Introduction
Life is a set of problems and difficult situations happen on daily basis, these problems are like daily dosages of vitamins that are given which make us feel stronger and healthier day by day. To me if life did not have challenges and difficult circumstances we were never going to know the strength that we have in us. All the exemplary personalities we have around us have all gone through stressors and only then have become role models for other. Stress holds the value of an examination in everyone’s life, unless you take and pass an exam you do not get succeeded to the next grade of your job or studies.
To my knowledge one needs to have the capabilities to understand his or her situation and the kind of problems they are faced with and then the ultimate impact of them on their lives and on the lives of their loved ones. I have been through problems on daily basis as well as I already said it’s a dose received on daily basis. I have been going through them and learning through my experience recently I had an experience which was a bit too shocking and unexpected one.
It was a conflict of loss of demarcation between personal emotions and professional responsibility of a colleague/senior of mine. The issue was that we were working in a hospital in surgery department where everything was going very pleasant initially; she was very happy and satisfied with my work. I happened to go on leave for a week to my parents I talked to her about the extreme need of a week off. She initially did not show a positive attitude but then she asked me for my leave application. I gave it to her and that time I wanted her to open it and read through it once before she keeps it but she enclosed it back in the envelope and kept it in her purse. I kept waiting for her to either respond in positive or negative in a week’s time but she did not.
My booking had already been confirmed and I had my flight on the day I had mentioned in my application so I left when the day came. After I left she created a whole fuss of it through writing emails to the whole comity of our training program that he I had gone without a leave. I was called back so, had to take a flight back within 24 hours of getting home and had to come back. When I came back a set of confrontation and big dialogue to protect myself started with the comity. She would never accept that I had given her an application and she said that I needed to have witness to prove that so I got one and then she raised another issue that the date I was supposed to leave on was a week down the road and had left earlier than that.
When she was asked to bring the application up to the committee she said she had lost it. I was very angry and frustrated looking at the whole sequence of events she was showing no other ways to protect myself and if I was not able to resolve this conflict tactfully I was going to lose my job and my degree. The way I handled that conflict was such that I analyzed mine and my colleges’ position first and prepared myself for giving the due respect to our relationship, the next thing I took care of was to maintain a good control on my emotions and not to lose my intelligence and d abstract thinking in that, I also stayed calm and reserved and stayed back with a decent and professionally acceptable nonverbal cues of communication along with an eye on the other side’s nonverbal communication as well. While doing this entire thing I maintained my playfulness and light way of making fun and jokes stayed there.
Main body
Whenever one is heading towards a confrontation or an enforcement of one’s views, it is very important to look at the relationship you have with your opponent. At times anger goes to a peak where it becomes very difficult get yourself stop in the middle of a confrontation and remind yourself the relation you have with your opponent or the set of obligations you have towards that person so it is always very helpful to understand and determine your limits. Then at time if it is someone very near and dear then the feeling arises that why am I finding it difficult to have that person with me the same lines of thinking and that rages one in anger, then that complicates the problem as Segal, J.& Jafee, J. havea well said in their content in their article “Relationship stress triggers knee-jerk fight or flight responses that make us feel like running or fighting –but not much of anything else”.
With me my senior co-worker was having a confrontation on an issue that I thought I was right at. For me to have that feeling going that my senior was wrong and she badly needed to understand the situation and get back to what was right I had to go through a lot for a more than a month’s time. Keeping myself cool everyday and reminding myself her position and my obligations to maintain a due respect for her I kept reminding the importance of her position to myself and that kept me going without feeling bad about myself and she was also got ready to think about her attitude and finally got ready to accept my view point and that made me feel that since I kept respecting our relationship throughout she also prepared herself to sit down with me listen to what I had to say and was finally able to agree with me. At this point in time I just wanted her to accept her mistake that she was supposed to read my application and respond to me in that week’s time.
