Hi, my name is Matt Goddard. I want to talk to you today about the distinction of conflict versus calibration. When I say conflict, I'm talking about the kind of tension and stress that you might experience in a business meeting, in a conversation, or down the pub, pretty much anywhere where there might be something that you need to share that might go against someone else's perspective or opinion, or let's say story of how they think something should happen.
Conflict is something that we all experience in one way or another, and the solution to the conflict that we face is in how we choose to approach it rather than how we, let's say, try to get through it. What I've discovered is when you try to educate people before you've understood their perspective, or their beliefs or their conditioning, you find that there is an immediate pushback because people don't genuinely want to be told.
They want to be led. They want to be understood. They want to be appreciated or acknowledged. And in a context where you're trying to influence somebody or a situation. Starting with education, is the same as starting with conflict in many circumstances. And so conflict isn't something that you have to get through. It's something that you can learn from.
Now, calibration. And when I say calibration, I mean asking questions that help you understand where other people are coming from, how they see the world, what their beliefs and conditioning might be, can be extremely helpful in helping you position your perspective or position the education that you want to share in a way that is easier for the person to accept or at least begin to experiment with, to find out for themselves whether or not what you're sharing is true or not.
Calibration can come in lots of different forms. It can come in asking people what the purpose of the meeting is. It can come asking people what might be the implication of taking a particular approach. And from those many and varied calibration questions, you're able to ascertain where people's perspectives might be or how they are in fact seeing the world and then once you have that information or data, you're then better able to build a relationship or perhaps at least a connection with them so that when you move to sharing your perspective or your belief or the facts and figures that you want to communicate, they are accepted from a position of connection rather than a position of education.
Now, if you want to find out more about how to calibrate rather than be in conflict, you can do so by accessing my website: https://academy.thirtysixtwentysix.co.uk/
