Rehearse concise points you’d like to get across to a boss or colleague so you’ll feel confident when addressing them. It’s also about ensuring that problematic issues (like the one with your co-worker) are dealt with so they don’t happen again in the future. Reflective listening is reflecting to the person what they’ve said using their keywords. The keywords are the words the speaker puts more emphasis on or that seem important to her.

Conflict Avoidance in Adults: Causes, Symptoms, and Strategies

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• However, if you accommodate too often, your own needs might go unmet, leading to resentment or burnout over time.
• A partner who routinely crosses these boundaries may not be emotionally safe.
• You avoid conflict because you tend to become the conflict-avoidant partner, which serves to protect you from something you fear.
• When this gauge is low, people typically already feel quite low about themselves, making any conflict encountered feel like a threat rather than an opportunity for growth.
• Learning to express boundaries and feelings calmly could also promote mutual respect, making it easier for you to stay engaged in the discussion rather than shutting down.

Take a co-worker, or friend, who always wants to debate controversial topics you might feel uncomfortable with as an example. If this happens frequently enough, you might avoiding conflict decide to step back or walk away. Choosing not to engage here can be a way of protecting your emotional space and even a healthy kind of avoidance that keeps things balanced. Being conflict avoidant also impacts our relationships because we’re cutting off all honest communication with the other person.

Understanding Conflict Avoidance: Why It Happens and How to Address It

The absolute worst action (or drug addiction treatment non-action) is to ignore any unwanted behaviour in the hope it will go away. Let’s say you’ve listened to a colleague or one of your team be rather abrupt with 3 different customers on the phone this morning. She’s always charming and friendly, so being abrupt is out of character for her. As well as this, many countries projected to undergo the greatest population increases over the next quarter of a century are, at present, fragile states. And because food insecurity can fuel civil unrest and armed conflict, the threat is even more dire in places with weak institutions and ongoing wars.