How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Pocket that phone
. If you need to stay reachable while having an
important conversation, make your ringtone loud enough to hear from
your pocket or bag.

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NINE
Resolving Tensions
Rubbing shoulders with the rest of the human race can be hard at times.
Everyone is living their own life, with their own goals and needs. As we all pull
in different directions, we can easily find our days cluttered with annoyances.
Sometimes they’re small, like the irritable push of fellow commuters or a
snappish comment in the corridor. Sometimes the grievances feel bigger. We
might find ourselves having an argument that escalates, being excluded from an
important discussion, or working with someone who repeatedly fails to follow
through on their commitments.
When tensions bubble to the surface in this way, it’s unlikely that we can
control the whole situation. But we can choose how we want to react. And in this
chapter, I’ll show how much difference that can make. By focusing on what 
we
can do to make things feel better, we can usually resolve or at least reduce the
impact of tense situations, even when it’s someone else who’s triggered the
tension.
FIND COMMON GROUND
Let’s start with the situation where we have a straight disagreement with
someone. In some ways, it’s surprising that arguments don’t happen more often,
given that the filters of our automatic system—including inattentional blindness
and confirmation bias—make the reality we experience a highly personalized
one. You only need one of your colleagues to have had a rough morning for that
colleague to see things differently than you while you’re sitting in the very same
meeting (as I discovered with Lucas back in 
Part I
). And since none of us ever
has the whole picture, it’s possible that both of you are right 
and
wrong on
certain aspects of the topic. We all see different “gorillas.”
Mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport showed that recog nizing this
fundamental truth—that it’s unlikely either side is 100 percent wrong—is the
key to resolving conflict. In his classic book 
Fights, Games, and Debates
,

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Rapoport demonstrated the power of developing what he called “empathetic
understanding” of each other’s point of view and what I simply call “common
ground.” It means showing that we’ve understood where the other person is
coming from, and highlighting the similarities between us. From that common
ground, mutually acceptable solutions are much easier to find, because the
process helps to nudge our brains out of defensive mode, allowing us to think
more creatively and approach compromise more openly.
1
Here is the five-step process I’ve evolved based on his research: