Leading Through Conflict Without Escalation

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Leading Through Conflict Without Escalation

Lauren returns to share how nervous system regulation, clear boundaries, and repair can prevent conflict from escalating.

After taking a week off to tend to personal matters, Lauren returns to the series on leading under pressure with a focus on navigating conflict without escalation. She reframes conflict as a nervous system event rather than simply a communication issue, explaining how stress activates threat responses around control, safety, and belonging. When leaders become dysregulated, they lose access to clarity and often default to avoidance, control, or appeasement.

She also explores what it looks like to stay grounded in tense moments through steady tone, clear boundaries, defined next steps, and meaningful repair when needed. Conflict is inevitable, but escalation is not when leaders choose regulation over urgency.

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Transcript:

Lauren Spigelmyer:

Missed y'all last week. A little bit of a personal life crisis, and… didn't record an episode. It felt weird. Feels weird. But it's good to be back in the hot seat with… with myself. But, we're going back to this series that we've been on, where we're talking about leading under pressure. Oh, I just… this series excites me because…It doesn't really matter which field you're in. If you're leading anyone in that field, even if you're leading in your home, this applies. But… How do we…get and stay regulated as someone who is a leader in whatever space we are in to be able to make better decisions in these high-stress roles. I mean, this is like a stay-at-home mom. How do you stay regulated and make better decisions when your life is stressful? I think people sometimes think that being a stay-at-home mom is not stressful. It's a lot. It's a lot to carry. Kids all day, all the responsibilities of the household, just managing everyone, managing everything, and you don't get to really go home after work. You get to keep on doing your job all day, night long, all week long. No weekends off. But… This specific episode is going to focus on How do we lead through conflict, when things start to escalate a little bit. The biggest thing is, I don't personally feel like conflict is a bad thing. I think it can be poorly handled, but it certainly isn't a sign of failure. It's… A moment… that we can either determine to make one type of meaning out of, or the other type of meaning, but ultimately what's happening between the people, or the person, or whoever the conflict is happening between. It's… it's an event of the nervous system.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, I'm gonna talk about why… Conflict typically escalates under stress and how, when we focus on coming from a regulated place as a leader, we can stay present. And that means we don't avoid the conflict, which isn't good either. We're not just falling into, like, appeasement, and we're not also moving from a more, like, masculine… forceful, controlling-based stance either. We want to land in a happy medium. So, we'll talk about how do we de-escalate the tension while… keeping the trust, getting to a point of clarity, next steps, and also maintaining your authority without being disrespectful. Note that… conflict is… I think people think that conflict is, like, miscommunications, or maybe not even miscommunications, but just, like, communication problem. And communication can maybe solve the problem, but as I shared earlier, it's really, like, a moment and an event inside of your body with a nervous system. Tension starts to arise. The body… says, on a subconscious level, or maybe conscious, too, alert, alert, your heart rate shifts, your breathing might be a little bit more rapid, your perception starts to narrow, defensiveness might come into play. In that moment, The people that you were sitting with, the leadership you are working with, even if that's them, and not you, or it's you and not them. Their presence will either… Escalate that threat-based feeling, or help to down-regulate it. And either way, like, their responsibility as a leader is to downregulate it. And if they can't and don't therein lies the problem. I really feel like… when we interview leaders, we talk about, like, conflict management as a strategy, or a tool or a skill. More important than that, I really believe regulation of the nervous system is about the core. If you can't regulate yourself, you can't regulate your nervous system. And that's just not, like, only staying calm. You don't have access to your logical, rational brain, so no matter how good your skills are, you don't have access to them if you cannot get your nervous system regulated.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, why does conflict dysregulate leaders? Well, as I just shared, it activates your threat detection. It activates, like, your threat response. Whether you want it to or not, it does. Someone's or something is challenging you, and maybe in a healthy way, but… hat's happening. Disagreement is gonna trigger… the same neural pathways as, like, a physical threat to you. A psychological threat, a work-based threat, they're all activating the same things. The brain is gonna immediately scan for a couple things. How much control did I just lose? Loss of my status. Does this affect my sense of belonging? Because belonging at my core is one of my greatest, deepest needs as a human being. Is there a loss of safety? Even psychological? And whether or not you're aware of those things, like, your brain is kind of running through the rolodex of, like, status, control, safety, belonging. And that already starts to dysregulate. And that already reduces your mental capacity to be present. So, for leaders, Conflict feels especially threatening, because your identity as a leader, again, whatever space you're in, even if it's a home space, it's tied to how competent you are. And if you're getting dysregulated, or you can't get out of dysregulation, and the conflict continues to increase, it feels like incompetence. When that happens, and someone loses their cool, or is starting to lose their cool, not to say that you can't ever do that, because we're human beings, but if you're doing that pretty regularly, it's a pattern, your authority starts to get questioned. And the outcomes of that alone negatively impact others. And the whole organization, and its culture, or at least your sub-team. If there is a subteam. There is this pressure… From the organizational hole, up, down, around, below, beneath, above, to… to handle conflict well. And rightly so. You have been entrusted in a position of leadership to oversee human beings of whatever sort, even if they're children and the expectation is that you will always handle it well. And are we always going to handle it well? No. So that's why we have repair work, but more times than not, we definitely do want to handle it well.