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.

E-Mail Success - By Wolfgang Halliwell

I returned to work today after a 2 week Christmas vacation and opened my inbox with some trepidation. After a similar break last year I had returned form holiday with over 400 e-mails awaiting my attention. It took me a couple of days to deal with these so I vowed there and then that this would never happen again.

One of my New Years resolutions at the beginning of 2007 was to take control of my e-mail inbox. Today would prove one way or the other whether the action I took worked.

I opened my inbox and found only 32 items awaiting me. Thirty minutes later and my inbox was empty. Complete success!

So, what did I do to achieve this? The good news is that this is not rocket science and a few simple steps have achieved this result. The action I took in 2007 included:

1. Always remembering to set my out of office message when I was away for more than a day.


2. Unsubscribing to newsletters and update services unless I really needed them.


3. Agreeing a few ground rules with colleagues about when and when not to use e-mail.


4. Using the telephone a lot more to avoid those unproductive games of e-mail tennis.


5. Delegating or redirecting some of my e-mail to other people when appropriate.

None of this took very long to do but the results have been really spectacular for me. If you suffer from an overfull inbox you might find some of the techniques I have listed are of some help.

Of course, there is also a need to manage your e-mail once you have got it, but that is the topic for another posting.

This article relates to our training course material, 'Managing E-Mails', which you can find on our website by clicking here.