Why conflict can be difficult to resolve

The main reason that conflicts are so difficult to resolve is that they are predominantly influenced by emotions. When emotions like anger and resentment are felt it is often difficult for people to behave rationally. The likelihood of the person understanding the others point of view diminishes as their own strong emotions take over.

Emotions play a role in how people make sense of their relationships, concept of power, and social status. People constantly evaluate situations and events to work out if they are personally relevant. These understandings and appraisals are infused with various emotions and feelings. So, emotion not only serves a side effect of conflict, but also frames the way in which parties understand and define their dispute.

Secondly, within the context of relationships, emotions typically express people's agendas, desires, and goals. When people perceive that they have incompatible goals or that others are interfering with their desires and pursuits, this elicits emotions and leads to conflict.


Imagine an iceberg, a small percentage is above the iceberg and visible, while a large part is below the water line and obscured from view. The small part represents our behaviour; we can see and hear it.

Just below the surface is our emotions – we can neither see nor hear them, but we can often guess how we and others are feeling by observing the behaviours. For example; when someone is smiling, we can guess they are happy, when they frown we guess they are sad etc.

If we go deeper down the iceberg we get to a place that represents the things that are most important to us: our needs and interests. These are the things that drive our emotions and in turn cause us to act and react the way we do when in conflict.

When dealing with conflict it is tempting to overlook the emotional aspect and often we are told to treat things only from an objective point of view. This is dangerous and usually leads to failure. Our aim should be to identify that emotions play a part and look for methods of addressing the emotive issues. Only then can we overcome the substantive needs of those involved.

This article is an excerpt from the training materials for trainers called 'Conflict Handling', which are available from our website at Trainer Bubble. Visit us today and buy this fantastic resource.

Achieving Your Goals - Keeping things on track

Apparently when riding the underground people look up at the map and check their progress on average every 40 seconds. Most of these people know exactly where they are going and when they will get there, so why do they do it? I suspect the answer has a lot to do with the need to track advancement and ensure that they are indeed reaching their destination, which is a bit strange considering they are on a rail and the likelihood of them not getting there is pretty much zero.

Now let’s translate this to our own goals, whether they are in life, work, sport or whatever, we are consistently told how important they are and I am sure that most people set them in one way or another. However, the question is this…

‘How often do you track your progress and ensure that you are indeed reaching your destination?’

Individuals, businesses and even parents have become great at developing goals and targets, whilst not only ensuring they are smart, but also placing them in a gorgeous laminated folder and filing them under ‘G’. The same can also often be said for business strategies. People seem to enjoy setting them (or more likely feel they have to), but when it comes to implementation something falls down.

Let’s go back to that underground journey. Imagine you realise that you’re on the wrong train and are not going to make your destination. What do you do? Well of course, you would get off and find the next available train that gets you to your stop. Maybe you would need to adapt your journey a bit and perhaps even get more than one train, but it’s far better than staying on the original train and ending up somewhere you don't want to be.

Seems obvious really, doesn’t it? Yet, in business and in life we continually fail to do this very thing. It’s as if we set our goals and then forget we ever did them. Only once we’ve reached our destination (the wrong one) do we turn around and look for someone to blame.

You see it couldn’t be your fault; you set the goal, so the hard part was done, surely? Well no, just as the driver is not to blame for the fact you are on the wrong track, your team, your friends, your enemies are not to blame for your failure to achieve your goal. If you didn’t check your progress, it’s your fault you end up in the wrong place.

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