Emotionalism is an enemy of wisdom. Most of the time one gets to the more emotional side of life and looses to reason so if we conclude one should not get emotional to maintain reasoning but then the next thing comes what if emotionalism might be carrying a lot of value to our life? This is true without emotionalism there is no taste to life we can take an example of a husband that is very nice, very caring. He is spending all his energy to earn for his family, is buying them everything before the wife even demands for it. He takes her out to have fun on every weekend but on the other hand when it comes to expressing his emotions he is flat he would not say a word about it.
In his love relationship with his wife he will never get the satisfaction of a satisfactory life why? Because he is lacking in a very important aspect of a happy life and that is emotionalism. Considering all this and accepting the fact that emotionalism is important to have a fun life the next thing that needs to be encountered is that how to control your anger and frustration that emotionalism brings to one. There are very useful ways to it which is grouped as emotional intelligence, one stays emotionally active but the intellect should also stay in hand in a strong grip too.
One should stay focused and determined and should keep reminding himself or herself about the relationship one has with the opponent, the kind of outcome one wants out of a confrontation, the good and bad consequences of it and the last but not the least one needs to look at the overall impact of whole thing on his or her life and their on the life of their loved ones. Now after giving a picture of emotional intelligence I will share what I did. My emotions the hell a lot of a things which included my impression that was getting spoiled by her by telling everyone that I had gone without a leave, my future was getting spoiled if they were to hold my degree back, my working environment was getting spoiled if I had to go back to work with if everything settles back and more than that I had gone on leave for something very important which I could not fulfill so the whole thing I was getting out of this whole exercise was a frustrated me.
I got raged into emotions and wanted to go to her and talk to her in a very harsh way to make her understand what she had done to a junior trainee of her. I also wanted to tell her that she did not deserve to be sitting in that position after the kind of non professional attitude she showed in my case but I did not do anything like that. I rather kept rephrasing my words again and again and was giving a chance to think about it from every aspect and then tell herself whether she was going the right way or wrong? And with my intelligent handing of my emotions I was able to maintain a good relationship with her despite such a huge conflict going on amongst us.
In this whole scenario we were both still working at the same place, on the same patients till something was decided. I was getting to see her, receive orders from her, and report to her almost every day. She even changed the schedule of night calls and created a very hassle some schedule for me. Whenever I was meeting her on the way she was not showing a good body language. Her non verbal cues were a lot more hurting then her words but I took care of it and always took care of my emotions to have a control on body language not to respond back the same.
Segal again mentions in another article of him “Restoring your emotional intelligence first requires retrieving your emotional awareness and learning to manage your emotions. This may make emotional management sound simple, but for most people it is a hard-won skill. Managing your emotions requires more than knowledge and motivation to be effective — you need to be able to recognize and control stress, and to be aware of, experience, and take control of your emotions. When your stress levels and emotions are out of control, they will override the thinking parts of your brain”. So I had to have knowledge of my emotions, I needed to have skills to control my stress and I really had to work hard on that. It is absolutely not easy to handle conflicts while letting your intellect stay in hand one can succeed in anything.
At times when your opponent is trying to irritate you or is just not able to able to take care of their anger they start making faces, they start acting weirdly, and they start showing their frustration the way that it becomes rather more painful. For me it is easy to respond back to verbal communication or difference of ideas but to interpret and respond back to body language is very hard for human beings. Human beings have been said to be the superior creation on the face of the earth because of their ability to communicate verbally and when they stop using it then they more or less loose all the abilities of a human beings. Non verbal cues used for a nice purpose or just to have some assistance of them to make your verbal communication easier or better is always appreciable but the negative impact of them cannot be ignored either.
The way I handled this issue in my conflict was such that she would show me an extreme reaction of her emotions through body movement, her facial expression, she would even point at me at time while talking to people, she would sit with other doctors and would discuss me with them and while doing that she would keep showing me by making bad faces that I am the topic of her talk. She also used to change the tone of her voice while talking to me or talking about me. The kind of posturing she would make, the kind of intensifying emotions she would show.
