Why most of us avoid dealing with Conflict

Nobody wants trouble, and when we see trouble coming around the corner most of us would rather cross the street and avoid it. But since conflict is part of our personal and professional life and all of us have either had to deal with conflict in the past and we will all face conflict in the future. lets see some of the common causes of resistance we all may experience sometimes to deal with the conflict situation even though we know we are facing a real conflict situation that is affecting either our professional or quality of personal life and must be dealt with.

Strong emotions
Both or either of the parties envolved are experiencing a strong emotional feeling regarding the specific language used or certain actions and cannot seem to get over this . They are stuck in the past which can seriously limit people's ability to think logically and move forward.

Lack of trust
Both parties do not trust each other due to work history or bad past experiences in addition to real or perceived threats made in the past.

Failure to communicate
Difficulty to communicate between the parties either due to having different communication styles or due to the use of aggressive language or tone or even body language that indicates the person is not listening or ready to listen.
See also : Barriers to good communication , Behavioral Styles

Seeing only one solution
The person may come to the conflict resolution meeting with one idea in his/her head and can only see one way out of it, sometimes we tend to think there is only one solution to a problem when it's a fact that in most cases a problem or specific issue has more than one solution but we sometimes fail to see but only one.

Overconfidence
Sometimes justly or unjustly we believe we are right because we had some reassurance from others siding with us which may give us a sense of overconfidence, we feel we are more powerful because others justified our position.

Stubbornness
Sometimes a solution proposed by one of the conflict parties is not accepted by the other parties, even though it's a logic and fair compromise simply cause it was the idea of a specific person. This solution would be perfectly reasonable if anyone else.

There are many reasons that hold us back from dealing assertively with conflict situations both in our personal or professional life and it does take some effort and hard work to overcome the above obstacles but we must always keep in mind that conflict usually doesn't go away if we don't do anything about it in fact it can get worse. We just constantly have to remind ourselves that the power to change any conflict situation that's negatively impacting our life is within us. Please read through the rest of our conflict resolution articles where you can find useful tools to give you more insight and guidance about the topic of conflict resolution.

For more on conflict resolution, check out our instant download training package: Conflict Resolution