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October 13, 2004
Effective Confrontation
Interview
with Kerry Patterson author of the book, Crucial
Confrontation
Mike
Carruthers:
Why do so many of us hate confrontation? Kerry
Patterson:
The
reason people don't like to do it typically is because they move silence to violence.They
hold it inside until they become angry. Kerry
Patterson author of the book, Crucial
Confrontation… It
would be like taking out a bowl full of cottage cheese that's already gone rancid,
sticking it on your counter and coming back a week later hoping it got better.
It gets worse inside and so the silence, eventually when we do speak it comes
out as violence. That violence of course then gives us a warning that says, "
Oh don't confront again because next time you confront there will be another battle."
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But
Kerry says effective confrontation doesn't require a battle. And he's researched
and studied this whole subject of effective confrontation a lot. In
fact we've observed tens of thousands of people of which hundreds were very effective
and never got into battle, they didn't walk away, they didn't sugar coat, they
stepped up and said can we talk. Now that skill, that capacity to hold that confrontation
makes all the difference. It's
very empowering, says Kerry, to realize that you could confront just about anybody,
which just about anything and not have it turn into a big fight. It's all in how
you do it. More
often than not when you describe it in a non-confrontive(sic) way the other individual
comes around and the problem is solved in the first sentence or two. Most problems
that we have come because we come in charged reloaded for bear, angry and attacking.
The other person becomes defensive and it's a downward spiral from that point
on. Tomorrow
a specific strategy for effective confrontation, I'm Mike Carruthers and that's
Something You Should Know.
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