What I would do was that I would go to the same table and I would change their conversation to something else. Or I would request her to stop with me for a few seconds and I would have a short talk on a patient’s issue or a presentation that would be due for me or anything related to our work. So, then slowly it started becoming evident that she was not trying to go her way rather than making me focus at her through her nonverbal cues to have a look at what she had to say to me.
While having a conflict or a confrontation going on one most of the time stays around with the opponent and that makes the conflict more interesting and more active. If one has a conflict with somebody and then one starts ignoring that person or just leaves that place or goes away somewhere then that is not a conflict anymore that shows the resolution of the conflict with one’s failure. That is not something everyone one would want to happen to their conflict, everyone wants to pick a confrontation or change of their view and fight for it with a success in the end. In order to have a conflict going till one is able to get to other’s view point or the opponents gets to the one’s view point and it resolves one has to maintain a good environment which should ensure good circumstances for one to stay functional effectively and not to lose the efficiency, energy and urge to work.
If one picks a conflict and starts giving all his or her time to it and doing nothing else that is not a healthy way of going with it. Along with caring all the frustration, emotions, productivity, social dealing and obviously one’s work or other words one’s job one has to have a specific pattern to go through all of this. If one is carrying the anger with him or her all the time that affects the quality of thinking and acting one has. Once one goes into depression secondary to a long ongoing conflict then the capabilities to handle it keeps going away and that is again the stage when one usually backs off and other words looses the game without making the appropriate conflict resolving strategies work.
One needs to stay normal, cool minded, ready to listen, ready to reason, ready to carry out their relationships the way they used to be. If there is a drastic change in these above mentioned characteristics of a person then the skills to handle stress are not used appropriately and it needs to be revised again. One should stop there and think if he or she will be able to make it that way or do they need to change the mode of their action. Segal adds a bit more to communication skills in another article and says “Humor, laughter and play lighten our burdens and help us to keep things in perspective. A good hearty laugh reduces stress, elevates mood, and improves brain functioning”. (Segal,J. 2008)
Conclusion
Conflicts happen in life with loved ones and dear ones everyday if we do not know how to handle them we cannot hope for a good peaceful and satisfying life. These components of conflict resolving skills should be learnt and practiced on daily basis so that we learn the major way of making our lives better and to make us beneficial human beings of a society. The steps to go about it in a simple order are whenever one starts having an issue the first thing that should click in our minds is who the opponent is which will very clearly determine our limits by identifying our relationship towards the opponent. Then we should focus on ourselves and we should think about our emotional aspect and when that brings labiality to us then the art to control our anger through our intelligence while maintaining the emotional components still on board. Our non verbal cues carry the utmost importance because that is the aspect hurts the most and that is again something very difficult to control on our part, accepted easily on the opponent’s part.
One can never fully justify himself or herself whether what they felt about a non verbal cue about somebody is 100 % what they felt or it can be something opposite as well and this happens most of the time. Then the last and the most important component of maintain a good deal of skills is to maintain your humor and playfulness while going through stress and handling it effectively along with that. This component is very important because this keeps us going; it keeps us have a good brain to think, and the stamina to keep us functional. Finally, what I have personally felt if you have this art of handling your conflicts you will have absolutely no stressors in life and your quality of life and productivity keeps on increasing.
Communication skill is an art to a better and successful life. It is an art and since there is no formal teaching of this art there are very few people that know the importance of and that can handle everyday problems in standard way. Taking care of all these aspects of conflict handling skills I handled my problem successfully and was able to tackle the hurdles put forth to me.
References
Segal, J. (2008). Understand, Prevent, and resolve life’s challenges. McGraw-Hill Education.
Segal, J., Smith, M., Robinson, L., & Boose, G. (2008). Body Language and Nonverbal Communication. HelpGuide.org. Web.
Segal, J. (2008). The Language of Emotional Intelligence. McGraw-Hill Education.
Segal, J. & Jeffe, J. (2008). ‘Playful communication skills’,An effective tool to lighten your mood and strengthen relationships, vol. 01, no. 4, p. 2.