importance of conflict w/ liz kislik

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at T D S and T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Thank you, Taylor. I am up for this this morning. So I'm a management consultant and executive coach.

And as Taylor said, I've done a TEDx on conflict. Why there's so much of it at work and what you can do to fix it. And I also write for Harvard Business Review and for Forbes. And I've just seen a lot of distress and struggle in my time with all kinds of companies from very large corporate entities to small family-run businesses. And we all in some way, whether we come on strong or whether we run away from it, we all struggle with conflict. Yes, yes, except eights. Y'all eights on the Instagram love some conflict. Y'all thrive in it, so props to y'all, but y'all also mean that's another conversation in and of itself.

So all right, so Liz, so let's dive in today. Conflict, right? What's just some general thoughts from you, maybe pull from your TEDx talk? What's some general thoughts on conflict and some words of encouragement to others who maybe struggle with conflict right now? We call it conflict when we think it's the bad kind. If we're just having a conversation and an exchange of opinions and nobody's really stressed about it, we actually don't label it as conflict. We kind of save that term for the things that either feel hard or ugly or we don't know how to approach them. Sure. So let me ask you this then.

and how do we, and so I've tried to do this, how do we have healthy conversations, aka conflict, but to not be in the moment. So I feel like a lot of individuals, I myself get very or nationally angry sometimes and I wanna just dive into it and just go glove to glove and let's just get after it. What's your advice to people who have a quick release, quick trigger that kind of dive in that like just gets so caught up in the moment. Okay, Taylor, wave me off if I poke you too much. Yeah, no, that's fine. That's fine. I love it. Irrational anger is an absolute indication of some kind of boundary violation.

There's some way in which something has come across at you. That's the way you are taking it. It doesn't matter what the other person meant. So we all know people, you know, they get red right away, you can see the surge, right? Or you might yourself or people in the audience, you feel hot or you get that lump in your throat. Dizzy, I get dizzy. Oh, didn't you scary? Not like over a bit of lightheaded. Yeah, but that is like a mark of feeling a loss of control. of control. And one of the reasons why you might come back at somebody is to try to reestablish your own sense of control.

So I actually want to shift something you said, because it's not about not being in the moment. Sure. Mindfulness would say we all should be in the moment all the time we would do a lot better. I mean, the violation idea is because whatever's happening now in some way triggers your reactions from earlier bad times. So it's actually kind of not being in the moment that gets us into trouble in a way. But the thing to do is to know these are my reactions when I don't feel safe. And the first thing in this kind of situation that I try to teach clients is how to actually persuade their brains that right now they are safe.

There is no tiger, there is no actual knife. Okay. So how do you do that? And again, this is for y'all who are watching, this is the free counseling session for me for 30 minutes. So y'all can watch or move on, but I'm going to take a full advantage of Liz being on the show selfishly. So Liz, how do I, how do I do that? Right. So the first thing is, and this is not what we were taught as young people in business in workplaces. The first thing is actually to think about your body. Because it's your body that's trying to run away, or that's trying to fight.

And you've got to connect up what's happening in your body and your brain. Because if your body is calm, your brain figures out that you're not in danger. So this is gonna look ridiculous, but everybody can try it because it actually works. If you look over your shoulder, I mean, really look, like look, I am looking at the back wall of my office. Yeah. And then in the other direction, so I have now checked the environment. Nothing is actually coming at me. I'm not saying do this in the middle of a meeting. This is just an example. There is no physical danger, so my brain doesn't have to react as if I am about to be killed.

That means I get thinking capacity back and I can actually think about what to do for the real situation that's in front of me. So that's one way, but a quieter way, if you're in a conference room and there are other people there, great way is feel your feet in your shoes. actually do that right now. Feel your feet pressing again. You have to put your feet on the floor if they're not. But know where your big toes are, know where your heel is. Anything that anchors you in the real world. Another great one is to notice four things visually and actually note them to yourself.

I see the doorknob, I see the window, those kinds of things. And then to think of several things you hear. I hear the white noise machine so that I'm not disturbed while we're talking. I hear the traffic outside the window. Something you feel very helpful to actually put your hands on the tabletop or on your thighs if you're sitting somewhere and don't have a table. Some sensory input. You can do these very quickly and inconspicuously and much less time that it's taking me to describe it to you. By the time you've anchored yourself in your body, you actually calm down, your pulse rate slows, you're able to think again, the blood stops clouding your head.

