I was asked twice this week how I handle conflict when I know it’s coming.
People usually expect me to name a specific technique, some clever way to steer the conversation once I’m in it. I do have those, and I’ll get to a few I tend to reach for. They’re not where we need to start, however. We need to start by regulating our own state.
As mammals, we co-regulate each other’s nervous systems, whether we’re aware of it or not. Our calm is contagious and so is our agitation. Before I’ve said a word, the other person’s nervous system is already reading mine from thousands of unconscious signals we’re sending each other.
My ability to steady someone else isn’t a fixed skill I can reach for whenever I like. It rises and falls with my own state. When I’m calm, I can calm others. When I’m angry or frustrated myself, that ability falls away. The very state that shows up in a heated moment is the one that strips out my capacity to settle anyone. I can’t co-regulate you from the middle of my own storm.
That’s why the first move is to regulate myself. It’s the airline safety briefing that we all know: “Put your own mask on first”. Not because I matter more, because I’m no use to anyone if I’m gasping too.
So what does regulating yourself look like in the moment? The key is shifting from reacting to observing and there are many ways to approach that.
With yourself, you give yourself some distance from the problems. For example, I can name what’s happening: “I notice I’m getting frustrated”. The naming itself is affect labeling; the “I notice” framing adds cognitive defusion, a step outside the feeling. I could imagine myself looking through a camera at the situation (third position) so that I’m watching it, rather than being part of it. This is the reason that wartime photographers don’t feel the same levels of danger in risky situations, because they feel like they’re on the outside. The camera gives just enough separation to keep working. You can do the same with a tense conversation, stepping back to watch it as though from outside. David Marquet has written an entire book on different approaches to distancing.
With the other person, you get curious. A real question is the fastest way I know to interrupt my own reaction, because you can’t attack someone and genuinely want to understand them at the same time. It pulls you up into the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, and out of the threat response. Stephen Covey made this one of his seven habits: seek first to understand, then to be understood. Asking “Tell me more” is enough. It buys time, it lowers the temperature, and it pulls you out of the story you were about to tell yourself about them.
With a whole group, the same move scales up. When I run a retrospective that I expect to be heated, I start by asking only what we know. Just the facts, no feelings yet. Getting a room to agree on the data first tends to defuse the tension people carried in, before anyone gets to how they feel about it. It’s the group version of putting your own mask on first, the room steadying itself before it handles the charge.
None of this is complicated; the hard part is never the doing. It’s remembering to do it when you’re activated, which is exactly when you’re least likely to think of it. The heat that makes you need the technique is the same heat that makes you forget you have one. That isn’t weakness, it’s how the brain works under pressure: stress knocks the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, offline, which is the very part that would have remembered the technique. So until this becomes habit, it’s worth keeping a reminder lying around. “Put your own mask on first”.
I learned all of this by fixing myself. I took NLP training, then hypnosis training, and both were taught the same way. You learn a technique, you run it on someone else, then they run it on you. So while I thought I was picking up skills for my clients, I was quietly working through my own stuff in every practice round. The steadiness I bring to a tense conversation now, I built one exercise at a time, on myself.
If you want to get better at this, there are two ways in.
- You can learn a few of the techniques yourself. Plenty of them are simple, and I’ve pulled some of the most useful into a short guide you can work from.
- Or you can skip the learning and work with someone who already knows them: a therapist, a coach, an NLP practitioner, or a hypnotist. I’m three of those four, so it’s the work I do, and there are plenty of good people who do it too. If you’d like it to be me, let’s talk.
Either way the goal is the same. Get yourself steady first. Everything you want to do for the other person depends on it.