How to Understand the High-Conflict Person With Dr. Ashley R. Kennard.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at AI, we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Hello.

Thanks so much for having me, Kwame.

Yeah, it's our pleasure. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Sure. Yeah. So, currently I am an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. I also serve on the board of directors for We Rise, which is a grassroots, community driven, anti racist organization in the community where I live. And also, in thinking about doing this interview with you, I kind of was reminded of my time as a sales and marketing rep for a medical supply company in between undergraduate and my graduate work. So I don't always think of myself sort of through this conflict or negotiation lens, but it is something that I've been doing for a long time and now I teach it.

Fantastic. Yes. And we're super excited to chat because first of all, we scheduled this months ago. I'm glad we're able to find, get it together and make this happen. It's like you said, we. In our prep beforehand, when we were chatting, you mentioned that we negotiate every day. So even if it's not like the main focus in a transactional type of sense, you're still doing it all the time. Family, friends, students, faculty, staff, and of course on the board too. And you mentioned something really interesting before the conversation started because I like to start off by just asking, hey, what's, what's your. Where's your energy going? Like what. When it relates to human interaction, what's really jazzing you up? And you said focusing on the humanity of those we're in conflict with, and I love that. So Tell us a bit more about that.

Sure, yeah. And this is something that I've really been sort of working through and thinking through primarily in my role as an educator, because I think that it's something that we all struggle with. Right. When we're in conflict, conflict with someone, as you wrote about in your book. Right. There are all these emotions that become involved. And so we sometimes forget to sort of see or think about the fact that the person that we're engaging with at the end of the day is a human, just like we are. And when the conflict topics are particularly charged or exciting in some way. Right. We tend to sort of let that overshadow or kind of shade our vision on how we feel about. Right. That person, which at the end of the day, doesn't really get us anywhere. If we're not able to see that humanity, we're not really able to connect with that individual. And so all hopes of really resolving the conflict in any way or at least managing it kind of go out the door.

Yeah, you're so right. It reminds me of the term, the fog of war, where it's like people get so caught up in the fight that they lose track of why they're even fighting or what they're trying to do. And so when it comes to these difficult conversations we're having day to day, whether it's a negotiation or a conflict, whatever it happens to be, let's get deeper into really what drives this tendency for us to dehumanize the other side. Where exactly do you think that comes from?

Well, I think, at least in my research background, I would say through the lens of intercultural communication and sort of the idea of othering. Right. And so we have these in groups and these out groups, and we just have this propensity as human beings to think of others as members of our out group. And so if you don't look like me, if you don't think like me, if you don't believe the things that I believe, then you must be an other. Right. And so when we talk about or think about engaging in conversation with others, we tend to dehumanize them.

Absolutely. And I love the term that you use, which is propensity, because what that tells me is that this is not a choice. We're not in this conflict. And I say, you know what would help me in this conflict? I want to dehumanize this person, isn't. This is not. It's not a conscious thing. It's just a natural thing. And what I'm recognizing more and more when it comes to negotiation, conflict resolution, or just human interaction in general, we are fighting our instincts in many ways. These are the natural things that the brain would do. And when you think about in group versus out group bias, whenever we can see similarities in other people, then, and we see them as part of our side or a part of our tribe, then what I'm realizing more and more often is that with tribalism, tribalism is nothing without having some kind of enemy. So it's like, it's not just about, you're in my tribe, you're on my team, hey, we're on the same team. It's not just that. It's like, who are we against? Not just what are we for? And so it's really important for us to understand that underlying psychology so we can start to work against it when it starts to come into play in our everyday life.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's so much at the crux of everything, right. Is just understanding that that is the way that our brains function. Because in understanding psychology, our brains function that way for a reason. Right. We like to monitor our cognitive resources and make sure that we're not expending too much energy thinking about everything. And so our brains are hardwired to prepare us to. For survival in a lot of ways. And so when we're engaging in these difficult conversations or when we're thinking about approaching these difficult conversations or just communicating with people, right. We have to be able to recognize, okay, wait a second, am I in a moment of survival? Right. I'm not. And so I can sort of pay attention to or acknowledge the biases that I might be operating under. And taking that conscious moment to sort of reflect on how you're thinking can then reframe or re. Sort of shape the way that you communicate going forward.

Talking about cognitive resources. I think this is something that's often overlooked because our brains are designed to save energy, because it's an energy hog. It uses so much energy relative to other parts of our body. And so we're always using these little shortcuts to save energy. And so what this means is that in order to not dehumanize people, or I could just say in order to humanize people in the heat of the moment, it's going to take a lot of effort. And that's hard to do, especially when you're using a. You're already under a lot of cognitive load because you're having a pretty significant conversation of consequence there too. And so you're. You're doing that, and then now you have to really, with intentionality, try to humanize the person. And then at the same time, the other person might not have heard the episode with Dr. Ashley Kennard. They might not be humanizing us. It's a lot of effort that it takes for us to, to galvanize those resources and overcome those. Those barriers. So how do we do this in the moment?

