The dog gets rid of its diarrhea early in the morning in the middle of the carpet in the apartment, the child has to be taken out of childcare with a fever, you send the email with all the important offer data to the wrong customer, your mother yells at you before the flight why you are so late for the airport.
All human crises, every day. Hundreds of impulses with crisis potential stream at us, every day. Emails, text messages, WhatsApp, phone calls, personal conversations. How do we really deal with conflicts?
The high pulse and total tension
Not only from my time working in sales, but also in particular through the many startups I support, I encounter many crisis issues every day, both in a professional and interpersonal sense. No matter what it is, every problem needs to be discussed, but sometimes it just remains a problem, despite the many clever consultants and coaching approaches and the pompous comments on LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, when I worked for the fancy big brands, I often stayed in crisis mode with many problems, always getting very hectic, with a high pulse and total tension. This became a learned behavior when dealing with many problems and prevailed in finding a solution. Not good for everyone involved and, in particular, fast, hectic action leads to the wrong solution, which in the end is not a real solution. I always admired my experienced colleagues for how calm they remained. What has helped me to do the same and to face problems, no matter how big they are, with absolute calm?
Physical focus
In the truest sense of the word, I slow everything down when things get problematic. I walk and speak more slowly, breathe more calmly, take deep breaths very slowly and have developed a crisis mode, especially through many years of very good meditation exercises, in which I can still act, but do so calmly, listen, ask questions, think through alternatives and only then react very calmly.
Mental Strength
Pressure creates a push-back reflex in me. So I don't just accept everything immediately as others expect it of me and I don't respond to all requests every second, but with a very long time lag. I used to respond to everything immediately and quickly because I thought that was what was expected of me. Today, I use the GTD scheme and have a quiet day, still with up to 200 emails, lots of to-dos and lots of conversations with conflicting topics. I step back from the problem situation and look at everything calmly at first, without reacting. I only come to a decision after a long, thoughtful consideration of all the options.
In particular, calm listening is actually a normal standard for any conversation, but one that is lost in many conversations every day. Everyone has to relearn this, especially in today's AI-driven world, with ultra-fast response times to a request. Of course, the AI assistant that I use to answer inquiries, emails and for scheduling is good. And the robot as a colleague will solve everything even faster and more efficiently than any human can in the future. But precisely because processes are becoming faster and faster, you need to develop a mode for yourself and your health in which you can keep an overview and find inner peace.
Who says that you have to react immediately, always and everywhere, with the perfect answer? Nobody is forcing you to do anything, it is much more important to learn how to practise your own control in order to master the many daily conflict issues and not let yourself be dominated by these conflicts.
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