Conflict at Christmas

There, I said it, the C word. Christmas. More especially Conflict at Christmas

The trigger for this blog was having a friend talk to me about how much she was dreading her
company’s Christmas ‘do’ because of one particular person she continually ends up arguing with. She was already anticipating the conflict.

What Happens?

Conflict and Christmas do seem to go hand in hand. Naturally, a lot of the difficulties people
have are with their own families but increasingly, the additional stresses and pressures at
Christmas seem to tip people over the edge and they can be really grumpy at work, taking out their frustrations and anxieties on their colleagues.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the interesting bit….conflict at Christmas is usually because you haven’t dealt with
stuff before the fateful date. Like right now, before it gets too late. The same goes for conflict
in the workplace; the longer you delay dealing with it, the worse it’s going to be when it does
finally come out into the open.

One of the main problems with conflict is what I call the ‘festering phase’. Here’s how it
works: something happens that you don’t like or upsets you. You wait for an apology or some
acknowledgement that there’s a problem. You don’t say anything.

But you do fester. You replay whatever it is that happened. Over and over and over again. You
think about what you did say and what you might have said. Over and over and over again. You think about what’s wrong with the other person and what they need to do to make everything all right. Over and over and over again.

The ‘festering phase’ can last anywhere from a couple of minutes to the rest of your life.

What I’m interested in is what happens in the lead-up to the conflict. If that can change then
you don’t have to enter a ‘festering phase’ – you might even be able to head towards a ‘resolution phase’. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why It Happens

In our vast experience of running Conflict Management and Assertiveness Courses, we know that people fall into the same old patterns of behaviour they’ve always done (on both sides, mind you) so that conflict becomes inevitable. 20 Great Assertiveness Tips

Is there one person with whom you seem to engage in conflict often? Are there types of conflict
situations that repeat themselves? Once you have a good beady-eyed look, you ‘should’ be able to detect patterns. It could be anything, couldn’t it?

For instance, you say something, someone else takes offence, you try to defend yourself, the
other person doesn’t want to hear your defences and you’re into conflict.

It could be someone asks you to do something, you don’t want to, they start putting pressure on you, you push back, they push back harder and you’re into conflict.

Once you can unpick the pattern, you have an opportunity to change it.

This, of course, means that one of you will have to do something different in order to break the
pattern, and guess what? It’s going to have to be you if you want to at least kick-start a new way of communicating.

How to Avoid Christmas Conflict?

Obviously, I’d need about 10 blogs to really go into this in any detail, so I’ll give you one
suggestion for now.

Mind-sets get us into trouble and they can equally help us get out of trouble, even before it
begins. Like the woman I mentioned at the beginning of this blog who’s dreading her company’s Christmas ‘do’, lots of us anticipate conflict – we know it’s most likely inevitable and yet we can’t see a way of avoiding it other than avoiding the situation, which isn’t going to alter
anything.

Preparing for Christmas – Ten Top Tips

Thus a change of mindset is needed. Think of that really difficult person or scenario. Think
about what rubs you up the wrong way, what do they say or do that ‘gets your goat’? I bet that even doing that might trigger an old ‘festering phase’ as you replay old conflicts.

Now see if you can identify that one point of conflict, what could be called the point of no
return, the point at which you are both playing out the same old patterns of behaviour. Get really specific: what you were thinking, feeling and saying; what was the other person saying and how were they behaving?

Here’s where the shift in mindset can happen – the bit right before the point of no return. The
new mindset that says, “Walk away now.” The mindset that says, “How can I respond differently this time?” The mindset that says, “I don’t have to engage in any dispute with this person. So what if they rub me up the wrong way? That’s my problem, not theirs.”

Changing a mindset rarely happens all at once. The trick is to start anticipating potential
conflict not as inevitable but as a chance for you to practise new behaviour. Rather than replaying conflict after the fact with what you could have said, start practising right now what you could
say differently that will change the dynamic between you.

Have a go and you just might make life at Christmas (or any time really) a lot less fraught and
a lot more peaceful.

By Jo Ellen Grzyb,
Director, Impact Factory