Absolutely. And I think that's a really great question. Right at the heart of it, though, I think it's being conscious and more aware and so that we're able to be more intentional. When we enter into these conversations and thinking about what it is that we're trying to accomplish. What. What are we trying to do here? And thinking about how we might overcome some of these biases just simply by recognizing them. I also think it has to do with educating yourself. Right. And the more that you can try to understand and learn about people and cultures and interactions, you're better prepared to sort of show up in more intentional and engaged ways.

Yes. And I just realized something. Sometimes I can hear the listeners talking to me, and somebody said, but Kwame, I don't want to do this. Dehumanizing the other side kind of feels good. And maybe what I need to do is I just need to, like, be really mean and get them to come off of their position. And they're not humanizing me. So why should I be the person to humanize the other side when they're not giving me the same grace?

Wow. Yeah, that's a great question. Right. But I, and I think that there are lots of ways to answer this question. I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes. Yeah, you just, you're just not that person. Right. Or that's not the moment. And you choose your piece and you can walk away from that conversation. You don't have to engage in that moment. If you realize that that person has not shown up with any sort of open mindedness or willingness to listen and to interact in meaningful and productive ways, you walk away. Right. And I think that that's perfectly fine. But aside from that, I think if you really have a lot invested in this relationship, you're really wanting to work through it, or you feel really boldly about the point that you're trying to make. I think you realize that it's a process and that it takes time. And so it might not happen right now, but what are some other things that I can do to build trust in this relationship, to connect with this individual, to demonstrate some of our similarities? Sometimes it's just being purposeful, thinking through. In what ways are we similar? What do we have in common and where can we sort of see eye to eye and then building off of that?

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more and we will be right back after this. Oh, so much good here. And the first point that you made when you're talking, when you said we can choose not to engage in that moment, I think that's so powerful. Powerful but so often overlooked. Because I think a lot of times we feel obligated to see the conversation through to its natural conclusion and we have to realize that sometimes taking a break and recognizing that, hey, I'm not in a good place to have this conversation right now, I cannot galvanize the cognitive resources to do what needs to be done to negotiate and resolve conflict at a high level. So I'm just not going to do it right now. That is really, really powerful, but often overlooked. Just being honest with yourself and giving yourself that grace and saying now is not the time is really powerful. So that's really good. And then recognizing that you have to put your emotional desires in the mom below your long term goals because you said if you care about the relationship and if you care about the outcome, then you should utilize these techniques. And humanization of the other side is part of that technique. Because if you're dehumanizing the other side, I don't think there's a way for you to dehumanize someone while at the same time respecting them. And so the person is going to feel disrespected and what they're going to do throughout the entirety of the interaction is try to reclaim that respect, usually through force and aggression. And so now we have a fight and that's not not productive. And so we have to demonstrate that respect and then they would be more likely to reciprocate in kind and then we'll be able to move in the right direction. But I think what we have to recognize is we have to be the leaders in the interaction to get that ball of positivity moving in the right direction. And then you also said it's a process, it's going to take time because if you've gotten to the point where you are dehumanizing the other side and seeing them as the other, like the evil person, the villain, probably you have a big conflict on your hand and it's probably going take more than two or three minutes to put it together. But when we think about that cognitive resource thing, we have to recognize that patience requires a lot of energy, it requires a lot of time. And sometimes persuasion just takes time. And the tip that you gave I thought was great, focus on those similarities. No matter who it is that you're talking to, you've got something in common with them, something be creative. And then you start to find those things, expand on those things. And then what you're doing is you're triggering a little bit of in group bias. You want to take some time and demonstrate how we are actually moving in the same direction, actually working together, actually somehow on the same team. And then you start to get some of the benefits of the in group bias. And then that out group bias starts to go a little bit downward, which can really do wonders for the relationship. So you just dropped some gems there and I want to make sure that the, the listeners caught those.

Wonderful. And I will just add too, because I think it's really important. We haven't talked much about emotion, but that is another key part of this. And just to share a little anecdote, I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2017 with my partner. And before we decided to take off on this journey, this 2189.8 mile journey for six and a half months, I said we need like a safe word essentially for our interactions. And so we collectively share a distaste for kombucha. And that was the word. And so if things started to get heated, we started to get a little, you know, frustrated with each other, which is inevitable when you're spending all day, every single day hiking up and down mountains together. I just sort of said we need to have a way to say stop and pause. And it meant that you got 20 minutes, right? You automatically get 20 minutes where you can't talk to me. We're not going to engage, we're not going to talk about anything so that we can sort of process for some time before we actually have this conversation and we used it. Right. Not often, but, you know, especially at the beginning when we were kind of figuring out our pace and our hiking style and how it would work, we fell back on that to say, you know what, I need a minute. Because the things I'm going to say in this moment aren't the things that I want to say. They're not going to be productive, they're not going to be helpful.

