When you’re stuck in conflict, how do you step outside of the situation enough to identify ways to break the patterns that are keeping you stuck? Especially in ongoing conflict, just doing more of the same isn’t going to change your outcome. Our guest is Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, author of Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life. We’ll talk about practical, effective strategies you can use to escape the conflict loop - and, thus, get different results!
And as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!
Sponsors:
Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you.
Resources:
Check out Jen Goldman-Wetzler’s website, where you can take the assessments we talk about in today’s conversation.
Grab Jen Goldman-Wetzler’s book Optimal Outcomes on Amazon or from your local bookseller.
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship
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Visit www.neilsattin.com/optimal to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler.
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
Transcript:
Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host Neil Sattin. Now, I don't know about you, but I haven't managed to live a conflict-free life. In fact, it seems like it can be pretty easy to experience conflict with people in the world around us. And it comes up in our relationships, it comes up at work, it comes up with family, it comes up with your kids, and so I was tantalized when a former guest, Erica Fox, reached out to tell me about a colleague and friend of hers who had just come out with a new book called Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself From Conflict at Work, at Home and in Life. And I thought, "Conflict-free, that sounds pretty good." 'Cause conflict adds a lot of stress. And you know I went through a divorce about a year ago, and that process wasn't conflict-free, and my divorce before that wasn't conflict-free. And in fact, there are all kinds of opportunities to experience rocky relationships. And this is particularly vexing for me because I put so much energy into trying to get it right and trying to master communication skills and bring openness and understanding to all of these conversations with people that, not all the time, I don't want you to think that my life is just riddled with conflict, but occasionally blow up in my face.
Neil Sattin: So I'm excited to have today's guest here with us to talk about this process of totally reframing the way that you see conflict, how you handle conflict, and how to escape from those perpetual conflicts that seem to be unresolvable. We'll see how we can go from unresolvable to conflict-free in today's episode. Our guest's name is Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler. She's the author of Optimal Outcomes as I just mentioned, and she is also the Founder and CEO of Alignment Strategies Group, which is an organization that is focused on creating health in other organizations and corporations. And on top of that, she teaches a popular course on conflict resolution at Columbia University. So let's dive right in. Before we do, if you want a transcript of today's episode, just visit neilsattin.com/optimal. Or as always, you can text the word "Passion" to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. Okay, that's it. Jen Goldman-Wetzler, it's such a pleasure to have you here with us today on Relationship Alive.
Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: It's great to be with you today, Neil.
Neil Sattin: Let's just dive in with... I'm curious to know how you... How would you define the way that you look at conflict? How is that different from typical conflict resolution? Why is this not your grandmother's conflict resolution, or maybe your Harvard negotiation program's conflict resolution?
Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Right. It definitely isn't. It is built on that though. My work in conflict freedom comes out of doing the work of conflict resolution with people on the ground in the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians, with corporate leaders in pharmaceutical companies and healthcare companies and financial services, professional services. And at some point, about five years into doing that work, I noticed that conflict didn't always get resolved. The methods that we've been teaching for the last 40 years around resolving conflict work well in many situations, but in some situations, they just don't work. And when I came to that realization, I realized I wanted to dig in and try to understand, "Why not?" And most importantly, "What could we do to free ourselves from those conflict loops?" Those situations that just seem to go around and around and around and never get resolved, no matter what we do, no matter how well we apply the latest conflict resolution methodology. And so it took me about 13 years to get this book written, and it's based on five years of deep research in the realm of emotions like humiliation and conflict.
Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: So the main difference really is...
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Do you ever feel like you *should* have gotten over something challenging - that you’ve grown, and learned from the experience, but that on some level it still haunts you? Or do you feel inner conflict around decisions that seem like they should be relatively clear-cut? Are you afraid of failure? It could very well be that you have bypassed or suppressed your negative emotions, and that they’re now stuck inside you, wreaking havoc on your inner guidance system. By not facing failures or challenges head on, we actually create an emotional dissonance within ourselves that’s an obstacle to moving forward. Today we’ll talk about how to face things when they’re not quite the way you want them to be - and how to develop the inner honesty that will help you feel aligned and courageous no matter what’s happening in your life.
As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!
Sponsors:
Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you.
Resources:
Check out my Secrets of Relationship Communication COURSE for a masterclass in how to improve the communication and connection in your relationship.
I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey
FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets
Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE)
Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444)
Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters
Transcript:
Neil Sattin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. Today is going to be an episode about truth, and more specifically why it is so important for you to be truthful with yourself and why that sometimes means that you have to go negative, and why it's so important to not be bypassing your negative experiences. And I'm talking to you from the perspective of someone who is almost always optimistic about life, even in my darkest moments, I generally am able to look on the bright side, and that's a helpful skill in life. In fact, there's a whole branch of psychology, positive psychology, that is at least in part based on this idea of how we make meaning in the world and trying to make positive meanings out of the things that happen to us and what a difference that makes. However, there is a danger in that skill, and today we're going to talk about what the danger is to make sure that you are not gas-lighting yourself, and instead that you're able to best use the truth for your own growth, and so to really understand what's happening in your life right now, because it can be so easy to miss what's challenging, what's truly challenging for the sake of a quick silver lining.
Neil Sattin: All right, let's dive into the topic at hand. So what is true? When you look at your life, you don't want to make things out to be worse than they are, you don't want to make mountains out of molehills, as they say, but you also don't necessarily want to make things out to be better than they are. In a way where we've been having in our world today sort of a crisis of truth, what do you believe, and we could have all kinds of conversations about how to figure out what the facts are in the outside world, but today we're going to talk about what the facts are in your inner world, and why that is so important for you. You want to be able to face your failures. And failure is a charged word. I mean, a few episodes ago, you may have heard in my session with David Burns where I confronted this idea that I was a failure and it was one of the negative thoughts, the pernicious negative thoughts that was bringing me down and contributing to my being overwhelmed with the sheer number of things that I had to do.
Neil Sattin: And yet... And David and working with me did a really effective job of helping me bust through the negative thought, the cognitive distortion in order to get what was true. And that is super important work. This today's episode is not about suddenly everyone becoming pessimists or for you to suddenly be shitting on yourself all the time. That's not what today's episode is about. However, sometimes when you're looking at reality, you have to admit that the reality isn't what you wanted it to be. And just kind of a quick cursory noticing of that might not really be enough for some important reasons.
Neil Sattin: Now, it might be enough to recognize that your life isn't the way that you want it to be, that something really sucks for just a moment in order to get resourceful and start strategizing about ways to change things, and if you are anything like me, and I know that because you're here listening, you are at least a growth-minded person, then that might be something that's relatively easy for you, "This sucks, how am I going to make it better?" And then you start strategizing. But the problem with that is that there is a place in us where the hurt, where the sadness, where the anger, where all of the feelings that are stirred up by the results that we are getting in our lives that don't quite line up with what we wanted, whether it's through our actions or through the actions of others, there's a place in us where those negative feelings live...
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