'Being Able to Talk to Each Other So You Can...'
The important need in disputes or conflict to converse
Disputes and ongoing conflicts are messy interactions. Communication can be intense even when words are not being expressed. When verbal communication suddenly stops or becomes limited and cryptic, bigger risks emerge.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin knows this well, saying about China and the importance of ongoing verbal communication, “being able to talk to each other so you can manage crises and prevent things from spiraling out of control unnecessarily.”
It’s true, isn’t it?
When we aren’t talking, big disagreements, intense emotions and the conclusions that might not be accurate about each other mean that crises aren’t being managed and danger emerges that “things” can, as Austin says, spiral out of control, which is bad enough, but maybe more importantly, “unnecessarily.”
When matters end up growing in magnitude and traveling at increased velocity and it was preventable and unnecessary, we really have to look inside ourselves and ask, “why” as in “why did we permit this on our end” if we were the ones who were uncommunicative or rigid?
Maybe it wasn’t just us — or us at all — but it was someone and if it was us, we have to take the responsibility to a large degree for not managing risk by not responsibly addressing the dispute, ongoing conflict and maybe what became a crisis.
We can save ourselves a lot of misery by being assertive, not aggressive, persistent, even when being stonewalled, deflected, gaslighted, whatever and further develop our skills.
Doing this will go a long way towards prevention and mitigating risk and damages.
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