the same mistake repeatedly and triggered the causes of conflict?

Given below are the common causes of conflict:

Mind reading – you assume negative things the other person is thinking about you and feel angry.
You are so self-centered that you fail to consider other person’s needs.
You are carrying a heavy baggage of hurts, insults, and suspicions.
Your Leadership and management styles are authoritarian.
Your Leadership and management styles do not leave any room for listening.
You are taking relationships for granted.
You are under tremendous stress, or you are unable to spot the stress in others.
You have a suboptimal Leadership and management styles.
You have poor conflict resolution skills.
Your empathy is so low that you are unable to put yourself in other’s shoes.
You have differences in values with others, and you are not even aware of it.
Your goals are misaligned with others, and you are pulling in different directions.
You have an inbuilt prejudice that you are not even aware of, and it is affecting your relationship with certain kinds of people repeatedly.
You have very poor listening skills and most of the time you are not registering in what others say.
You are very selfish, and you are concerned only of your needs and wants.

These are some of the main causes of conflict. A lot of it has to do with your personality and some of it has to do with your Leadership and management styles.

The bad news is that you will find it difficult to change as these are hardened habits of behavior. However, the good news is that you can change if you are determined and work hard.

The first step you can take is to increase your awareness of these causes of conflict and resolve to remove the causes one by one.

It will also be a good idea to go for some excellent training programs where they teach you leadership management styles that are based on sound leadership and management values.

Communication strategy - Two-way communication (Photo credit: @boetter)

Conflicts are a common place in modern day to day living. When was the last time you had a conflict and what was your communication strategy to resolve it?

There are typical ways people react when they are in a conflict -read through the list while checking how many of these approaches you follow in handling conflict.

Strategy variations in handling conflicts are:

Withdrawal
Feeling sorry for yourself
Blaming yourself
Labeling yourself as a failure
Labeling others
Silent treatment
Mind reading
Shunning away from resolving the conflict
Passing sarcastic remarks
Attacking the other person at every opportunity
Planning and setting a trap
Complaining
Gossiping about the person you are in conflict with
Self-pity
Depression
Emotional outbursts
Indulging in fear
Open transparent two-way communication

The list can go on and on. Create your own list of behaviors that you use to cope with conflict.

If you look at the list above, you will see that most of the strategies for dealing with a conflict move away from communication even though communication is the key to resolving conflict.

Conflicts can be resolved through open communication. You have to think through a communication strategy before you attempt to resolve the conflict. The biggest dilemma you will experience is the million dollars question “Who will make the first move?” The greatest temptation is to postpone resolving the conflict and hope things will get better. Conflicts rarely solve itself and there are great benefits if you make the first move to resolve the conflict.

The benefits are the following:

You will feel better because you are taking some action
Further conflicts will not pile up over the current one
You will have a great chance to diffuse the tension
You will be able to maintain the relationship and perhaps even grow it
You will get peace of mind
You will be in the driver’s seat

Your communication strategy should always be to be the first one to take the step to resolve the conflict.

Even if you follow this one strategy you will end up resolving much more conflicts than others, and you will be at peace.

Look back at all the conflicts you have had and how many of them, you took charge to resolve the conflict?

Commit today that in all conflicts in the future you will make the first move to resolve them.

Blog Disclaimer

Lifetime Learning is a record of my day-to-day, real-time learning. It is also, a record of my various experiments to be more productive, more successful, more caring and more contributing in all areas of my life.

While the concepts and ideas recorded here can be universally applied by anyone, the reader needs to use his discretion and apply these ideas based on his judgment of how appropriate and fit they are to his context and situation.

Occasionally there may be a mention of a certain skill, technique or approach which has been drawn from my professional training, please use them only if you have undergone a similar professional training yourself.

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Causes of conflict!

Communication strategy in a conflict-making the first move!