That's a great example. And as soon as you started to talk about the trail and six months, the first thing that came to mind was no escape. That's smart, though. That's smart because again, it's going to happen. And you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once those things come out, it's out there and there's. You feel that regret sometimes. And it's like, I can't undo that. Hopefully I can try to rebuild that relationship, but I cannot undo the damage that was done. And just recognizing that. And a lot of times in these conversations, you're going to be successful not so much because of the really cool, amazing things that you say, but because of the mistakes that you do not make. If you could just stay in the conversation long enough and be respectful long enough without being flagrantly disrespectful. Just that alone does wonders for these relationships too.

Yeah, absolutely.

And now when we were chatting, you brought up something that I thought was really great because we've talked about intercultural negotiations and cross cultural negotiations and cultural intelligence. And you said something, something explicitly that I think we've danced around, but nobody has explicitly said. And you said every interaction, emphasis on every. Every interaction is an intercultural interaction. Can you tell us what that means?

Yeah, and I think before I jump into answering that it's important to just talk about the way that we think about the word culture, because oftentimes people tend to think of what I refer to as like the big C cultures, where we think about nationalities, ethnicities and things like that. And we tend to forget what might be more like little sea cultures and the different ways in which all of the past experiences and our knowledge and all the things that we sort of bring to the table when we interact with folks. And so if you think about culture in that way, you think about how we have all these sort of different subcultures or little C cultures that influence our everyday interactions, then you could argue that every interaction is intercultural, cultural in some way. Right. We're bringing those things. A couple of examples that I like to Use in the classroom. One is baseball, right? And so I grew up in a baseball heavy family. I played softball for years. And if you really go to a baseball game, there's an entire subculture there, right? There's a language that you use that somebody who's never seen a baseball game would understand. When you talk about rally caps or the home stretch and things like that, folks that are not familiar with baseball aren't going to get that because it's a culture, right? There's a culture to baseball. Why you do the seventh inning stretch and all of these things. Another example, I guess, to go back to the hiking thing, there's this whole culture of folks that do ultralight hiking, and these are the folks that cut labels out of their shirts so that they weigh less. And that was not. I actually carried four books, so that was easy to say, not my style when it came to hiking the Appalachian Trail. At any given time, like I said, I had multiple books on me. And again, recognizing that, then my interactions with these folks would be different based on sort of my worldview or my perspective. And part of that is, in essence, cultural, right? It's the way that we engage with folks and interact in ways that reflect our backgrounds, our worldviews, our knowledge, our values, our beliefs. And we bring all of that to all of our interpersonal interactions.

I love that. It makes so much sense. Now, I want to paint this picture. Let's say we don't recognize that every interaction is an intercultural interaction. What are the risks? What are the dangers?

Well, I think that in not thinking about it in this way, we tend to get caught up in our own assumptions and our own viewpoints, and we don't look at things from other people's perspectives. And so it's often that, say we're in conflict with a friend or a roommate or a peer. We have our side of the story, right? And we have the way that we understand all of those events, whatever led to this conflict to have gone down. And if we're not thinking about why I feel a certain type of way about why, for example, the dishes need to be cleaned every night, then I'm not considering why somebody else thinks that they don't need to be cleaned every single night or something to that effect. And so if we can't understand our own sort of culture and why we feel the certain way that we do about certain things, we're definitely not going to be thinking about why, why or how other folks feel about it. And that just leads to, you know, miscommunication which is at the crux of so many problems in the cause of so much conflict.

Absolutely. And now maybe I'm. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this, Ashley.

Okay.

But based on the way that the. The T at the end of every night was, like, so sharp for you, it seemed like that was a. A trigger.

Oh, goodness. I wouldn't say necessarily that story. Exactly.

Okay. I was like, seems like we're hitting close to home here, Ashley.

Oh, goodness. Now you're trying to get me in trouble.

Exactly, exactly. No, this is good. This is really good. And you're so right, because again, we have these assumptions and we just think that the world should be this way. So imagine we grew up in a family where dishes were done every night, and then we lived on our own and dishes were done every night. And now, as somebody else has a different metric, and it's like, how have you lived this way? The whole. It's clear that it should be done this way. Right. And it can be really. I think some of my favorite conflicts to observe, not be in, are the ones where one person's idea of common sense runs counter to somebody else's idea of common sense. And then for the first time, they have to reconcile with the fact that it's just your way and my way, not right and wrong. How do we address that? I think that's fascinating, but very challenging.

