Conflict Resolution Training: Innocent Until Proven Guilty And Maybe Not Even Then

"The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that it's difficult to

determine whether or not they are genuine."

       Abraham Lincoln (provided to me by Michael Nees)

“Believe half of what you see son and none of what you hear”

          “I heard it through the Grapevine”

I’m not sure where Michael Nees got that Lincoln quote. Perhaps I should Google "Lincoln" on the Internet.

The key to resolving conflict is to give up being right and making others wrong.

Here’s a test to determine your conflict resolution skills: The next time someone provides you with a piece of gossip, ask yourself whether you believe it or not. The less you believe the gossip, the better your conflict resolution skills.

Even when you observe the behavior yourself, be careful about judging the other person. The juiciest payoff for a human being is to be right and make others wrong.  

Another way of thinking about this is to live by the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty. I suggest that many conflicts would be resolved if we lived by the rule that others are innocent until proven guilty and, even when we are sure of guilt, to check our premises before acting.

I was reminded of this when I was recently called to jury duty. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. 

I wasn’t selected for the jury, but I did get to hear the judge describe the case, which involved possible child molestation. The accused, a man of about 50, was alleged to have taken pictures of his 12-year old stepdaughter. There was an intimation that he was accused of more than just taking pictures.

Later, I repeated what I had heard about the case to friends, many of whom questioned whether they would have been able to serve impartially on the jury. They had children of their own and were outraged by the crime. Several had been molested themselves as children and still carried the scars.

I said that I would have absolutely no trouble serving impartially, that the accused was, without question, innocent until proven guilty. I came to this conclusion because of another time I had been called to serve on a jury and had likewise been excused.

In that case, we were told that the man on trial was accused of hitting a car in which two children and their mother had been riding. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the man had run from the scene and, it was alleged, he had been smoking marijuana. As I heard the details of the case, I wondered why a jury trial was necessary. Why waste taxpayer time and money on adjudicating something for which this man was so obviously guilty?

Two weeks after I had been excused, I was reading a newspaper and I saw a story about the trial. 

After deliberating for only 20 minutes, the jury found the defendant not guilty. In fact, when several of the jurors were interviewed, they questioned why there had  even been a trial since the man being accused was so plainly innocent. Obviously, my perception of the facts and the actual facts were not the same.

Presume innocence. We tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. Start reversing that if you want t Presume innocence. We tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and  resolve a conflict.  

Since we don’t have other jurors to give us their perspective of the “evidence,” we need to be doubly careful that what we are seeing is “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

If You Build It, He Will Come

I'm sure you've seen or, certainly, know of the movie, "Field Of Dreams" with its famous tag line that I've used as the title of this article.

The film is often referred to as the cinematic version of the best selling book and DVD program, "The Secret" with its emphasis on focusing intently on what we want in our lives and the power of our beliefs.

I was reminded of the power of our beliefs in an unexpected place the other day. I was listening to the National Public Radio program "Car Talk" which, as you probably know, is a show where people call in to get car advice from the hosts, two brothers named Tom and Ray Magliozzi who often refer to themselves as "The Tappet Brothers."

A caller asked which additive, when put in the gas tank, works best at improving gas mileage. Without hesitation, Tom and Ray said that none of them actually work. But, they then added, paradoxically, that putting the additive in your gas tank usually does improve gas mileage for a time.

I thought I was in the midst of the Zen Koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping." How can an additive both work and not work?

Tom and Ray explained that, while the additive doesn't work, we are so desirous of making it work that, without necessarily realizing it, we drive more carefully. We slow down. We make fewer jack rabbit starts. We turn the motor off instead of letting it idle. In other words, we want to believe that it works and we act to confirm our belief

The reason the additive eventually fails is because we revert to our old driving habits.

Now back to "Field Of Dreams." People who are disappointed that their dreams remain unfulfilled even though they meditated, visualized and prayed, may be focusing more attention on "He will come" than on "If you build it."

Without actually altering driving habits, the additive wouldn't reduce gas mileage at all. Without actually fighting to get up that hill, "The Little Engine That Could" never could have made it no matter how much thinking went into it. Without actually building the base ball field, the players would have no place to show up no matter how much Ray Kinsella (the protagonist played by Kevin Costner) may have wished for it.

