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Don’t give up your power when dealing with conflict

Type: news

Over my many years of doing conflict resolution and collaboration work, it has become very clear to me that we have a serious problem with power. People involved in conflict often describe themselves as powerless. Or they ask questions such as “How do you negotiate with people who have more power than you?” or “What do I do if they have all of the power?” Or they wonder how parties can collaborate when there are serious power imbalances.

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Barista, bartender, bar: 3L Anthony Tenney’s journey to law school

Type: news

3L Anthony Tenney initially planned on the life of an academic after pursuing a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Ohio State University. However, after working in the service industry for several years as a barista and bartender and then losing his job due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he began thinking of alternative ways to influence his community.

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Commitment: A core conflict competency

Type: news

Over the past year, I have published a series of blogs exploring the key skills that are necessary for making conflict productive, or what I call the core “conflict competencies.” Prior blogs have explored the conflict competencies of calm, curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage, and communication. In this blog, I want to explore one final core conflict competency: commitment.

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Communication: A core conflict competency

Type: news

In 2023, I wrote a series of blogs exploring key conflict competencies. There are two competencies I identified in that blog that I have yet to fully describe: communication and commitment. In this blog, I am going to discuss communication. In my next blog, I’ll dive into commitment.

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Destructive conflict tendencies vs. productive conflict choices

Type: news

In my last blog, I described what conflict competence is and summarized the key conflict competencies that empower us to deal with conflict skillfully and productively. In this blog, I build on those ideas to explore the choices we make when dealing with conflict and the way in which different choices lead to very different outcomes.

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