That idea of seeing red, it's actually about the blood rushing to your head. So just reminding yourself, I've been here before, I can deal with this. Well, it's fascinating. It's fascinating you said that because so I've had to deal, so I'm currently counseling right now and trying to be more mindful. It's funny you brought that up because I feel like, and I'm interested to hear kind of what what your thoughts on this, people have overworked themselves during COVID. I have overworked myself. My wife can attest that I've overworked myself. And so I'm trying to pull back a little bit and be more mindful, right? And I think one of the things that I talked with my counselor about is trying to get out of your routine.

And what he was saying is that usually if people get so routine oriented and something bad happens, you kind of spiral out of control really easily. And he was like, so he goes, I recommend my people, it kind of a little bit of OCD, and it's right, go out to a restaurant that you always go to and order something different than you usually do. Or he told me, he goes, put your toothbrush, a different side of your sink, and to try to connect with kind of what's happening currently, right? And he was saying, like, tail, when you're driving to a client lunch, because I told him, I'm struggling getting out of the house.

I've been at the house so long, I've developed my routine. It's hard for me to get out. So he was like, when you're driving, like, notice the trees. Notice how the sun feels on your skin as you're driving to create mindfulness. I want to hear your thoughts on mindfulness. And maybe if you've seen people struggle with maybe overworking themselves and having to kind of figure out how to go back in the real world now. Okay, you're going to remind me of all these parts. Yeah, there's a lot. Just one of the yes. Again, counseling session for Taylor, I just unloaded on you. Okay, well, that's good.

The first First thing I would say for Taylor is I trust you when you say you've been overworking. I don't need your wife to assent to it. What you say is enough. I love that. I love that. That's the first thing. Second thing, one of the things that your counselor is describing is strengthening your flexibility of mind. Yes. There isn't just one way. Correct. options and choices and the broader your set of experiences when you need flexibility and resilience, you've already strengthened those muscles. So then you can support yourself when you're having a hard time. It's not just like confuse yourself by moving your toothbrush.

It's actually expanding your range. I like that. And the Buddhists have a concept called noting. In some ways it's like what you said about the trees and the warmth as you're driving, but it is also about your emotions and reactions and thoughts. So that noting, I didn't like that comment. I'm starting to feel that angry way. I'm having a part of what the Buddhists say is, it's not as helpful to say to yourself, I feel angry as to say something like, I notice that I am having a feeling of anger. When I'm angry, it's all of me. I'm in it much harder to pull yourself out.

But if I am noticing, I'm still in control, there are things passing by, the trees, the scenery, whatever. Oh, there goes my anger. Then I can see that my feeling is not me. It's something that happens. It's a real thing. But it's not all of me. I still have all of me that I can bring to bear on this situation. I love that. Okay, so now let me take that if I'm remembering all the peace parts to the how do you get yourself out of the house? Yeah, just maybe people who are struggling who have lived a life last year is like me where it's like we've overloaded we've Strapped ourselves to the desk and it's like, you know trying to tell ourselves, you know what?

It's okay to go do a lunch with somebody right? so First of all, there is so much going on just in that question question. Of course, we're all stressed and freaked out. Although in a different way from people who never worked at home and had to be on the front lines through all of this, you know, those of us who had the advantage of being at home, or in my case, I hate working at home. So as soon as I could, I came back to my office, which I maintained the whole time sanctuary for me. But if you think of in tough times, we cling to what feels safe.

It's like home became the life raft and now you're saying you want me to claw my fingers off the thing that was stabilizing me in rough water, right? I might drown. That's actually what the experience is. I'll be overwhelmed. It's too much for me. So all of these millions of things to think and things to try, they all work. They don't all work for everybody. So if you hear me give a technique or a gambit and you think, oh, that is not for me, leave it alone. Don't worry about it. There's another one. Okay. So there are some people who are the ones who will plunge into the cold ocean all at once.

So for them, make a date outside, put on regular clothes, get yourself, just do it, don't think twice, that's how you like to do. For most of us though, we take a more gradual approach. Yeah, yeah, so start with meeting a colleague for coffee and a walk. Not a full lunch. You've probably gone for a walk at some point in the two and a half years anyway. So just add whatever your beverage of choice is, you can handle that. And meet a colleague someplace, agree to join up. up. That way it's not so formal. To in the pond kind of thing. And then work your way up to a full formal dinner with wine.

