Conflict Resolution: To Deal With Highly Opinionated People, Give Up Being Highly Opinionated

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is, “How can I deal with highly opinionated people?” and I always answer in the same way: To be effective with these people, give up being one of them. After all, everyone is “highly opinionated” including, of course, me (I wouldn’t be writing this if I weren’t). Some don’t express their opinions openly, but their opinions are in their minds just waiting to be expressed to a friend (“You can’t believe what John said to me. He’s so opinionated.”).

Now when presented with my answer for dealing with highly opinionated people, your tendency may be to argue which is, of course, an example of just how opinionated you are.

That’s why the best way to deal with opinionated people is to listen to what they are saying and really “get” them. Listen for what they are actually saying without all your judgments, beliefs and opinions (which, by the way, are more examples of how “highly opinionated” you actually are). Never give your opinion without first paraphrasing, to the other person’s satisfaction, what he or she has just said to you.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Aggression encourages aggression. Listening encourages listening. Go into the interaction with these highly opinionated people not with the intent to get them to agree with you but with the intent that you are going to agree with them. “Agree” in this case means understand where they are coming from and with the possibility that you will not only change your view but that you will change your behavior.

What have you got to lose? That which you resist persists. Your current way of dealing with these people hasn’t made any difference. Why not try something new?

After all, from the perspective of the other person, you’re the one who is “highly opinionated.”  

We’re Worried About The Wrong Things

“Don't listen to "experts" predicting what might happen. They have no idea what's going to happen.”

Jeffrey Gittomar

Author, “The Little Red Book of Sales” among others

If you are a parent, what do you worry most about? According to a Mayo clinic survey that was mentioned in a story in the New York Times on September 18^th, 2010, parents are most worried about, kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers and drugs.

The story was titled, “Keeping Kids Safe From the Wrong Dangers” and, as you can infer from the title, parent’s worries bear little relationship to reality. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the five things most likely to cause injury to children up to age 18 are car accidents, homicide, child abuse, suicide and drowning.

In fact, "The least safe thing you can do for your child it to drive them somewhere" according to Lenore Skenazy, author of "Free Range Kids."

British writer Warwick Cairns, author of "How To Live Dangerously" calculates that "If you wanted to guarantee that your child would be snatched off the street, he or she would have to stand outside alone for 750,000 hours."

In reality, homicide is down, kidnapping is down, traffic deaths are down. So why do we so often worry about the wrong things?

The answer lies in our brains and in what’s called our “reticulating activating system” (RAS) which basically determines what we will focus on. When we experience emotion (hearing of a terrorist attack, reading about home foreclosures or the state of the economy), our RAS goes into high alert and has us watching out for potential dangers. So when we read a newspaper or watch the news on television, we become convinced that we need to be fearful for our safety. Colloquially, we understand this when we say, “What you see is what you’ll get.”

So how fearful do we need to be? Not very. Our perception of fear doesn’t match reality. What we see on television or read in our newspapers is very unlikely to happen to us. Yet we think it will and it keeps us in a state of high arousal. Politicians, advertisers and the media know this and use it to influence our behavior.

So relax. What you see is not likely to be what you get.