Simon Sinek argues that listening with genuine curiosity instead of judgment is how to resolve conflict. He describes staying close to a conspiracy theorist friend by asking questions and finding common ground rather than debating. The skill works at every level, from personal relationships to political divides.
Chapters
So, first of all, conflict is not a bad thing, right? It is like even an idealist like me that actually imagines world peace, I don't imagine a world without conflict. That's impossible. I imagine a world in which we can resolve conflict peacefully. Conflict is not a bad thing. Good marriages have conflict. Good relationships have conflict. Good corporate cultures have conflict. The question is, do you know how to manage conflict and resolve conflict peacefully? That's a different question. And one of the problems we have in our nation, and I would argue in a lot of companies, is we haven't been teaching the skills of how to resolve conflict. And the preeminent skill of resolving conflict is listening. We're a shouting society, right? Nobody listens to social media. We shout on social media. Nobody's ever read a comment and be like, you know what? I've changed my mind. Right? Said no one ever. Right? It's a place where we broadcast. Literally, it is simply a broadcast mechanism and nothing else. It's a place that we get to vent and nothing else. And so, this is what we're really good at. We're good at telling other people and listening zero. We're good at demanding that somebody hear us, but we're very bad at hearing other people. Right? And so, if we can teach the skill of listening, when you teach the skill of listening, what you learn to do is you learn to change judgment to curiosity. I'll give you a real-life example. I have a friend, she's a dear friend, who is, she's from rural Tennessee, and she is a conspiracy theorist through and through. And I didn't know this as we were becoming friends. It came out later. I gave her an Amazon Alexa for her birthday, and she sent it back because she didn't want the government listening to her. And I said to her, "The government's not listening to you. Amazon's listening to you." But the government's not listening to you. And she came to visit me in New York and we went for a nice long walk and she said something conspiratorial. I mean, when I say she's into conspiracies, I mean all of them. And I might have said, but I definitely thought, how can you be so stupid? And she stopped in her tracks. She turned to me and said, "You just called your friend stupid." And it really caught me that I was being judgmental. And for many of us, we avoid political conversations at the Thanksgiving table and we, you know, crazy uncle, we're just going to— And by the way, all of these metaphors and analogies, it could be the left or the right. Your crazy uncle could be on the left. I don't care what somebody's politics are. It's the same nonsense on both sides. And we're both judgmental on both sides. And we use the same rhetoric on both sides. And so she and I could have done a couple things. We could have abandoned the friendship. And I hear people saying this all the time. I could never be friends with somebody, dot, dot, dot, who would vote differently than me. I could never be friends with somebody who believes, dot, dot, dot. So we could have abandoned our friendship. That was one possibility. Another one is we could have agreed never to just talk about this stuff. But we decided, no, we're going to learn how to communicate and we're going to learn how to deal with conflict and tension. And what we had to learn to do was to learn to listen. And what we had to learn to do was to replace our judgment of each other, because we definitely judged each other on both sides of that equation. Each party thinks of the other as the sheeple, right? And we had to learn to listen to each other and be curious about each other's opinions and point of views. And going through COVID, we talked about all of it. We talked about masks, we talked about vaccines, and we had to learn to listen. And communicate. And what we did is, and we weren't just waiting for our turn to speak, we were legitimately curious about how that person came to that opinion and where they get their information. We didn't challenge the other person. What we did was we looked for affirmation. So we'd go deeper and deeper and deeper until we could find one thing you go, "I agree with you," or, "That's 100% true." And as soon as we could find overlap, now we could go up from there. And it became very productive. And she's still to this day one of my best friends on the planet. And we're very, very proud of our friendship and how we took ourselves on. And I think we complain about our politicians that they don't listen. We complain about our society that our society doesn't listen. We can complain about the division and the conflict in our society. We complain about all of it. And yet, how many of us are doing the work to fix the situation first? Because the last I checked, change starts at home.