Well, and I think, too, it goes back to communication. And in those moments, our tendency. And maybe this goes back to those cognitive resources, but our tendency is to then make assumptions to. About why. Right. And so we assume that, oh, well, you're just so lazy that that's why you think it's okay for them to stick around for a day or so. Right. And we make these assumptions without ever giving the other person the opportunity to share their side or their feelings about it or why they believe, you know, what it is that they believe. And so those assumptions, I mean, you know the adage, right? Like, assumptions are dangerous. And so, yes, it's just not really a great way to manage a relationship. If you're constantly making assumptions about why somebody believes or thinks the way that they do. And again, going like, if you're not then thinking about it through this lens, that there might just be different perspectives here or different cultures at work, then you're less likely to engage. You're more likely to assume. And that's where things start to fall apart, I think.

Agreed. And I think what's going to be frustrating for the listeners is they're going to Listen to this and it will make sense. They're going to say, yep, got it. This makes sense. I'm going to navigate the world more adeptly now. But then we run into people who aren't right. They haven't listened to this episode. Right. And so let's say we're having a conversation where we were recognizing that it's an intercultural issue, your way versus my way. It's a cultural thing and I'm recognizing some assumptions, but the other person doesn't have that high level recognition and they just keep on thinking that they're right and they're approaching it as if they're right. What advice do you have for our listeners for how to actually handle that conversation?

Yeah, and I think that's a really great question. For me. The thing that comes to mind is, is this idea that we don't really talk about how we talk or talk about our communication. We don't have sort of that meta communication where we actually have a conversation about how the conversation's going. And so it's okay to sort of acknowledge in that moment that the conversation is going in a direction that's not helpful, or you feel as though the person is not willing to see the humanity or your humanity in that moment. And so thinking about ways to actually acknowledge and talk about the way that you communicate, I don't think it sounds right. People are probably thinking, what is she talking about? But I'm talking about talking about the way that we talk. Right. And we don't do that. And so if you just keep pushing forward and you never take time to acknowledge that what isn't working, it's not fair, right? It's not fair to the person that you're communicating with because you're just mad at them for not figuring out something that's in your brain. And so if we can actually just talk about the way that we talk, I think it could be really helpful and powerful in those moments.

That is so profound. And the thing that I love about that is that if we were to watch two people having an interaction and then watch one of them do that, it would be a high level move. But I don't think it would be like, pretty. You know, I think if we were to think about like a Hollywood script, it wouldn't flow. And I think that's why most people would be reluctant to do it. But that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. And the reason I say that is because real negotiations are kind of sloppy, like human interactions in general. Are sloppy. There are a lot of times when we have these conversations and we try to go one way, the other person is going another way, and then we just pause and say, hey, hold on. This is what I'm seeing. It's almost like imagine. Let's use a little sports analogy. So imagine you're watching a game, but then the players are also the commentators. So it's like they call a timeout, and you're like, you see this play that's happening here. This is why this isn't working. I think it's so brilliant. And I think it takes a lot of humility to be willing to do that and just recognize, hey, the approach that I came into this conversation with, unfortunately, is not working right now. Here's what I'm seeing. Tell me what you're seeing. Let's talk through how we can continue this conversation more effectively, and then let us continue the conversation. Brilliant. I'm so glad you said that.

Yeah, wonderful.

Yeah. This is. This is strong. This is strong. And, you know, now that I think about it, Ashley, it's been years since we've talked about the meta negotiations, like, the conversation behind the conversation that should happen, but it rarely does. So I think this is a strong way to wrap this up. But I think before you go, I want you to leave the listeners with, like, one last piece of advice, because we covered a lot. We talked about humanizing the other side. We talked about intercultural communications. Now we're talking about the. The meta conversation. So when people listen to this and they're looking for, like, one simple place to start, what would that place be?

I would say it's okay to mess up. I think that so often we become caught up in getting it right and doing the right thing and saying the right thing and, you know, feeling the pressure to learn and really understand what are the best, best methods out there for this engagement and rec. Like, messing up is human, and it's going to happen, I can assure you of that. But that's where the greatest things come from, too, right? Nothing good comes from comfort zones, as I've been told. And so getting out of that comfort zone and recognizing that you're going to make mistakes and it's going to be okay, but it's how you sort of come back from them and the ways in which that you learn from them and sort of how you then apply what you learned going forward and just being really intentional about applying, you know, and showing up in those moments going forward.

I love it. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us really appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me.

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