Princess Stories of Conflict: Rescuing Yourself

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Kathy Jourdain

In the last Shape Shift post, the Princess story framework was shared, showing how it is a beautiful way of resolving conflict, inviting you to examine the way you see the conflict – your worldview – and the way others see the conflict – or their worldview perspective.

In conflict, as you tell your story from the Princess perspective, very often you are waiting for a Prince to come along and rescue you from the Dragon or whatever your dilemma might be. You want someone else to solve your problem for you.

The Prince you are waiting for could be a third person. It could be a boss who you want to solve a problem with a coworker. The boss could also be the Dragon and you want another job or someone higher in the organization to provide the rescue. Or maybe you are waiting for a friend or family member to play the role of the Prince.

Alternatively, you could be waiting for the Dragon to turn into the Prince and thus provide the rescue. When you want the Dragon to be the rescuer what you really want is for the Dragon to admit that they were wrong, you are right and offer you an apology vindicating your Princess perspective. Usually you have to wait a long time for this to happen, and it rarely ever does.

It doesn’t often occur to you that perhaps you are the one who might be wrong – or may not be right. Even if you are right, that doesn’t necessarily make the Dragon wrong. Or, perhaps it is you who needs to offer the apology. Remember in the Dragon’s perspective of this same conflict, they are the Princess and you are the Dragon.

Ultimately, what is helpful is to transform into the Prince and rescue yourself. Why? In doing so, you reclaim the power that you traded for sympathy and make yourself stronger. As you recognize all three roles within you, you come closer to wholeness within yourself. The things you are looking for to make yourself complete are never found outside of yourself, they are always found within.

In the same way, your rescue cannot come from outside of yourself. If it does it is only temporary. In order to be truly effective, it must come from within. If it comes from external sources, the problems which precipitated the need to be rescued will only come back around in the same way or in some other variation and everyone one of us has had experiences which speak to this.

In order to transform yourself into the Prince, the first step is often giving up the need to be right. When you have the need to be right and you want other people to validate that for you, you are entrenched in your position or your own point of view or worldview. It is very difficult to acknowledge there may be other perspectives that are just as valid as your own. Giving up the need to be right doesn’t mean you aren’t right and it also doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person is right. But giving up the need to be right opens up space and opportunity to expand the story.

The need to be right does not stem from factual truth, it stems from emotional truth. It is the emotional truth that drives the conflict, not the factual truth. The way you act reflects this kind of thinking: “I feel that you hurt me in some way and I want you to apologize for that hurt. If you don’t apologize, I will show you what it feels like by acting in a way that will create the same hurt in you. Once you know what it feels like, then for sure you will apologize to me.”

This strategy rarely ever works because so much of what it tries to do is implicit not explicit. “I want an apology but I will not ask for it or explain why I want it – because you should already know that.” Trouble is, that other person cannot read your mind, as much as you may think they should be able to. And often, they are too busy reacting to your reaction to decipher what your encoded message means. Thus, the conflict escalates.

Stepping out of the need to be right, even if you do so begrudgingly, is a very effective way to de-escalate the conflict. As you acknowledge what you may have contributed to the conflict, very often the other person will also begin to acknowledge their own role.

It is really easy to get people to agree to the idea that they would prefer their relationship or their interactions to be different and better – preferably if the other person changes! As much as you may think differently, that Dragon has no more interest in perpetuating the stress and anxiety that goes along with the conflict than you do. As you take charge of the situation and take the initial steps to a new form of relationship, you begin the process of transforming into the Prince.

You can do this from any perspective. Earlier in this article, the scenario of the Dragon being your boss was posed. For many people this seems like an impossible situation because the boss is the boss and if they engage in conflict with their boss, they fear losing their jobs. I recently had a client in this very situation.

My client and his managers were meeting with my client’s boss. The boss royally dressed down these department managers for a good hour, deflating and demoralizing everyone. My client felt just as demoralized as his managers and he felt helpless to respond. After a few days and a lot of thought, my client asked for a meeting with his boss to discuss that situation.

He told his boss that the points the boss had made were valid points and that steps needed to be taken to rectify the situation. He also told his boss that his approach had been totally demoralizing and had the exact opposite effect – de-motivating staff to want to rectify the situation. Much to his surprise, his boss apologized to him. Then he asked if my client would like him to meet with his staff to apologize to them – which he did.