You don't have to do it all the first day. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And I think too, because I think one thing I struggle with too is, like I said, beans so caught up in a schedule, right? I mean, for human beans, we are very routine oriented or we can be. Some of us are more than others. And I feel like the last two years, I think what saved a lot of people and to be honest with you is what saved me is my routine. And I think my routine now has come back to haunt me a little bit. And so it's been tough to kind of break out of that.

But like I said, I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people and trying to just get out and also give myself grace. I think we as human beings don't give each other, give ourselves enough grace. I think we're incredibly difficult on ourselves. And I think that's something I've had to learn too, as the world's opening upwards. Like, hey, you know what, Taylor, it's okay to grab lunch. It's fine. Like, you have to go eat. It's okay. And I think telling myself to like, hey, listen, just relax. It's all right, has helped me as well. Has helped me as well. So you put a whole bunch in there Referring to yourself in the second person is very helpful It's much more helpful to talk to yourself my kids make fun of me all the time I talked to myself all the time Liz I had a full on I had a full on 30-minute dialogue last night as I'm walking the dog by myself And I'm gonna be honest with you.

It was incredibly cathartic It's so useful We are okay, so we do most of us actually attack ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves all the ways in which we are no good, we've screwed up, we're an embarrassment. These things that we think we heard from someone else once. And we take all the harsh parts and we apply them to ourselves. We're not good at easing up. But when we talk to ourselves in second person, because there's just this little bit of distance, we might be just a little kinder the way we would when we were speaking to somebody else. And so it's an opportunity to distance ourselves from the harsh judgmental voice and actually give ourselves a voice of grace, as you're saying.

And one of the things that you've really made a clear reference to is we are creatures of habit. And during this time, we were forced, thrown in, had to build new habits to not feel crazy. That's how we sort of stabilized ourselves. And now in effect, we're being asked to throw those habits out the window and have either completely new ones or go back to old ones. It's hard. We all know changing habits is very hard. So acknowledging that that's what's happening in the same way that your counselor said, move your toothbrush from side to side. You can say to yourself, here's a habit I've got.

a new one I'd like to reestablish, how can I work toward that? What are the smallest possible steps? For most people doing the smallest thing, the least thing, the thing that is least likely to trigger the horror response, I think of it as, you know, in some of those action movies where where the character is in this room with a web of lasers and they have to, you know, that's me. That's me. That's me. Roll under. Right. Right. You want to stay under the painful lasers. So you're doing small things so you don't get shock to burned. Little at a time, little at a time, and then you build up again.

It's, you know what we see. funny. It's wonderful to be with people. Like it can be exhilarating to go for that walk and you see your colleague coming and you get all happy. Yeah. And it's also horrible to be with people. That's right. That's it. I think we should end the show. That was great. Yeah. For real though. For real. Yeah. But that's what it is because so we didn't have to deal with this annoying one and we didn't have to put up with that other person's weird personal habits and we didn't, whatever it was, we got used to maintaining sort of alone. We are still the same people.

We won't die from being exposed to the person who interrupts us too much will get frustrated. If you think carefully, while you've been home, there have been plenty of things that frustrated you too. So you can think of it as there isn't a physics concept exactly, but think of it as conservation of annoyance. You have a certain capacity for it and it's probably going to get tapped every day. Yeah. Okay. Humans know how to be annoyed And we know how to recover. I want to, as we kind of, you know, last seven, eight minutes we have together this, this morning. Again, Liz, thank you. This has been, this has been so good in the comments have been great.

I see y'all commenting. I see them. Um, we're just on a roll right now. I was, I didn't want to interrupt, but Julie comes in and goes live, can seem like mission impossible at times. A hundred percent agree with that. Steven comes in and goes and join this topic for the, I think for sure. An absolutely man. Um, Barrett goes, but what if I don't want to go back into the world? Same Barrett. I hear your brother. So, yeah, I want to drive home this one thing, and it's something that I'm struggling with as well, just to be totally open and vulnerable live in front of people, is the voices of the people that are negative are usually a lot louder than the people who support you.

And I think, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that for people who may be struggling with some impostor. So, there's a lot of impostor syndrome that happens in the software industry, not knowing certain things feeling like people are fraud. You know, maybe some people take what their managers say to heart even though like, you know, their managers had one bad thing, but people around them are saying a bunch of positives. You know, I'm kind of dealing with that as well. What's your advice to people who may be zero in on the negative? So let me give you that in two different pieces.

