Best Conflict Conversation Cards: Professional Edition

In the Healthcare Leadership Excellence podcast, Karl Pister and I talked through ideas from my Best Conflict Conversation Cards, which he uses in his consulting work: the stories we tell ourselves, the anger iceberg, impact versus intent, and the power of a generous assumption. These skills matter in healthcare, at work, and at home, and every one of them can be learned. Here are nine ideas from our two conversations.

I don’t use ground rules in mediation, and I never have. In my mediation coaching and skills training, I watch what happens when someone is reminded of the rules: they shut down and start saying the right thing instead of the true thing. Here’s what I do instead, from an opening that asks people to listen to understand, to stopping and summarizing when it gets heated, plus the research on what suppressing emotion costs people at the table.

Children fall out with each other constantly, and the next morning they are back on the same blacktop. Somewhere between second grade and adulthood, we started treating a broken conversation as permanent. Our family conflicts and our geopolitical conflicts are the same conflicts scaled up. Only the weapons get greater. What two little girls told me about friendship is where repair starts.

Mediator Kimberly Best, RN, MA returns to Dr. Lee Sharma's Scalpel and Sword podcast for Ep69 to talk about practicing conflict skills in healthcare, the Best Conflict Conversation Cards, and why a hard conversation deserves the same rehearsal as any procedure.

Best Conflict Solutions debunks the amygdala hijack. The amygdala is not a fear center that seizes control of your brain. It is a relevance detector, a smoke detector that flags what matters, and stress chemicals hand thinking off to habit. Handoff, not hijack. Learn why conflict escalates so quickly, how triggers work, why we are built to overreact, and how to train a calmer response. From mediator Kimberly Best, drawing on the research of LeDoux, Barrett, and Arnsten. St. L