How to Rebuild a Relationship After a Difference of Opinion | Angie McArthur

How to Rebuild a Relationship After a Difference of Opinion

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It's all too easy to develop a grudge, and let one bad experience inform how you view a person going forward. But as leadership expert Angie McArthur says, "The more certain we are, the more stuck we will remain." A moment of broken trust can compound into a closed mind, but to loosen up that knot, revisit the experience and ask yourself: how subjective is your narrative of the events? What was going on in your life at the time—and what may have been going on in theirs? "You can’t change people," says McArthur, "...but you can respect yourself and you can at least let them have the experience of being respected." When you start to see conflict as a diversity of ideas rather than targeted opposition, it becomes an enormous opportunity for growth and perspective-taking. Here, McArthur speaks with diversity and inclusion expert Jennifer Brown about taking stock of past disagreements and mining them for growth opportunities. This live conversation was part of a recent New York panel on diversity, inclusion, and collaboration at work. Angie McArthur is the co-author of Reconcilable Differences: Connecting in a Disconnected World.

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ANGIE MCARTHUR:

Angie McArthur is Professional Thinking Partners' acting CEO. She has been an integral part of PTP since 1998, co-facilitating and designing global conferences, leadership retreats, training programs, and ongoing one-on-one Thinking Partnerships in organizations from non-profits to Fortune 500s. She is also one of the creators of the Worldwide Women’s Web, a network formed in 2001 to retain women in corporate leadership roles. As an expert in perceptual learning patterns, she has developed communication strategies for authors, corporations and CEO's, and the Executive Champions Workshop. She has also designed interactive web assessments and products for corporate training programs. Angie has co-authored two books for Random House with Dawna Markova: Collaborative Intelligence (2015) and Reconcilable Differences (2017).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Angie McArthur: Often I hear, “I don’t want to be around that person because I don’t trust them anymore.” And so my question to them—and I’ve seen this at the very top of some of the largest companies, globally—is: what caused that trust to break down? And we each interpret even that word “trust” differently. And so you have to break it down into behaviors. So when you’re trying to reconnect with someone, it means going back to what initially caused that break to happen and question your bias on many levels, including how you envision the break down in trust to happen. And I think it’s the word “respect”—actually the root of it—means the ability to see one as if for the first time again.

And I think we have to all challenge ourselves to know that because someone was difficult in one situation or even multiple situations it doesn’t mean they’re going to be difficult forever. That we’re constantly working on this ability that we all have, and this necessity we all have to connect, and maybe there’s multitudes of other things going on, but to constantly come back to that place of, “Okay, what do I need right now, here in this moment, to build connection with this person?”

Jennifer Brown: That’s such good advice. I would add: forgiveness is powerful. I’d say second and third and fourth chances, and I agree with you that people change. So how somebody was in a particular context or situation might not have been their best self. There may have been intervening circumstances. So I don’t think we can—can we ever really say that “someone is this way with me and I know that it’s a fact”? I’ve really learned that there’s no door that’s ever really closed— unless I think it is, and sometimes I’m wrong. Many times I’m wrong about that. So I do really challenge myself to look at every situation and person anew as often as I can. And sometimes that includes forgiveness, it includes the acknowledgement that maybe your opinion about what happened is a subjective one, and may not be the reality.

Angie McArthur: Yes, and it comes back to, always: the more certain we are, the more stuck we will remain. So if I am certain a person is a certain way, shows up a certain thing, that creates this, you know—it creates certainty. So again, it’s shifting from certainty to discovery. And I’m not saying this is easy. It’s difficult.

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