First rule when resolving a conflict – BE POLITE

I have been providing conflict resolution training for years now and during this time I have worked with people from across various industries from professional sport right through to healthcare. When I began giving my training way back in 2002, I quickly realised I needed some kind of clever acronym or phrase to package it all up with. Something which which would be nice and easy for people to remember.

Our training at Good Sense is slightly different as it covers a wide variety of areas such as martial arts, personal protection, body language and even NLP. Over the years I have had to read and research many leading experts from across these sectors to ensure I stay abreast of the latest techniques.

George J Thompson is one of the experts that I respect hugely, his book Verbal Judo was brilliant and I would strongly recommend it. In his book, he uses an acronym called LEAPS for people dealing with conflicts. George use LEAPS to stand for:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Ask
4. Paraphrase
5. Summarise

I was impressed by the thinking behind his methods and I have incorporated some of it into my own courses but I felt the phrase LEAPS, didn’t really send out the right message for what I am trying to do. It may be a personal thing, but LEAPS makes me think of an aggressor leaping at me over a desk. So although I liked the overall concept I felt I needed something more relevant for my delegates.

After lots of careful consideration, I created my own system and called it POLITE. I chose the word POLITE, as I feel it sends out a better message. In a conflict you must do your best to be POLITE, if you are as POLITE as possible you could both come out of it with a win-win.

POLITE is an acronym for the following:

1. Position
2. Observation
3. Listening
4. Intuition
5. Talking
6. Emotional state control

We always invite feedback from our delegates at our events and although I have trained more than 10,000, not one has ever said that they don’t like this system. However, feel free to share yours if you have an alternative.

Over the coming weeks I will delve a little deeper into my system on this blog and share my thinking on this with you in more detail.