Conflict, listening, and self-awareness

This past weekend was the first part of the conflict resolution class I'm taking this summer. It met Friday 4-8pm and Saturday and Sunday 9-5. It was pretty exhausting, but not in the way I might have thought going into it. The class actually energized me, and I was interested in what was happening the entire time. The instructors, two former lawyers turned mediators, were incredibly good. And I learned so much about myself I have no idea where to start.

For example, I knew that I was not a very good listener, but now I know how bad of a listener I have actually been all this time. We did an activity where we had to listen to somebody's conflict, and we weren't supposed to say a thing until the speaker was finished, about three minutes. I kept having to fight the urge to say, "Oh yeah, that happened to me once! I can't stand it! Blah blah blah." Then, in a role play, my partner told me in the debrief that she tried to give me some hints about what her needs were but I wasn't catching them. Upon reflection, I realized I had been so busy justifying my own actions and describing my own needs and feelings that I hadn't actually listened to the other person well.

Another thing, my conflict management style, when involved with people I care about, has often been accommodating, where I don't value (or know about) my own needs, until I can't take it anymore and explode in competitive style, where I don't value the other person's needs. This is what I have been doing all along, and I didn't even know there was this other way of working with another person to get what we both want -- we're not even talking about compromise but cooperation/collaboration.

This class has been a very humbling experience. There's a lot to work on in trying to develop self-awareness. You think of yourself one way, but compare that to others' perceptions of you, and BAM it's like your image of yourself needs to be rebuilt. Thus, the importance of listening to others....