One is Rick Hansen, psychologist, Oh, I don't know. He's got so many credentials. I can't even think of what we all are. He talks about our brains being Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive. I think that is such a great way to think about it. And he explains that when we were in the jungle or on the savannah, if you did not notice the negative. If you missed the Russell of the Snake or the Cheetah or whatever it was, you'd be dead. You couldn't do anything else, right? But the positives, there might be some berries over here or a nice little river to drink from over there.

If you missed that on any given day, you are still alive and you can have berries tomorrow. So we need to recognize the negatives for survival, but we need to recognize that that's not all that's happening. So in any given moment, you know, we can feel stricken by something that the boss says a colleague says, or we say to ourselves, and that's when you go to figuring out, am I safe? I am safe. I can think about this. And then you think about it almost as if you are someone else. Would I think someone else really screwed up? Am I being harsher to myself than I would be to my good colleague?

Well, let me at least treat myself as well as I treat somebody else. That's the first place. But the other thing has to do with imposter syndrome. And I want to give you sort of the opposite to this, which is Dunning-Kruger syndrome that you may have heard about, people may have heard about. And this is the idea that people who are incompetent don't recognize that they are. So in both cases, what we're talking about is an odd catch-22. Yeah. Right. It's a double bind. If I am worried about my level of competence, it's probably because I have some and I feel it's insufficient. I want more.

If I think I'm great, I may not notice where I'm actually completely unskillful. So when When we have these feelings like not good enough, inadequate to the situation, actually check yourself after you've stabilized, check yourself. You know you are a reasonably good and kind person with the same kind of mistakes that everybody else makes. Know that you have certain skills or they wouldn't have hired you for this job. You know you've accomplished ABC, these great things. You got awards for them. Somebody thanked you for them. Your mother likes you. Whatever the things are that are comforting to you, remember them because these are the mountains we've already climbed.

We tend to see only the mountains in front of us. We often don't look back and say, oh, wait a second. I've done a lot. Yeah. There's this little thing I still need to learn. Or I screwed up this thing on this report, this project. I made a mistake. OK. Do I know how to correct it? Or do I need help to correct it? So it's stabilizing ourselves so that we can think clearly. And then figuring out what is the best next thing to do? Can I do it on my own? Do I need to know if somebody for help? I love that, I love that so much.

So as you wrap up here, I'm actually gonna start, I'm starting to ask this question and you're the first person I'm asking. I'm starting this new thing because I wanna get back to where the guidance counselor 2.0 roots came from. And that's basically, we had guidance counselors in middle school, we had guidance counselors in high school, but now we don't really have guidance counselors as adults, right? And so I want to ask you this, what is one thing that you would tell your younger self about career stuff? Like basically, I guess what's one tip of advice that you would tell your younger self as words of encouragement with where you're at now?

I probably will say two things. I love it, two things. Can't help it. One is exactly the kind of thing I just described. I would remind myself, no, I'm not a complete failure or a complete loss, look at these things I've done. A person who was a washout couldn't have done those things. So not a total loss, what can you build from here? That's one thing. But the other thing, which in a way is more practical and forward looking, is to find people that you can look up to, either because you want some of what they have or you like the way they do something, observe them, figure out which parts of that could I adopt and adapt so that I can be like that too, so that I can accomplish that too.

And then, because I'm thinking of your guidance counselor motif, so in school, there was always the next level of work. It was clearer than what the next level was. I think we have to find sort of milestones for ourselves based on what we see in others that we choose to model ourselves on, that we wanna emulate. And then we actually have a kind of roadmap for going forward. I love that. I love that. Well, Liz, thank you so much. That was incredible. I got a great session out of this. Hopefully y'all did too. I learned a lot. I go connect with Liz on LinkedIn. Liz, you're a gem.

Thank you so much. Stay on real quick. As we end. I want to say bye to you off air. Again, y'all check out render atl one guy in the chat. Where is he? Let's see here. Max. Max. I'll see you at render atl buddy. So definitely use the code GC2-0. Tomorrow morning, I have Andy Wong on the show. Andy is a former Google developer turned block developer. So block was square, the payment processing platform that is now block the web three payment platform. So very excited to have him on tomorrow. Go connect with Liz. Liz, thank you so much. And y'all have a wonderful, wonderful Tuesday.

Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful, cause you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finish an entire episode, so I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So, thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S.

and on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.