Consider the movie: Ray devoted a considerable amount of time to plowing up an entire field of corn worth (at the time of the 1989 film), $2,200 per acre, installing lights for night games and creating the base ball infield and outfield. He researched the life of Terence Mann, a writer Ray admired in the 1960s. Ray drove from Dyersville, Iowa where the ball field is located to Boston where Ray finds Terence Mann to Chisholm, Minnesota to find Doc Graham (a character whom Ray thinks is supposed to return with him to Dyersville) and back home to Iowa. This is a distance of 3,107 miles that would have taken 52 hours in driving time alone (thank you Rand McNally mileage calculator), not including the time spent in the destination cities.

Malcolm Gladwell might have included Ray Kinisella in his book "Outliers." In that book, Gladwell writes about people who have become successful pursuing their dreams (lawyers, doctors, The Beatles and Bill Gates among others) and he notes that there was one thing they all had in common.  According to Gladwell, every one of these people worked for at least 10,000 hours (about three year's worth of 10-hour days, 7 days a week) to achieve their success.

There's something to notice about "The Little Engine That Could," "The Secret" the "Car Talk" show I referenced and "Field Of Dreams." As much as we would like to "wish" our desires into existence, it takes concentrated action (not just concentrated thinking) to make them happen (according to "The Secret" website, the secret "has been passed down through the ages," so, obviously, it took untold effort to get it to us).

You may have heard the story of the man who couldn't understand why he never won the lottery. After all, he had meditated for an hour every day, visualizing what he would do with the money once he won. Then someone pointed out to him that no matter how much he visualized, he would still have to buy a ticket. 

No matter how much visualizing one may do, "You can't win if you don't play."

As we all know, visualization without action is an hallucination.

The “Secret” To Long Term Relationships

Did you see the recent HBO documentary about former Beatle George Harrison called “Living In The Material World?” The documentary was directed by Martin Scorcese and produced by Olivia Harrison, George’s widow to whom he had been married for 23 years.

In the documentary, Olivia is asked, “What is the secret to a long marriage?” After a short pause, she smiled slightly and said, “Don’t get divorced.”

I’ve been married for 38 years and I can tell you that is the best advice anyone can give to those who are wondering how to maintain a long term relationship.

As you know, any relationship of any duration will have ups, downs and in betweens. Like a roller coaster ride, the difference between those who stay together and those who don’t is that those who stay together have decided to not get off the ride while the ride is in progress.

I also ask you to consider that we choose our lives and then forget that we were the ones doing the choosing. Instead, we blame the person we’re in relationship with for the condition of our lives. Then we end the relationship and enter a new relationship in which we recreate the conditions of the old relationship.

The only way we could create a new relationship is if we were new. After all, we’re the only common denominator in all of our relationships. Just as we continue to believe that money will buy happiness, we are sure that some other grass is always greener.

As my friend Sherri Bresn noted in a recent email, “We build our lives around patterns of feelings, beliefs and behaviors. We then repeat those behaviors over and over because then we do not have to think so much about what we are doing... habits die hard.”

A friend of mine is considering divorce because his wife doesn’t like to do the things he likes to do. Of course, the things he likes to do (rock climbing, hiking and biking), he likes to do alone. His main complaint is that his wife won’t do the things with him that he likes to do alone.

It was easy for me to see the paradox in my friend’s behavior, but it’s not so easy to see my own blind spots. That’s why it’s important to listen to the feedback we receive and especially to the feedback about ourselves that we disagree with.

None of this is to suggest that one should stay in a relationship no matter what. I simply intend to point out that our perception of a relationship depends on our point of view about that relationship. Sometimes, we think our point of view is the truth.

Points of view can change. Relationships end when points of view are mistaken for the truth.

The “secret” to a long term relationship is to give up being right and making the other person wrong for being exactly as you want him/her to be.

Where Do We Find The Strength To Be Miserable?

Film critic Roger Ebert, writing in his Chicago Sun Times blog on November 12^th, 2010, noted that he knows people who have volunteered to answer Alcoholics Anonymous phone numbers in Chicago. Ebert wrote that one person “after doing this for a time, wondered where people found the strength to keep on drinking despite the misery it was causing them.”

Strength??? How odd…until I thought about it. Then I wondered where any of us find the strength to maintain our misery.

I remember spending years being angry at my mother. Until I made peace with her, I didn’t realize how much strength it took to maintain that anger.

I had a friend who called his ex wife to apologize after years of not speaking. To his surprise, she was not happy to hear the apology. “I was prepared to hate you for the rest of my life,” she said. “What am I going to do now?”

Where did she find the strength to maintain her anger for all those years?

I’ve worked with many people who commit to changing a behavior that has frustrated them for years. Six months later, some of these same people have reverted to their old behavior, preferring instead to return to their misery.

