Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Criticism activates the same neural circuits as physical pain, and understanding that mechanism is what lets you actually use feedback instead of just defending against it.
motivated reasoning
When a colleague argues hard against a well-supported idea, the real obstacle is usually emotional, not logical, and understanding what they're protecting matters more than winning the debate.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
When a colleague's bluntness feels threatening, the real work isn't changing them but understanding why your nervous system is treating direct feedback as a personal attack.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
When managers make unpopular calls, tribal bonding and amygdala threat responses make group indignation feel like safety, but often at the cost of clear thinking.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Most workplace apologies fail because they're designed to relieve the apologizer's discomfort rather than update the other person's mental model, and people can feel that difference even when they can't articulate it.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
The words that hurt us only land because they've found something inside us that already matters — and that pain is pointing somewhere worth looking.
conflict theory
Most workplace conflict isn't really about the other person; it's about the brain's hardwired tendency to divide the world into "me versus them," and learning to see through that illusion is what makes collaboration actually work.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
A Buddhist framework of three simple questions — is it true, is it necessary, is it kind? — can transform workplace communication from reflexive and damaging to honest, clear, and actually useful.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
The Matrix's most misunderstood line isn't about speed; it's about what happens when you've done enough inner work that other people's words simply lose their power to trigger you.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Process disagreements that never resolve are usually proxy battles over deeper conflicts about values, status, or purpose — and the fix is surfacing what each side is actually trying to protect.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Your brain treats challenges to deeply held beliefs as existential threats, which is why rational argument almost never resolves deep conflict.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Conflict isn't a disagreement about facts; it's two people running incompatible predictive models, where feelings are the output of that prediction process, not the cause of the conflict.