Bloom Your Mind

Ep 142: Conflict Convo Cheat Sheet

• Marie McDonald

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Conflict isn’t a detour. It’s the road itself.
And if you’re out there making ideas real, you’re going to hit it—whether you like it or not.

This week on the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, we’re wrapping up our 3-part conflict resolution series with a quick-and-dirty cheat sheet. Think of this episode as your prep guide before a hard conversation: the moves that give you and the other person the best shot at resolution, connection, and growth.

We’ll cover:
 ✨ A lightning recap of the last two episodes (why the problem is the problem—not the person—and the five things conflict is really about).
 ✨ The mirror listening tool, and how to use it so people actually feel heard.
 ✨ An eight-point cheat sheet for walking into conflict as your best self. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • Grounding tips for entering a conversation with a still mind, a calm body, and lead by the outcome; you and I against the problem 
  • Using a mental talking stick to keep our inner interruption beast at bay 
  • What it means to stick to one topic at a time, even when our topics are vendiagrams
  • How owning our own experience, impact and subjective experience increases connection
  • How ditching generalizations can bring us together, and how to recognize the sneaky ones that we use without realizing it. 
  • How to sort out when we’re coming from attachment vs. coming from love (and why boundaries matter).
  • Manage your mind—how to watch your thinking and stay curious before during and after, so that your mind doesn’t regenerate the same conflicts again and again. 

By the end, you’ll have a go-to conversation checklist you can use now, or years from now, to turn conflict into a tool for building stronger ideas, deeper relationships, and a more resilient you.

Your homework: Pick one current or past conflict, and run it through the cheat sheet. Where could you have shifted from “me vs. you” to “us vs. the problem”? Which step would have changed the tone?

Mentioned on this episode: 

How to connect with Marie:

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Bloom your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 142 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. Today's episode is created to be a quick resource for you. It's a very short episode that gives you a conflict resolution cheat sheet. Keep this episode in your back pocket for when conflict arises. It is the third of our three-part conflict series. This is this quick guide that you can have ready today, tomorrow or 10 years from now when you most need it.

Speaker 1:

So in our first conflict resolution episode, we talked about the art of resolving conflict, based on the book by Betty Prize called the Space Between Us. Then last week, we zoomed in on one big shift that you can make in conflict resolution, which is making the problem the problem instead of the person the problem. We even talked about the five things that conflicts are generally about. The five root causes of conflict. We think they're about the other person, but in general, they're usually about one of five things resources, history, structures, values or communication. That list was highly helpful for me and you can go in and check out what all of those five mean by listening to one of the past two episodes. We've introduced mirror listening before on the podcast. You can check out that tool by listening to. Listening is Sexy. That's the episode. And then today's episode ties a lot of those tools together with a practical step-by-step cheat sheet that you can use to prep yourself before heading into a conflict resolution conversation. Because when you're out there trying to make your ideas real which we are all about you're going to run into conflict. You're going to have internal conflict we have lots of tools for that on the podcast but you'll also have conflict with other people. You'll have interpersonal conflict. It's not a glitch in the system. When that happens, it is the system. We don't really exist outside of relationship to one another, and how you handle conflict determines whether your ideas thrive and really make it into the world, whether you keep going to make more ideas real, whether your relationships deepen and whether you walk out of that conflict having grown and evolved. It is always an opportunity for that, and conflicts really create a space for us to learn more about ourselves, about others and about healing, so we can do a lot of good in the world. All right, here is your conflict resolution cheat sheet. These are eight I believe tips that I've come up with to help you and be a quick resource anytime you need them.

Speaker 1:

Number one before you go into a conflict resolution conversation, ground yourself with the outcome in mind. Before you start talking, pause. Use one of our tools to complete the stress cycle, to regulate yourself. You can listen to the episode completing the stress cycle. If you'd like more tools on that, you can take a walk. You can breathe. You can use the animalistic behavior of shaking it out. That's my favorite one. Sometimes you'll see athletes or public speakers jumping up and down and shaking their body. It's totally normal, even though your brain tells you it's not. Shake out the stress. Do whatever you need to regulate yourself and then picture the outcome that you want. It's not to be right. It's not to have the other person understand you. It's not to prove that you're the one that was in the right the whole time. The outcome we want is for you and I to be against the problem, you and I on the same team. The outcome we want is to understand one another and come out of the conversation with a win-win, with something that works for both of us.

Speaker 1:

Number two when we're speaking, take turns talking and don't interrupt. This is where that tool of mirror listening comes in. So you can even use the metaphor of a talking stick. You can literally imagine that when one of you is talking, the other person does not get to talk about their experience. When the other person is talking, you can imagine that they're holding a talking stick and your job is to not interrupt but just to listen, to understand, ask follow-up questions if you want. That will help you understand what they're saying and then reflect back what you heard. Okay, so here's what I'm hearing and you reflect back what you think you heard so that they can correct you if you're getting it wrong. All too often we walk away from conversations holding on to what we think the person meant and sometimes we get it wrong. So let's be really clear that we're understanding what the person meant by repeating it back to them, and nothing shuts down a fight faster than when someone feels truly heard. Once they're finished expressing what they need to express, it can be our turn. We can take the talking stick, but let's really hear the other person out first whenever that's possible. Number three this is so important and I think it can be hard to recognize sometimes Stay on one topic at a time.