Have you ever made a “commitment” to change and then failed to keep that commitment? How many say they’d like to be more patient and then blow up at the slightest delay? How many want to be more thankful but continue to complain? Who among us say they want to be a better listener, a better parent, a better anything and then…nothing changes?

Where do we find the strength to keep our misery in place?

We find the strength because, through repetition, we’ve become addicted to our misery. Or, put another way, feelings are produced when chemicals (neurotransmitters) are released in our bodies. When we try to change a behavior, what we’re really doing is trying to alter our body chemistry. When those chemicals we’ve been used to aren’t released, we miss them. That’s why people who change sometimes say, “I don’t feel right” or “I don’t feel like myself.” It’s the chemical “hit” that we’re missing, not the cigarette or the drink or the food or the anger or any other emotion.

This is really what my friend’s ex wife meant when she asked, “What do I do know?” In other words, what will replace my usual chemical addiction?

Perhaps you don’t think of these as addictions. But what else to call a behavior that we change for awhile and, then, revert to the way we always have done things in spite of our “misery?” The classic definition of insanity.

The difference between those who stop smoking, lose weight, begin an exercise program or change anger into compassion and those who don’t is the difference between those who are willing to put up with the discomfort of not getting their accustomed chemical hit.

Patience is not only a virtue. It’s the pathway to permanent change.    

Conflict Resolution Training: When Resolving Conflicts, It’s The Little Words That Count

Resolving conflicts is largely a matter of paying attention to the little things, especially the little words. 

Indeed, you may be in conflict because you spend a lot of time
“butting” others rather than “anding” them.

For example, if I say,“I agree with you, but…” what I’m really saying is that I don’t agree with you at all. In fact, I’m suggesting that everything you’ve said prior to the word “but” is wrong.

On the other hand, if I say, “I agree with you and…” I’m suggesting
that what you are saying is true and what I am about to say is
equally true.

Another little word that seems innocuous and can have major
consequences for conflict resolution is the word “because.”  We use
“because” to explain a cause and effect relationship that, to us,
is a rational explanation for the events we observe. Consider that
conflicts occur when we attribute motivations to someone’s actions
and then respond as though our assessments are true while, at the
same time assessing our similar actions differently.

For example:
You are a team leader who is angry at one of your team members who
is late and you just know it is because she is selfish and doesn’t
care about the needs of the team. When you arrive
late for a meeting with your team, you excuse yourself with the
obviously rational explanation that you were late because you were
completing a conversation with another team leader. 

A coworker lets you down again. It’s obviously because he is
unreliable. When you let a coworker down again, it’s obviously because,

as your coworker must certainly know, you’ve been so overworked.

No one will let you into a line of traffic during rush hour. It’s
because other drivers are inconsiderate. When you won’t let other
drivers cut in front of you during rush hour, it's because too many

people have already cut in front of you.

A peer gives your boss a birthday card because he’s angling for a
promotion. When you give your boss a birthday card, it's because, as everyone
knows, you’ve been working together a long time and you really care
about him.

Your direct report asks for a raise and it’s because she doesn’t
understand the economic difficulties the company is experiencing.

When you ask for a raise, it's because you're worth it

since the work you do, as all can see, has a direct impact on the

bottom line of the company.

You don’t give someone feedback because you don’t want to hurt his
feelings. When he doesn’t give you feedback, you’re certain it’s
because he doesn’t want you to succeed.

Your spouse didn’t pick up the dry cleaning because she’s angry at
you. When you didn’t go to the grocery store, it's because, as might happen to anyone, you simply forgot.

The waiter is giving you slow service because he’s incompetent. When you
didn't immediately respond to a request, it was because, as everyone knows,

you are meticulous and you didn’t want to make a mistake.

In all these instances, suppose we substitute “and” for “but?”
Suppose instead of creating a “because” we simply asked? Suppose we
started from empathy rather than blame? Suppose we assumed that
people are just as reasonable as we are, just with different
reasons? Suppose, instead of demanding that people justify their
positions, we accepted their positions without justification?

One of the rules I encourage people to live by is to stop
pretending they know what motivates another person and to simply
ask.

  The goal of conflict resolution is not to change another’s view of
the world (a useless exercise if there ever was one). The goal is
to find a compromise agreement to which all can be committed.

Simply changing “but” to “and” while also asking instead of creating
“because” reasons won’t, of course, resolve a conflict.

Consider, however, that if we start from a different set of
premises than the ones we’re currently using, we will get very
different outcomes.