As division and polarization continue to plague our world, Father Dave welcomes Bob Bordone to discuss how conflict can be an opportunity to forge stronger relationships. Bob is Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School as well as the founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. His latest book, co-authored with neurologist Dr. Joel Salinas, is called, “Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In.”
Bob discusses how he first became interested in this field during his second year of law school. “I took a negotiation class, and I have to tell you that I took it for all the wrong reasons. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna learn the 15 tips and tricks to persuade people,’” he says. “The class was pretty life-transforming, because I learned that to be effective at negotiation and better at managing conflicts, it was all about listening, perspective-taking, and getting curious about other people.”
“I found it fascinating, life-giving, and more consistent with a lot of the reasons why I went to law school. From a faith perspective, I saw opportunities to serve and heal, or at least be an instrument for that,” Bob continues.
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While it may seem contradictory, Bob explains how conflict can help our relationships. “This idea of conflict resilience is that conflict can actually be a source of connection and a source of building relationships, not destroying them,” he says. “If we are in relationship with people who have thoughts, ideas, and feelings, then necessarily we’re going to have some differences. In fact, differences are what make life interesting.”
“So the issue is not whether we’re going to have differences. If you’re in a relationship where there’s no conflict, that’s a real problem. The question is, what are we going to do with that?” Bob continues, and notes that many respond by avoiding conflict. “When we enter into those hard conversations with generosity, kindness, but also authenticity, that is when the actual connection can happen. Because all of the ‘yeses’ in a relationship don’t have a lot of meaning until you have the first ‘no.’”
He offers some key skills to help manage conflicts. “The most important skill is listening. When I say listening, I don’t mean sitting there passively or nodding your head…this is more of a listening born of curiosity,” Bob says. “I think this is also where a lot of people get stuck, particularly in this really polarized moment when you’re thinking, ‘Frankly, I’m really not curious about why you [believe] fill-in-the-blank. I just think you’re wrong or bad.”
“So the first piece of this [asks] how can we cultivate genuine curiosity? Because otherwise, if we’re just doing a set of behavioral things, we’re going to look canned and fake, and that is going to backfire.”
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Bob reflects on why it’s important to try to stay in relationship with friends and family even when we disagree. “In our current culture – because of social media, cable news, and demographic changes – it is extremely easy to pull the rip cord and go into our cocoon of comfort with our [like-minded] people,” he says. “In the long run, that is extremely dangerous, because the more we do that, the easier it becomes to tell the story that the other is the devil, the demon, or that they are not human. Then we sit with our group and reinforce that, and our relationships disintegrate.”
“In that moment, we could just cancel, block, or unfriend, and move on with our lives. We don’t think there’s a cost there, but I would say there is,” he continues. “It’s a little counterintuitive, but that disagreement itself offers opportunities for connection and for navigating these incredibly hard times.”
