Conflict Owner's Manual

What you tell yourself about your conflict competencies is what you believe is true. Are you telling yourself information that will grow your skills? On the conflict competence continuum of skills, where you put your pin will influence and inform how you do conflict.

show notes. These scholars research how our beliefs shape our choices in life.

* Michael Rousell: Surprise! How Your Brain Secretly Changes Your Beliefs
TEDxSalem • January, 2019
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rousell_surprise_how_your_brain_secretly_changes_your_beliefs

* Doug Lipman: As powerful as stories are, the process of storytelling has great but overlooked power, June, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zmc-1rT8kQ

*Ethan Kross: Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don't Manage You, 2025

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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Everyone experiences conflict, and has ways of dealing with it but some ways are better than others for improving the quality of your relationships. It's never too late to learn more and better ways. 
Tyson and Deborah share how they learned conflict management, what tools they use most (spoiler - for Deborah, it's conflict analysis), when they began their life's work in managing conflict, and in what ways their backgrounds in family and faith inform their practices.

show notes:
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
Bantam/Turner Books, USA, 1992, 266 pages.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

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"Know thyself!" comes to us as philosophical wisdom from antiquity. Self awareness is a conflict competency that increases your adaptability. The self you know is a learning, growing being who strives for quality relationships. Self awareness can prevent conflict, make you more adaptable to manage different kinds of conflict with different strategies, and improve the quality of the relationship you have with yourself. The more we are able to adapt, the more opportunities we have to be conflict competent.
Here are three ways that you achieving self awareness improves your conflict competence.

Show notes:
Myers Briggs https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/the-16-mbti-personality-types/
Thomas Kilmann https://kilmanndiagnostics.com/overview-thomas-kilmann-conflict-mode-instrument-tki/
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/09/21/quiz-find-out-your-conflict-style
https://www.ethankross.com/ to manage negative self talk.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Everyone has a view of how the world should work according to themselves. Your view is a frame that your holds, among other things, your beliefs, concerns, values, and hopes. But sometimes, your frame rubs wrong against someone else's frame, and oops, conflict happens. That's when a reframe adds a valuable conflict competence. We describe user-friendly ways to look at frames and reframes.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

You have habits, everyone does. Habits are patterns of how you behave. Once you recognize how you usually or often react in a conflict you have identified your conflict pattern. Name your reaction pattern, the emotions driving that pattern, and the pattern you'd rather have. Name it, own it, improve it.

Show notes
Juliet spoke to herself (Act 2, Scene 2) on her balcony, unaware that Romeo was hiding below, watching her rest her cheek upon her hand while she thought of him.

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. 
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? 
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Conflicts unfold over time to become patterns. We discuss the many opportunities to manage, shift, change and reframe conflict patterns. When you change the pattern you improve your conflict competence.

Tyson refers to adrienne maree brown: https://adriennemareebrown.net/2015/02/02/trust-the-people/ 

"if you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy." Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Send us a text. We love hearing from you.

Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Does your attachment to your point of view make your good questions sound like judgments? Here are four steps to showing that your curiosity comes from your good intentions.

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

It's election 2025 tomorrow in Canada, and we discuss conflict competence as a skill in every interaction, as well as necessary for democracy, electioneering, voting, and governing. 

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Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

Defaulting to curiosity rather than judgement is conflict competent. But, what if that curious question still sounds judgemental? We show you how to ask conflict competent questions, so you can diffuse conflict.

The article the explains better questions than starting with the word "why" at this link: https://deborahsword.com/a-conflict-analysis-of-why/

Send us a text. We love hearing from you.

Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.

A bias can make decisions easier. You don't have to think hard if you already know your bias for herbal tea and against caffeinated tea. But when biases cause conflict, or stop you from enjoying the company of friends who hold perspectives you don't share, you'll want some conflict competent hacks to overcome biased thinking. We discuss four of the most common.

Send us a text. We love hearing from you.

Dr. Deborah Sword is a conflict specialist with decades of experience and training to share.

Please subscribe to our podcast, like it, share it, leave comments (we love comments), ask questions and suggest topics you'd like to hear. Thank you for listening.