Later we evaluated what happened in the original meeting. I asked my client how he could have handled that situation differently. He said that he could have stopped his boss, asked his own managers to leave and then had the conversation with his boss one-on-one, later bringing the staff back in after some appropriate course of action had been decided. His original response was the best he could do at the time given the unexpectedness of the situation and his own reaction to it. The point in evaluating it is to build a repertoire of alternative responses to possible future scenarios so that there are choices more readily available.

My client could have stayed in his Princess story of what a terrible boss he has. And certainly there is room for improvement in the boss’ management skills. However, his boss’ behaviour is largely out of my client’s control. When he began to focus on what was in his control he effected a change in his boss’ behaviour that he couldn’t have imagined. The first thing he did was acknowledge what was valid in his boss’ message. It turned the tide and created movement that enabled a resolution to be reached.

And remember that conflict is not always overt. That is largely the problem with it. We try to avoid it and yet we stay stuck in our Princess stories. Whenever you find yourself thinking that someone else needs to change or do or say something you are in a Princess story and you are held hostage by it. By thinking of the story from the Dragon’s perspective, or of what you contributed to it or of what is within your control to change, you begin the transformation process. The only true way to resolve conflict is to transform yourself. That White Knight in Shining Armour really is you! Loving how fairy tales are reinventing themselves.

Princess Stories – A Key to Conflict Resolution

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Kathy Jourdain

When we are engaged in conflict with someone else, it is often difficult to step out of it to gain perspective. It is hard to pinpoint the exact problem, usually because we are absolutely convinced the problem is the other person, although we may begrudgingly admit that we might be contributing to the problem.

The answers to conflict resolution can be pretty easy. Opening up to them is the hard part. They are contained in the stories we tell. If we can allow ourselves to listen to our own stories with a more discerning ear, we may be able to penetrate to the heart of the conflict more easily.

Ken Cloke and Joan Goldsmith, in their book Resolving Personal and Organizational Conflict, present a framework I find useful and powerful in explaining the underlying dynamics of conflict and my clients find it engaging. It is a way to explore worldview and experience the transformative power of worldview awareness. It is based on the notion that we tell stories in a certain way when we are in conflict. The framework looks like this:

Princess Story Triangle

If you think of fairy tales of old ( since the very nature of our fairytale storytelling is now, thankfully, changing), there is usually a Princess or damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by the Prince from the Dragon, wicked step-mother or other perpetrator. The Princess is pure and beautiful and always the victim of circumstance or of the jealous or evil intentions of someone who has some kind of influence or power over her life. She never rescues herself. The dragon is evil and hateful and has it out for the Princess. The Prince is handsome and gallant and always arrives to rectify the situation. (It is important to remember these are archetypal roles that we all assume so even though the Princess is referred to as “she” it could just as easily and often be a “he” in the role.)

We often tell our conflict stories from the perspective of the Princess. In our stories about conflict we have with another person we are the victim. Somebody has done something to us. Whatever we perceive they have done, we use to justify our own actions or behaviour in the conflict especially when we find ourselves “acting out of character”. When we act out of reaction, anger, frustration, we don’t feel good about ourselves or how we treated someone else. If we can rationalize that we have been provoked into our reaction, that at least offers an explanation for our own behaviour that we can live with, that supports our worldview. We become identified with our position and are unwilling to acknowledge what we may have done to contribute to the situation. The less heard we feel, the more entrenched we become in our position. Our attempts to resolve the conflict feel like giving in.

We want other people to understand our reaction in light of the provocation so we paint the person we are in conflict with as the “dragon”. Then, it’s as if we had no choice because the dragon forced us into it. While we see ourselves as “acting out of character” we see the dragon in our story as very much acting within character for them, more so if the conflict has gone on for awhile or is particularly entrenched.

One of the reasons we tell our conflict stories to others is that we are looking for our knight in shining armour to come along and rescue us. Sometimes the rescue is simply in being validated or acknowledged for our own actions. “The dragon did such a terrible thing, no wonder you reacted the way you did.” Other times we are looking for someone to do something for us, to intervene or to make the dragon disappear.

