How to Control Your Emotions in Conflict Resolution

Learn how to take your emotional temperature during a negotiation.

By — on / Conflict Resolution

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The following is negotiation advice drawn from a case study of conflict resolution and management: To guard against acting irrationally or in ways that can harm you, authors of Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro advise you to take your emotional temperature during a negotiation. Specifically, try to gauge whether your emotions are manageable, starting to heat up, or threatening to boil over.

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Emotions in Conflict Resolution

Do you ever feel ambushed by strong emotions?

Here are some negotiation tips for lowering your emotional temperature:

Develop an Emergency Plan

Give yourself an ‘out’ – a break that allows you to take a walk to cool down, to call a friend or colleague for reinforcement, or remind yourself of your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement).

Shift the Focus

Ask questions that you time, bring new information, and test your assumptions.

  • See also: Business Negotiations – In Deal Making, Broaden Your Focus – In this negotiation scenario, imagine a negotiator is in charge of scouting for office space for a new branch of her company in a neighboring city. She does her research, meets with several real estate agents, and chooses the agent she qualitatively and quantitatively feels is the best candidate for finding the company’s new branch location. After selecting her preferred agent, the agent then begins to send her principal (the company representative) many options, so many that the principal feels overwhelmed with the number of possible locations for the new company branch (see also – agent theory). Having options can be a blessing, but it can also stifle decision making and lead to inaction. Negotiation research conducted by Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School examine choice bracketing, or the tendency to group large numbers of different choices into sets, and offers a case study of conflict management when principals are tasked with choosing among large numbers of disparate choices.

Diagnose Your Ailment

What core concerns of yours are not being met? Are you hurt because you feel unappreciated or dismissed? Once you understand why you’re upset, you’ll be better able to signal what you need.

  • See also: Conflict Resolution – Emotion and Judgment – Negotiation research conducted by University of Iowa neuroscientists Antoine Bechara, Daniel Tranel, and Hanna Damasio uses a case study of conflict management to focus on the effect of emotion on decision making using a card selection game.

How do you keep your emotions in check during conflict resolution? Share your approach in the comments.

Related Conflict Resolution Article: MESO, Negotiation, and Dealing with Difficult People: Make Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers to Create Value in Dealmaking

The New Conflict Management

Claim your FREE copy: The New Conflict Management

In our FREE special report from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School - The New Conflict Management: Effective Conflict Resolution Strategies to Avoid Litigation – renowned negotiation experts uncover unconventional approaches to conflict management that can turn adversaries into partners.


Originally published in May 17, 2013.

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Comments

3 Responses to “How to Control Your Emotions in Conflict Resolution”

  • GregoryCanion G.

    Very useful article. That really helps to keep emotions under control. Maybe it will need some time to pass, but in general everything is new and should work out. I didn’t know that my temperature rises when I’m nervous or angry. I also read other articles, linked here. Great information. Thanks.

    Reply
  • Aled D.

    Thanks for the post.

    When the stakes are high for parties in any negotiation and I’m speaking predominantly about the negotiation phase within a mediation, parties are always in danger of being sabotaged by their own emotions.

    One of the problems I see is that many people perceive the expression of emotion as a weakness or inappropriate in a ‘commercial setting’. I often hear the expression; ‘let’s not get emotional now’, which reinforces this perspective. I’d argue however that emotions are important and valuable data points in a negotiation. For example if I’m feeling very uneasy about something that’s being said or proposed but ignore that feeling, then I could risk making a decision that isn’t in my interests. I need to tune in to my emotions to make sense of them, so my uneasiness could be a hunch that the other party has an agenda in the conversation but isn’t being transparent about it. If I’m emotionally self aware then I’ll tune into this, maybe follow the suggestion above and take a break to reflect and make sense of my internal reaction, come back and test out my hunch.

    There’s a fabulous interview with Joanna Kalowski, an experienced Australian mediator who’s mediated in highly sensitive inter-racial and political settings all over the world. Joanna was a member of the administrative appeals tribunal for 10 years and later a member of the National Native Title Tribunal where she mediated land claims by Aboriginal people to their traditional lands and waters. She describes vividly how emotions affect parties in mediation and negotiation settings and what to say in order to diffuse these incredibly tense moments. You can listen to that interview here: Mediator Academy Interviews

    hope that’s useful.

    Best wishes
    Aled

    Reply
    • Veronika B.

      Excellent example on how expressing emotions can make the difference in negotiations entangled with the life and land of native people …

      Reply

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