Dearest Darling Friends,
According to leading mediation and negotiation experts like William Ury and Marshall Rosenberg, conflict does not become destructive because people disagree.
It becomes destructive when people stop feeling seen, safe, and significant.
The world’s best mediators use techniques that transform the emotional climate first. Once the emotional temperature changes, the conversation changes.
Conflict resolution sounds beautiful in theory.
The real test is what human beings actually do when emotions, ego, fear, history, power, or pain entered the room.
Here is a powerful solution that has worked for me and has worked beautifully well for 100s of my clients across the last 26+ years as a Business Coach.
Go to the Balcony
When conflict escalates, most people enter a “reaction game”.
They start…
- defending,
- attacking,
- interrupting,
- proving.
Great mediators mentally step onto an imaginary balcony and observe the situation instead of becoming trapped inside it.
This means:
•pause
•breathe
•slow your nervous system
•notice your emotions without obeying them.
Because reactions create more reactions.
The truth is that conflicts softens the moment one person stops feeding the fire.
When Mandela emerged from prison, many expected revenge.
Instead, he deliberately slowed down his emotional reaction to decades of oppression.
He knew resentment would imprison him psychologically even after physical freedom.
He even invited some of his former jailers to his presidential inauguration.
Think about that psychologically.
Most humans react from the wound.
Mandela responded from a larger vision.
That is “going to the balcony” at the highest level:
•not denying pain,
•not excusing injustice,
•but refusing impulsive retaliation.
Without that pause, South Africa could easily have descended into civil war.
Thanks to Nelson Mandela and his ability to “stop feeding the fire”, South Africa saw great progress under his Presidency.
May you develop the ability to solve conflicts instead of being trapped inside them. May you never ever ‘feed the fire of conflicts’.
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