Nipped into a weatherpersons and watched someone giving the waitress a hard time.
What can we do when someone is giving
us a verbal problem?
The best implementation of conflict management
I’ve ever witnessed was from my mum.
We grew up in guest houses and hotels in Blackpool
on a friday, we would get a coach load of holiday makers, often from Scotland travelling a long way and arriving miserable, tired and confrontational. .
When they started with the abuse, my mum would
so calmly say
“I appreciate that sir, can I get you a free drink and we’ll see how we can we best help you”.
This was a pattern interrupt she mastered intrinsically
to stop the conversation from spiralling downwards.
She was great at getting into their shoes as my dad was a grumpy traveller and she knew how to manage him as well.
A drink, meal and a rest in a’comfortable bed’
The guests in the hotel were always right as rain after breakfast the next day.
Mum had goto phrases and interrupt patterns, some of them she used were along these lines:
‘I appreciate that’
‘I’m sorry to hear that’
‘I understand that’
Pattern interrupts and good questions give you a chance of escaping or resolving a problem in a way that works for both parties.
Mum could sit in the eye of the storm and maintain calm, passing this forward.
You do need a cool head too to make this work and mum had a lot of practise at this.
But My mum did have a boundary.
When guests completely overstepped my mums boundary, she had a different set of words and interrupts for these special circumstances too 🙂