Managing Interpersonal Conflict

One of the biggest issues I've come up against, as my group prepares to pitch our story concepts to our class as a whole, is not related to the stories themselves, but rather the conflicts that have arisen in the process of the getting ready for our pitches.

When stress is high, I find it much more difficult to remain calm and assertive in conversations, and tend to lean much more into passive aggressive communication than I would like to, or is appropriate for that moment. If, metaphorically, everyone had an emotional bucket, stress over something we are all passionate about (like our story pitches) fills that bucket very quickly, so it is easy for little things that would normally be manageable to cause it to overflow. It is easy to let that overflow create a chain reaction while trying to communicate that only escalates the situation rather than resolving it, and leaves everyone with some degree of elevated emotions.

Ultimately, letting communications between myself and other group members get to that point is unhealthy conflict management and leads to being unproductive towards our mutual goal: ensuring our stories are ready to present to our class tomorrow.

While I can't control how other people act, I can control how I react to these types of situations. I need to work on reminding myself more consistently to take a deep breath, and communicate calmly and assertively. And if I can't accomplish that in the moment, then I need to be able to say that to the person I'm communicating with, and request that we come back to the conversation at a set time so we can discuss thing productively, rather than continuing to aggravate each other.

Managing interpersonal conflict is, in my opinion, one of the hardest parts of working in a group. It is very easy to do something alone, because you are the sole decision maker. However, working in a group gives, especially in this context, makes all of our ideas more well-rounded and provides the value of a variety of perspectives that working alone can't give. So, it is worth doing the hard work of practicing effective conflict management to foster better working relationships and make our finished product the best it can be.