Whether you're hammering out the details of a multimillion dollar business deal, allocating responsibilities among your project team, or just haggling over where to order takeout, you're negotiating. And the better you do it, the more likely you'll be happy with the outcome.
When conflict is mismanaged, it can cause great harm to a relationship, but when handled in a respectful, positive way, conflict provides an opportunity to
strengthen the bond between two people.
Conflict wreaks havoc on our brains. We are groomed by evolution to protect ourselves whenever we sense a threat. In our modern context, we don’t fight like a badger with a coyote, or run away like a rabbit from a fox. But our basic impulse to protect ourselves is automatic and unconscious.
Many conflict situations could be resolved more successfully than we might think at first glance. One big problem is that conflict participants often lose control of themselves and retreat into self-reinforcing, and self-defeating, patterns of attack and counterattack.