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, here's what really impacts that. One of the greatest indicators of how someone will handle conflict is their past experiences. A lot of their childhood will impact how well they have been modeled in the family system as a child, in their home, how to move through conflict, how their parents moved through conflict. It can be altered and changed, you can learn conflict management, but there are some subconscious patterns built in there that come from your past experiences, especially your childhood. So, that's a big part of it, your childhood dynamics, and if you haven't gone to therapy and worked on some of those things, they're definitely playing a part in your present… present life. And then this… all, this can apply to relationships, too. You have conflict in relationships, so this can be, like… and some people are gonna probably be offended by my saying this, but, like. Oh, I don't want to go into anything, like, religious or political here. I always try and stay the middle ground! No one judge me, but I, personally, based on my faith-based background, and based on the type of dynamic that I want in my own personal relationship, and this may not be the case for others, and I accept everyone as they are. I want a man to lead my home, but that man has to be a healthy masculine protector who is not domineering and, like, authoritarian overrule. That said. I have no idea where I was going with that. Something with Childhood Dynamics, but I don't remember what it was. Anyhow, irrelevant. Moving on. It wasn't relevant, but it is now. So… We are responding to conflict, it'll come back to me, in the way that our childhood has shaped us. What did it look like in our home? And if you come from a home of mother and father, it could be, like, how did the head of the home, the father, potentially, if the father was the head of the home, and that, in my case, that wasn't the case. I was raised by a single mom, she was the head of the home, so there actually wasn't as much conflict, because there wasn't anyone to have conflict with. But… Even how she managed stress, like, external conflict impacted how I show up today as a leader. Then as you grow up, and you begin to work in your teens, tweens, well, probably teens and 20s, and then beyond, your workplace conflict models impact how you function today, especially any, like, poor examples of them. Some of us have learned from our poor examples, we're like, I don't want to be like that. Some of us say that and then don't change our internal workings, but… it does shape how we show up today, and… just… you know, from childhood into adult workplace, even your experiences of being… overlooked, overshadowed, undermined, all those things impact how you manage and handle conflict today. Even times where, and this is probably more family system based, but also in the workplace too, like times where you were blamed or shamed, and often inappropriately. Shame is a big driver for a lot of personality disorders. Like, we're seeing more and more narcissistic personality disorders, probably undiagnosed, but, like, we're seeing the behavioral patterns of people in those dynamics more often. A lot of that has to do with childhood dynamics and shaming and blaming children and not attuning to their needs as young children, and I think there's more and more of that, less attunement to children, because the work is… the work and the world both are so stressful and so chaotic, and we're not able to attune to children like we used to be. Okay, I digress. I'm getting off… I'm getting off track.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so, ultimately, why… why are some of these dynamics in play today? Like, even if we don't want to be like our childhood, or we don't want to be like our past experiences, or we don't want to be like our history, the truth of the matter is, there's a book by Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the Score. The body remembers a lot faster than your mind can process. So, whether you cognitively or logically are like, I don't want to be like that. Your body kind of defaults to what it was like, unless we can override that with, you know, therapeutic work, or self-development work, or whatever it may be. So, you typically have, kind of, like, avoidance-based conflict, Control-based conflict,these are responses, or appeasement. And these, these responses are like stress responses. So what type of person are you? More avoidant? Are you more control-based? Are you more appeasement-based? And there can be healthy responses, too. Those are kind of… we're unhealthy on the scale, but… Avoidance is… something I really resonated with for a long time, and it's just kind of like, let's just not make a big deal out of it. Like, I just don't want to sit in conflict, I want to be happy, I'm a pretty, like, light-based person, very optimistic. But that can turn to an unhealthy… response. If you are control, and I've experienced this on the other end of relationships and experiences, where people are over-directing, over-explaining, micromanaging, and again, these aren't all, like, conscious choices. A lot of them are unconscious patterns. Appeasement, you're over-apologizing, you are softening, if not, like, have no boundaries, because you'd rather just keep the peace. So, appeasement can probably be confused with avoidance a little bit, and some of these can overlap, for sure. But the biggest thing I want you to hear from me is that… these are not personality flaws. Like, our stress responses are in place because they were ways that we had to cope to get through stressful moments. That's human. That's… that's okay. We can have grace for ourselves for that. We can have grace, but also move into growth. So… these things were designed to protect us and restore safety. Even if they were unhealthy, they did that. And the more that they did that, and the more that we did that, the more they became patterns. And that's where it gets a little bit hard to break.

