Exercises For Managing Conflict

According to the Help Guide, you can deal with conflict through positive healthy means or negative unhealthy ways that can lead to a lack of trust and rifts in the relationship. Healthy conflicts lead to understanding and trust, while unhealthy conflicts lead to feelings of mistrust and resentment. Improving your ability to manage conflict can help you to avoid the negative outcomes routinely associated with conflict.

Learn to Listen

Practice your active listening skills by restating what people are saying to you. Increase your acknowledgement by providing feedback to the message in the form of nonverbal gestures such as nodding or interjecting verbal responses such as "I see" or "Mm-hmm."

Recognize Your Conflict Needs

Understand what you want and need to get from the conflict resolution. Spend time focusing on what you need so that you can convey it to the person with whom you are in conflict.

Manage Stress

When you manage your own stress appropriately you will be better equipped to deal with tensions that can arise in conflicts. The Help Guide suggests that you remain centered and in control. To relieve stress in the moment, use deep breathing and counting exercises.

Increase Awareness

Emotional awareness is important to your ability to handle conflicts successfully, reports Help Guide. When you are engaged in conflict, do not ignore your feelings; instead tap into what you are experiencing. Doing so will help you successfully negotiate conflicts because it will give you deeper understanding of yourself and others.

Improve Your Questioning Skills

Improve your questioning skills through practice. According to Lewicki, Barry, and Saunders writing in the "Essentials of Negotiation," using questions in communication is an important way to obtain further information. Asking good questions also enables you to improve the clarity of your communication.

Be Respectful

Take words and phrase of disrespect out of your conflict style. Being respectful will help you resolve problems faster, reports the Help Guide.

Improve Your Nonverbal Skills

Practice making eye contact. According to the Help Guide, the visual sense is dominant for most people, making the influence of eye contact in nonverbal communication important. Lewicki, Barry, and Saunders suggest that to improve communication you should hold your body erect, lean slightly forward and face the other person to ensure they are aware of you interest. Allow your voice to fit with the emotions and feelings behind your words. It is not what you say but the tone, pitch, volume, inflection, rhythm and rate of your voice when you say it.

Use Humor

Humor can help you to resolve conflicts with less tension, and you may be able to say things you could not express otherwise, suggests Help Guide. The key to using humor in communication is to ensure that the other person is in on the joke with you and not feeling as though they are being laughed at.

Make a Video

Watch your communication patterns, learn from them and make improvements. Use a camera to record a conversation and then watch the conversation, observe the nonverbal signals and the inconsistencies between the verbal and nonverbal communication, suggests Help Guide.