In promoting our princess stories to whoever will listen, we are looking for sympathy. If we don’t get it, we go deeper into our story, give more detail, repeat ourselves. The repetition makes the story more and more real and we become more entwined with it. We drive ourselves deeper into the princess role because surely that will generate the sympathy we think we need. In exchange for the sympathy we seek, we trade in whatever power we may have to rectify our situation. In the victim role, we are helpless to defend ourselves, change our situation or learn from the conflict.

When we finally realize that the knight in shining armour is us, we stop looking for the prince. When we recognize that the dragon may not be purely evil but also “acting out of character”, we can begin to relinquish the princess role and truly learn from our plight. One key to doing this is to tell our story from the perspective of our dragon, to become curious about how they are seeing the world. The dragon in our story has their own version, their own worldview, of the conflict story. What are the odds that they actually paint themselves as the dragon? About the same as us painting ourselves as the dragon in our own story. Although sometimes that dragon is an internal dragon.

As we tell the story from their perspective, we put ourselves in their shoes. It enables us to see them in a new light. Maybe they were reacting to something we said or did. Perhaps they feel just as helpless in the escalation of this conflict as we feel. Maybe new awareness of their challenges and difficulties come to light that help us soften our own story, make us more curious and more generous, expanding the space for generative conversation to emerge.

Another benefit of telling the story from the perspective of the dragon is that it just might enable us to admit the pieces of our own princess story that we have omitted – the pieces that might have contributed to the dragon’s response, behaviour or actions. If we let down our guard only momentarily, instead of signaling to the dragon an opportunity to attack as we fear it will, it just might signal an opening to disarm the conflict.

In order to do this, we must give up our need to be right and open ourselves up to alternative explanations, stories, scenarios or worldviews. It is possible to have more than one right answer although when we feel absolutely that we are right it is a challenge to believe this.

Our princess story contains our truth. It is not always factual truth but it is emotional truth. It also contains omissions. The dragon’s story contains truth and omissions too. It is in bringing the truths and the omissions together that an alternative story emerges, one that often contains the framework or foundation for resolution in an expanded truth.

The stories we tell ourselves shape our experience. What conflict could you shift the shape of if you found a different way to tell the story, if you become curious about the situation, your reaction, the other person, if you became more gracious and generous in responding to them – even if it is a stretch as you begin. Some stretches end up being worth it.

Not Enough Time

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Kathy Jourdain

Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? – Mary Oliver

Not enough time in the day. Not enough time to get everything done. Not enough time to begin a project, to have a conversation. Not enough time with a loved one. Not enough time. Not enough.

I am certain that in a world that seems to move at an ever increasing pace, almost every one of us has, at some point, uttered the wish for more hours in a day. Because of the pressure of to-do lists that never get completed, have you ever jammed more than is humanly possible into a day or tried to eliminate sleeping hours from your schedule? Has your feeling of not enough time, not getting things done ever been turned into a story of you not being enough?

Time. It is relative. When my older sons were little I remember one of them saying to me after I probably said, “Just a minute”, “Mom, minutes are long.” Minutes are long. They are short too. The day I stood on the mountainside in Gold Lake, Colorado in 2009, minutes were timeless, time out of time. Minutes can be 60 seconds and it can be a turn of a phrase where we have not assigned it a finite meaning of time.

Have you noticed that jamming the day full to the brim of all those endless to-do’s doesn’t seem to solve the problem? Often it exacerbates it because time to refresh and renew is not scheduled in, leaving less opportunity for intentionality – intentionality in the stories you tell yourself and intentionality in your actions – so your stories count, your actions count, your passion is tapped into and surfaced so you feel yourself more alive in any of those precious moments.

What to do? There are many things to do to address the feeling that there is not enough time. Here are seven offerings on how to MAKE IT COUNT.

1. Tell yourself a better story – even if, as you begin it it doesn’t feel true – because neither is the story you have defaulted into. Tell the story that supports how you want to be, how you want to show up, how you want to feel about time available to you and about your life, your path, your journey. Tell a story that makes these things count.

2. Who are the people you value – in life and work? Significant other? Children? Parents? Friends? Colleagues? Work partners? Others you work with or for? Schedule them in. Make the time for visits, phone calls, checking in. Otherwise, opportunities are missed and one day we may come to regret it.

3. Know your own priorities and dedicate time to work on them without distractions. One distraction is the priorities that others land on you. Do they need to become your priorities or can they be handled in a different way or at a different time? Surprise yourself. Ask the question.