Laurem Spigelmyer: So… Let's move into the… this idea of, okay, well, okay, how is the best place to… or the best way to respond to conflict? One of the biggest things, I… I think that's an issue is this myth of, like, staying calm is the answer. Staying calm is the goal. Calm can feel really dismissive. I mean, even, I think, the perception is… leaders… tell themselves. that… even if I don't handle this well, but I stay calm, it will de-escalate. Not necessarily. You can stay calm and handle it really poorly, and people get really frustrated because it's not resolved well. You need calm, and when I say calm, I would say even more so, like, you need to regulate, yes, down-regulate, but in addition to down-regulating, you also need clear expectations. You need really firm boundaries, and you need very clearly defined next steps. And if those next steps feel too big for the situation, like, breaking them down into micro steps within the steps. If you don't have those three things alongside your regulation and you just stay calm, it might feel like…indifference, emotional withdrawal, disassociation, like, they don't care. You know, how people interpret that is different based on their own histories, but that's definitely not the message that we want to send. What we need alongside those three things is regulation in the form of, like, what's your emotional tone? What's your pacing like? For example, I know I get dysregulated or I am dysregulated, when I start to talk really fast. I can be excited dysregulated, but I'm still dysregulated. So, pacing really matters. Tonight, I can feel like I'm a little bit slower, I'm a little bit tired, more tired. If you go back and you listen to some of my episodes, I definitely talk a little bit faster. I'm an East Coaster, living on the West Coast but, on the days when I have more of a load that I'm carrying, and I'm recording, you can hear it in my voice, you can hear it in my tone, you can hear it in, like, my mixed thoughts. So, regulation needs tone and pacing, it needs clarity, like, clearly defined next steps, it needs the ability to be present and to co-regulate. So, it means, probably intentionally, this is a hard one for me, slowing your speech.