Speaker 1:

Here's an example of this. Let's say we're like two people in a couple and one person says we're always late. Whenever we leave the house, we're late. And it's really embarrassing for me and I really can't stand it because it feels stressful and I'm not enjoying myself once I get there because we've been rushed and we're leaving the house mad at each other. We've been rushed and it's been a stress. You know, we're leaving the house mad at each other. I wanna talk about why we're always late. Let's resolve that. And let's say the other person responds by saying well, the reason that we're always late is because there's so much unfinished stuff that you leave around the house. You're always leaving things unfinished, right, that is a different topic. Yes, it is very related, but they're two different problems to solve. So solve one problem at a time by staying on one topic. You can even verbally agree hey, I want to talk about the fact that there's so much left undone in the house and that's why I think we're late. But I don't want to change topics before we finish talking about this and they're slightly different. So let's talk about being late. And then I really want to talk about one of the things that I think helps us create the problem that makes us late, which is having too many unfinished projects. But we'll handle them one at a time. Let's go back to being late. Stay on one topic at a time and you can solve them, instead of sprawling out and interweaving multiple problems.

Speaker 1:

Number four and this is one of my two most important tips is to own your own experience. When we are talking about a specific thing that happened, we're going to say this is the exact scenario that happened when you interrupted me. This is the experience that I had and this is the impact that it had on me. This is the impact that I experienced. When we use a specific example and then follow it up by talking about what we experienced and the impact that we experienced, we're owning our own experience. There are infinite different ways that people react to situations and circumstances. The example of someone interrupting someone else someone might not care at all. Someone might get louder and interrupt the other person. Someone might feel small and defeated. Someone else might feel like you don't care about what I have to say. We all have different reactions to different circumstances. So when we can say the specific circumstance. When I'm in the middle of a sentence and I get interrupted, for example, and then follow it with, I experience frustration. I experience a feeling that what I have to say isn't as important. That's what the impact that I'm experiencing. We're acknowledging that it's our experience and we can even say I'm not saying it was your intention to make me feel like that. I'm just saying that's what I experience when I get interrupted. So I'm hoping that in the future we can minimize interruptions for one another and maybe even have a phrase that we say to help us remember not to interrupt one another. That would be really helpful to me. Would that work for you? So we're owning, we're using a specific example, owning our own experience and maybe even making a really specific request for what would work better in the future.

Speaker 1:

All right, number five no generalizations. We basically wanna banish the words. Always, never. You're the kind of person who this is how it always goes. Those types of statements throw someone onto their heels, they are nuclear, they turn a solvable conflict into a personality issue and a whole big thematic issue, with lots of examples that come into play. So we want to keep our statements specific, objective based. In fact, whenever possible, keep it about the actual conflict moment that you just experienced. Number six when you realize, when we realize that we're making a person a problem, pause and turn it into a problem problem Instead of deciding that the other person is the problem.

Speaker 1:

Go to the resource of the last podcast episode and see which of the five conflict roots is this actually about? Is this actually about history? Is it about structures? Is it about values, communication, resources? When we are focused on the problem, you and I can sit on the same side of the table and talk about the problem. When we're focused on each other, we are going to get kicked into our lizard brain and be in fight or flight or freezer fun. We're going to get triggered over and over again and that will really inflate conflicts really quickly.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the next one is to manage your mind. This is the second of the two, most important. This is the big one. Your external circumstances will never be what creates your internal state. There will always be hard things. We will always want more. Our old stories from our lives and our history will always resurface in shiny new costumes, in conflicts, in challenges that we face. We're in charge of our awareness around that.

Speaker 1:

So before, during and after a conflict, our job is to watch our own mind. Notice when it's trying to make us the good guy. Notice where your brain's trying to make you right and the other person wrong. Notice when our brains are digging trenches to find evidence that only proves our side right. Our brains are great at doing that. We're going to have an impulsive reaction to something and then our brains are going to get lots of evidence, go around gathering tons of evidence to support that immediate reaction.

Speaker 1:

We want to pause, notice that our brain is trying to make us the good guy, slow down our thinking and ask hmm, what if there's no good guy here? What if there's no right and wrong? There's no one person that's right and the other person is wrong. What if we're both right? What if two things could be true at one time? Get curious instead of certain. How could I listen to understand what this was like for them? How could it be so different than what it was like for me? Let's get curious about this.

Speaker 1:

When we can understand that two things are true at once, two people can have the same experience and experience them totally differently. That opens our curiosity in our mind. We're all humans, we're all coming from the same place. Deep down, we're all coming from a place where we want to do good, we want to be good. When we can remember that, our deep connection to one another and manage the automatic thinking that happens, conflict is so much more resolvable.

Speaker 1:

And when we need it number eight we can take time away, we can pause, we can cool down to regulate our system, just say, hey, you know what I need to take a beat and think about this for a minute. Let's talk again in five minutes, let's talk again tomorrow, whatever you need. Time away can help us be non-reactive and increase our self-awareness, our ability to manage our minds and our reactions. So it's always okay to take a beat. So there you have it, my friends the conflict conversation cheat sheet.

Speaker 1:

Use it as prep bookmark it, keep it as a resource for when tensions rise, because conflict is not here to destroy you, your idea or your relationships. It's here to help you grow. It will always show up and if we get really good at navigating it from a place of understanding that we're all humans, we're all having an experience and it's never about another person. The problem is always the problem Then conflict will help sharpen our ideas, deepen our connections and help us grow into the people we really want to be.

Speaker 1:

So go, make your ideas real and let conflict be part of the process and the thing that grows you along the way. That's what I've got for you this week and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. I'll see you in the Bloom Room, thank you.