4. Say no. Not arbitrarily but with intention. It makes your yes more powerful and you can be more committed to your yeses when you know you have not taken on things that don’t fit with your passion, your goals, your context, because you thought you should, because you felt obligated, because you were asked. Things that end up being done half heartedly because your heart wasn’t in it.

5. Turn off email. Yes. It is possible. It can be done. Pick a time or two of day when you will respond and be disciplined about it. Do you have your social media linked to your email that keeps distracting you back to social media? Turn it off. You can visit social media whenever you want, and you can schedule it. You really won’t miss that much.

6. Do you know what renews you? Exercise. Quiet. Music. Meditation. Walking. Sleep. You name it. Go do it! Schedule it in. You will be able to tackle that to-do list with more energy and move through it faster.

7. Need a half day for a project but can’t find it. What are you doing with those 5, 10, 15 minute slots of time that show up between calls, before lunch, before heading out to a meeting? What if you opened a document? Formatted a proposal? Captured a few thoughts? Read a few pages in a book that inspires you? You might be surprised how those brief intervals of time can add up to meaningful segments when you approach them with more intentionality and the same spontaneity you bring to surfing the web or other distractions that come your way.

Distractions are not all bad. But time is a precious commodity. Doesn’t mean every minute has to be filled with doing. It’s better if some of it is filled with being, renewing, remembering. There are enough hours in the day, in the week. Make them count.

The Importance of Resilience and How to Cultivate It – 10 Principles Overview

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Kathy Jourdain

A favourite keynote of mine (and larger body of work too) is on resilience – why it’s important and how to cultivate greater resiliency. When I went looking for a formula or guide for resilience, I didn’t find any that spoke to me about my experience and the experience of my clients with resilience. Inquiring into what I was learning about resilience through my own experiences of shifting the shape of my life and through that of my resilient clients shifting the shape of their culture, team or organization, generated a definition and 10 lovely principles of resilience.

Resilience is the ability to find the inner strength to bounce back from a set back or challenge, to recover quickly from illness, change or misfortune and it is your sense of knowing that you have the resources and abilities to handle anything that comes your way. For many of us, this does not come easy. It comes with having survived and navigated many different curves in the road – some when we imagined we must have been through enough already.

Ten principles for cultivating resilience are listed below and each of these will become a little post on its own that you can look for over the next few weeks.

Principles of resilience:

1. Inquire into what works, especially what works for you – since we all have good stories about when we have rebounded or recovered from a set back. When you know what has worked for you and why, it helps you generate more and more of what works – principles from Appreciative Inquiry.

2. Notice your self talk – don’t believe everything you think. Your mind is a powerful tool and it often seems to have a mind of its own. Not really. You can program it. You can wrest back control and use it for your advantage rather than be at the whimsy of unintentional thoughts or stories.

3. Networks of support. We all have people who are our champions and biggest fans, who will catch us when we fall. Of course, you have to let them and that often means you also have to let them in. Those walls you’ve created are meant to keep others out but what they really do is keep you in or insulated and, in the long run, that doesn’t work.

4. Be present. Lao Tzu offers this: if you are depressed you are living in the past; if you are anxious you are living in the future; if you are at peace, you are living in the present. It takes some conscious effort to keep yourself present in the moment and too often we allow ourselves, our minds, to wander to the past or the future. You will know where you let your mind go by how you feel.

5. Lean in – be aware of and still the voice of your inner judge. Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution. The easiest way to escape from a problem is to solve it. Counter intuitive perhaps but true.

6. The Miracle of Story. You are always, always expressing yourself in story in one way or another. Usually you – most of us – are unintentional about how you do that. I love Charles Eisenstein’s reflection on story and miracles: “We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.”

7. Intention. Develop clarity of intention, then let go of attachment to it. Hold it with lightness and see what shows up. Know it is an iterative process – you don’t just do this just once. Sorry. Or not. Depending on what’s showing up in the iterative process for you.

8. Act. Take steps. Look for openings, invitations and ease and also examine your limiting beliefs.

9. Life Throws Curve Balls. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out. Everything is running smoothly and life begs to differ. As you welcome it all in, you sit with it in a different way. A more accepting way. Then those curve balls lose their power to completely throw you off course.

10. Nourish Yourself. In the Art of Hosting world, we often call this hosting self – the first of the four fold practices. Embrace it all.