Lauren Spigelmyer: This next one's also a hard one for me. Intentional pauses. They're hard. It's… you have to be intentional, you have to be regulated to do those things. If you're dysregulated, you're not thinking about your speech, you're not thinking about your pausing. You also need, like, really direct, almost blunt statements, but statements that are… that are grounded. Like, you don't want to be ignorant, you don't want to be rude. But you do want to be clear, because clear is kind. And then you also need a clear structure for moving forward. I don't consider any of this… passive, I consider it extremely regulated, grounded, anchored, even. Like, I am here, I am in this anchored position, I am slowing down, I am pausing, I am staying regulated, and we are going through what are the expectations, what are the firm boundaries, and what are the defined next steps. If you don't come out of your conflict issues with those 3 things done, you have not resolved the conflict. Okay, so before you even go into the situation, or maybe you're dropped into it immediately, quickly what we want to do to help down-regulate ourselves, and then the collective whole, or whoever we're dealing with, you're gonna immediately notice how fast you're breathing, your heart rate. You want to try and slow that down. You want to actually, like, your body's gonna tense, and when your body tenses, your shoulders go up. You actually want to just, like, push your shoulders down, like, just drop your shoulders. That's gonna make you kind of sit upright more, versus slouched, or like… tight. Maybe take a couple deep breaths, slow your cadence down a little bit. Maybe even, like, take your feet and, like, take your toes in… like… what's the word? Like, push them into the ground? Like, you probably have shoes on unless you are barefoot at work. Which some of us could be, depending on which type of job you're in, but you want to take your feet, and you want to push your toes down the floor, almost like you're… pushing, your toes into, like, sand, or mud, or, you know, the grass, even. And just kind of go through a couple of these micro-regulatory practices that you can do right there in the moment, in a second, to just downregulate. Because that's gonna impact your nervous system, that's gonna help you to get to a more regulated space where you can access those 3 things to move through the conflict. I think one of the biggest issues with getting or staying dysregulated is we don't even realize that we've gotten dysregulated. Things are escalating and it's kind of unintentional, and it just happens. And we default to speaking faster, maybe speaking louder. That threat detection is, like, I am here, I sense it, something's wrong, quick, go into your default pattern, and your default pattern may not be speaking louder, or heart racing, it may be more appeasement, it may be more shutdown. But either way, like, threat comes into play, the body moves into this more, like, urgent-based state that starts to shut off your thinking. Others may interpret it one way or the other. It could be, like, they've gone more authoritarian and aggressive, or they've gone more, like, passive and, like… towards instability, or just indifference, even. And people start to jump to conclusions, and that's not what you want. But if you get regulated first, less likely that they're gonna jump to conclusions. We want… To signal… I understand this, or I understand you, or I understand the problem. Not like, let's get through this, let's move on, let's quick this, quick this fixily. Fix this quickly. I'm talking too fast, I need to slow my own cadence and take a pause here, but ultimately… Yes, we want to resolve problems quickly, but not so quick that people feel rushed through it, and we don't feel like there's full understanding in place first. A really great way to soften into conflict management, is to use statements like, I apologize, that wasn't my intention. Not things like, you're overreacting, and it's not that serious. You're gonna send people more into defensive mode right away. Woof! When we use poor language, That puts people on the defense, what we're communicating, consciously or subconsciously to the other person or the people that we're dealing with in this situation, is you're stating I care more about being right than understanding harm. And if that's the case, you got some ego issues to address. Because you've just escalated the whole room into a threat response. Not the goal, friends, not the goal.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay. how do we get regulated? Well, we talked about some of those things, and I'll reiterate them here, but what does it look like to be regulated as you move through conflict, or even just regulated conflict management? Jessica and I, my business partner, do a whole series, a whole, module on kind of, like, containment before escalation is what we call it. So, we talk about, like, stabilizing, stabilizing both sides, the leader and the frontline staff, or the leader, whoever they're working with, and kind of recognizing these… these strain signals, we call them, before it escalates, and learning how to stay steady when the tension goes up. Clarifying your ownership, and… Not just, like, absorbing the dysfunction that's going on around you as your own, and then addressing behavior before it becomes, like, a major cultural…shift. So, one of my favorite… topics to talk about, and we moved from that into, like, accountability, and how accountability protects people's capacity. And then we move into hard conversations. So, all parts of conflict management, because frankly, right now, everyone needs it. Okay, so you're gonna slow down the moment. The goal was almost to, like, slow down time. You might even say things like, okay, let's pause for a moment. I want to make sure I understand. I have actually had a lot of… not a lot, a few leaders use that. And dang, does that just, like, immediately drop me into, like, they care about me, and immediately I soften. Naming… the impact before the intent. Instead of saying something like, That's not what I meant. And that's not what I meant, it was, like, not the worst thing you can say, but do you feel, like, do you hear the defensive tone in that? A better thing to try, like a flipped version of that would be… I can hear that landed in a really frustrating way. Or I can hear that landed in a whatever, you know, you feel they might have felt way. you're… Acknowledging the impact. In doing so, lowers offensiveness. You can also, from there, move into, like, any boundaries if they are needed, but you can do it from that place without force. I think the problem is a lot of people will move from, like, that's not what I