One of the things I find most interesting about conflict is how people tend to resist it and how this makes me miss important moments when I could respond with purpose but don't. Resistance is a habitual way of acting. When I resist, I go into autopilot mode and miss the chance to respond in a way that shows I am fully present and engaged.
Aikido, the martial art I study and teach, says that fighting back makes things worse. When I try to solve a problem, it pushes back. In Aikido, alignment and redirection are used instead of fighting. I switch from thinking, "This person is trying to hurt me," to thinking, "This person is giving me energy that I can use."
Aikido means "the way of blending with energy" in Japanese, which is how you say it. Ki is the name for the life force or universal energy. Ki Moments are when we are fully aware of our life force and our power to change our surroundings.
In aikido, the attack is a part of life and can't be stopped. We can change how the attack goes by how we take part in it and how we lead it. Will I say no and start a competition that no one can win? Or will I learn aikido and turn the energy of the attack into a gift? How do I decide when I feel like I'm being attacked?
To begin:
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Have a good and useful reason for being.
If we don't have a goal to guide us in a conflict, we tend to fall back on old ways of acting. Refocusing on the goal answers the question "What am I really trying to do here?" and guides the conflict toward a good result.
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Practice the skills and methods that will help us reach our goal.
We have habits that, when we're angry or upset, pull us away from the goal. Changing our "habits" in a conflict situation requires building skills, practising, and keeping at it.
My work is mostly about putting aikido principles to use "off the mat," in situations like "attacks" we face at work, in our relationships, and in hard life events that can happen at any time. How can we turn the problems we face every day into lessons? Just by asking the question, we start to turn conflict into ki and attacks into energy we can use to build the kind of home, work, and community we want to live in.