Gossip – Harmful or Helpful?

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Kathy Jourdain

The stories we tell shape our experiences as much and more than the experiences themselves. For anything we experience, there are a myriad of ways the story of it can be told. How the story is told illuminates a lot about us as individuals and about the culture of the organizations we work for. Many of the stories told are not done so with thoughtfulness or intentionality and this makes them very revealing for anyone paying attention and even for people not so tuned in. You want to know about a culture of an organization, pay attention to the stories told by those who work there and interact with them.

Recently I’ve been working with an organization that is struggling with morale, trust and relationships, sparked by many challenges the organization has experienced over the last few years. The topic of gossip is a central theme and it has us all curious. It is not the first time I have come across this in teams or organizations that are challenged or even labeled as dysfunctional.

There are many questions and assumptions in this group that are not unique to it. How do you know when it’s gossip? Is all gossip bad? How do we share information? How is gossip different than information sharing? It’s how we decompress. We deal with such pressing issues, it’s only natural we would gossip.

It is not “only natural” that we would gossip. There are lots of choices around how to share information and even whether to share. Gossip is a form of information sharing that goes beyond the facts and beyond the attempt to understand someone or something. It has an edge. It is often malicious. It has the potential to impact other’s reputations in destructive ways. Generally when gossip is a pattern in an organization or team individuals know they are just as likely to be gossiped about next as the current focus of the gossip. And, they do it anyway.

Gossip is one way of creating alliances. These alliances are often formed to keep others out or to target individuals in pejorative and harmful ways. It shows up in win/lose cultures and is way of trying to win – at all costs.

It is mobile as things do not remain confidential but spread rapidly. When gossip is rampant it often has truth, half truth and complete untruth in it and it is hard to distinguish which is which. It focuses on private and personal affairs, attributes, assumptions and insinuations about others. There is an energy to gossip which feels conspiratorial, sucks people in but also leaves people feeling bad about themselves – sometimes without knowing why. Sometimes it traverses into bullying.

In the organization I was working with recently, some wondered why I would focus on gossip when the pressing issues were clearly laid out in a mind map of patterns and themes distilled from employee responses to a survey. Some named leadership and accountability as the two most significant issues. I agreed. I also named gossip, role clarity, boundaries as a few others and I kept coming back to gossip, much to the disbelief of some. Patterns of gossip are also about control and power. This comes out of the formation of alliances, being able to shut people down and pushing agendas that are of interest to a few but maybe not unilaterally to everyone. If we can shift the pattern of gossip in an organization, it becomes possible to shift other patterns as well. Gossip detracts us from what more is possible. It is energy and time consuming.

As we wrapped up our day I asked two questions for the closing circle: what is your commitment to changing the conversation here and what is the intentional story you want others to know about this organization?

Some of the comments about gossip were particularly illuminating.

“I gossip when I am afraid to go to someone directly.”

“I know it’s gossip when I am eager to contribute something to the conversation.”

“I gossip when I don’t think I am as good as someone else.”

“I feel awful when I gossip. It’s yucky. I will not do it anymore.”

“I do not like the person I am when I gossip and I do not want to end my career at this organization in this way.”

A lack of respect for others, is a lack of respect for self. Our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. What we say about others says far more about us than about them.

We stop gossip when we decide to stop participating in it. When we become curious instead of playing in the judgment which characterizes so much gossip. When we become compassionate about the situation and the people involved. When we refuse to send gossip on. When we hold ourselves accountable to stop and when we hold others accountable by refusing to gossip with them, when we invite them into an inquiry about what is the purpose of the information they are sharing and are they inviting a conversation about how to strategize having conversations that matter with the people involved instead of about them.

When we stop filling the space between us with gossip we have the opportunity to fill that space with generosity, curiosity and compassion, with conversations that are meaningful and relevant and to focus on successes and the things we appreciate about each other and what we do. When we cultivate this kind of foundation, we create the base from which to have the conversations we’ve been avoiding through gossip – conversations about leadership, accountability and the deep purpose of the work we are in.

Gossip is only helpful in seeing culture and identifying challenges. It is not conducive to healthy workplaces or healthy relationships. When we replace gossip with intentional, appreciative conversations, we begin to create the conditions for more of what is possible, more of how we can serve the needs we have identified and a bonus is that we feel better about who we are and what we do. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the best of ways.

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