meant, and they'll move into a hard, harsh boundary, and it'll be feel… it'll be and feel very forceful. Boundaries… like, if you're moving into, like, correction-based boundaries after regulation, Are gonna sound something like, I'm not okay with that. I'm not okay with that behavior. We need to reset expectations here. It's a boundary, doesn't feel good to receive. But if we're receiving it from a regulated place, then we know that the person cares about us, and there's safety in place, psychological, definitely physical, then that type of response is easier to receive. And if someone flies off the deep end because you say something like that and you set a boundary, that's a deeper problem that we need to deal with with them, in general and deeper work that they need to do. The biggest thing is we don't want to shame people. The goal is not to shame or blame. The goal is not to… definitely not to raise your tone and yell. The goal is… and again, these things can happen. Like, people are gonna use shaming and blaming language. People are gonna raise their voice. People are gonna over-explain and confuse people. That's human. The goal is to get better at this. The goal is not to be perfect. We want to stay anchored. We want to stay grounded. And we want to move away from urgency, and move into steadiness.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay. Let's say for a hot second here that… We don't stay regulated. We need to then move into repair, and I love repair work. Genuinely, I love it, because I use it a lot in my family system because I'm trying to break patterns that existed before me, and I'm not always responding the way that I want to in my family system. And what I love about repair work is I know I'm gonna mess things up. Like, I can't keep myself from messing things up. I'm trying to get better, I'm preventing myself from doing it, but… I'm gonna mess things up. The beauty of that is, I've gotten really good at repair work. And repair doesn't erase the mess up, but it definitely helps, and it helps me to move into a reflective state where I can hopefully prevent the thing from happening next time. Repair… is a strength. Genuinely. Anyone that thinks repair work is a weakness has a problem. What repair does is it signals safety, and that's what we're trying to restore here. If there's a threat going on, psychological, we want to restore safety. So, we want to say things like, that conversation got really tense. I noticed I got really defensive. That's a good way to start your repair work. When you name what you're doing or how you're feeling, it reduces the ambiguity. It helps you to take responsibility without having to, like, apologize, because you didn't… you know, you were stating kind of what you're feeling. You're not saying, I'm so sorry that I got defensive. I'm so sorry that I got tense. You don't have to say that. You can just say, I noticed I. So you own your tone, You own the missed impact. And you definitely avoid the self-shaming spirals Gets you nowhere. Maybe sit in it for a second, but move out of it quickly. So, what this would look like is… I noticed I got defensive, And I'm… I immediately went into problem solving, or I moved too quickly. Let's back it up and slow down a little bit. So, we're gonna clarify the expectations. Then, we're gonna move into understanding, we're gonna check to make sure they understand. And then you're going to reaffirm that we are on the same page, that we have shared goals. By moving through with this type of language, it really breeds, like, openness and transparency, which I think a lot of leaders avoid, because, like, I can't be open and transparent, like… be too soft, because if I'm too soft, people won't take me seriously. No, actually, people will respect you. People will think a lot higher of you. A lot more of you. They'll respect you, they'll appreciate you, they'll enjoy working for you. and alongside you, and with you. I love repair work, I love it so much, but it's really hard, to be honest, y'all. Like, if you… haven't done a lot of repair work, or even, like, good conflict management, these things all sound great. The problem with, like, scripts and… systems and flows and structures that work is… you hear them in an episode like this, or you hear them in a training, and then you try to apply them, and they don't stick. And that's totally normal. So, that's where our work at Five Ives comes in. We create content, we do coaching, we run sessions, we do follow-up, we don't even do, like, one-off sessions. Like, you… we don't… support organizations unless they have ongoing work from us, because what you need is, like, the information with the follow-up and accountability and coaching. So, if you want to change the language, and you want to change your systems, you need someone to hold you accountable, and you need someone to continue to come back and, like, problem-solve with you, and change the scripts, and adapt them to make them yours, and help you apply them in moments where we tend to fall back on our old patterns. It's very hard to do on your own. Not to say that you can't. You can. But habit changing, pattern changing, man, that stuff's tough. So, what I'm going to ask you to do here is pause and think about your conflict resolution skills in general. And just think about how does your body respond to conflict? Whether someone's, like, bringing the conflict to you, or you're taking it to them. Does your test… test, does your chest tighten? Does your speech… speed up. Are you clenching your jaw? Are you feeling this, like, mental rush, urgency, rumination, crazy, wild, fast-moving thoughts? If any of that is true for you. What would change if you moved into that conflict from a place of steadiness, groundedness, anchoredness? And then I want you to think about, Where do you maybe escalate without even realizing it? When? Where? How? And maybe give some people that you trust close to you permission to call you out when that happens. If you're a more avoidant person, where are you avoiding? When are you avoiding? How are you avoiding? And how can you get to a place of clarity and firm boundary setting with clear next steps? Y'all, conflict is gonna happen. It's inevitable, no matter, again, which role you're in, even if you're a stay-at-home mom, that conflict is coming into play somewhere, sometime. But escalating the conflict, I personally believe, is optional. Because if you can come in from a place of steadiness and regulation, you can… Down-regulate that and prevent it from escalating. I really believe the best leaders show their true colors, In the most charged moments. You can really see who a true leader is when conflict arises. So, what kind of leader are you going to be?

Lauren Spigelmyer: I chatted a moment ago about, you know, Jessica and I do this work at Five Ives, and if you go to our website and you go to the Services tab, there's a tab a sub-tab on that tab called Staff Sustainability Program. It's a program that we build out, it's like a three-tier program, and you can do one tier, two tiers, or all three tiers. We definitely recommend all three, but some people don't… some organizations don't have the time commitment or funding commitment to do that, but we move through a lot of these pieces, especially conflict resolution and repair work and regulation, and all the things, in that programming. So, if it's something that you are like, oh, wow, this was, like, helpful to hear, but I need some help implementing it, or I think my organization could benefit from this. Go to the Five Ives Services tab in Staff Sustainability and reach out to us. Jessica and I are happy to have a conversation with anyone in any role, to discuss what it could look like to work with teams, to coach and implement through this type of work. Love this work. If you're thinking about it more from, like, an educator perspective, and you're like, this was great, like, for me in the classroom. There's a course that Jessica and I run every semester through… in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, it's called Behavior Breakthrough, so it works through some of these things with you as a leader of a classroom full of students. So, if you want to learn more about that, when you go to our homepage, FiveEyes.com, and you go all the way to the bottom, there's an on-demand tab, and you'll see the Behavior Breakthrough course in partnership with Penn. You could also take the course not in partnership with Penn and not get the credit, it's a lot cheaper. But, I'm gonna challenge you to, like, sit in that reflection, think about how you can make some shifts and changes, really think about, like, what would this look like to implement and then maybe get an accountability buddy, or, like, map a plan for yourself for how to hold yourself accountable. But do something to make a change. And until next episode, I'm Lauren Spigelmyer. Thanks for joining me.


Categories: : Emotional Regulation

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