Reflect on a personal or business situation in
which the cost of conflict was significantly greater than you would've
preferred. Analyze the situation in relation to Stewart Levine's 10 principles
of new thinking (p. 46). How would this have changed the situation? Could it
have reduced the cost of conflict? What lessons did you learn from this
exercise?
My mother and I have always had a
volatile relationship. For as long as I can remember we argued and were constantly
at each other’s throats bickering and trying to prove who was right and who was
wrong. I was the daughter so of course I was always wrong. Through my adolescence
I found myself seeking love and acceptance from my friends and their families.
I had no doubt that my mother loved me, but for whatever reason it was, we couldn’t
get our relationship to a positive place. She felt as though she tried and I
felt I had tried too many times to count. When I became a teenager, the
relationship got worse over time and once I was ready for college, I opted to
move out of state to pursue my education, but mostly to get away from home. I
was happy to be leaving and hoped that once I was gone my relationship with my
mother would somehow fix itself through the distance.
As I worked my way through college
it appeared that my mine and my mother’s relationship got worse. We talked less
but fought more. It was unreal. I couldn’t understand the constant conflict. Once
I finished college, got married and had my first daughter, I told myself, this
is it. We will have more in common, we will know what to say to each other and
we will finally have a good relationship. Wrong. Wrong and Wrong. When my mother
came to visit after the birth of my daughter everything took a turn for the
worst. She came into my home and began to critique everything about my life.
What I was doing wrong, what I needed to do right and continuously asking me
why I didn’t do this or that and so on. I had taken as much as I could and I
finally exploded.
I ranted and raved on how negative she was and asked
why she just couldn’t be a positive person. She moved on to insult myself and
my choices and when the argument was finally done we had nothing left to say to
one another. We had both crossed the line and that was it. Our relationship had
been challenged and we had failed to recognize the desperate need of
resolution. Instead of banding together, we drew each other further apart. We didn’t
talk for months afterwards and in all honestly I didn’t mind that much, it was
nice not to have to argue for once. While the silence was rewarding in some
ways it was debilitating in others. I now had a daughter. What would I tell her
about me and my mother’s relationship and what would my relationship with my
daughter be? Would we have the same issues? Would we be different? I didn’t know
the questions of what was to come for us, but I knew I needed to start building
a relationship with my own mother in order to make sure that I didn’t move forward
in making the same mistakes with my relationship with my daughter.
After reading Stewart Levine's 10
principles of new thinking I started to recognize some of the steps that I
could take to aid with bettering me and my mother’s relationship. Creating a
partnership is extremely important to bettering my relationship with my mother.
We need to learn to stop battling one another and band together to become a
cohesive unit. We need to learn to create efficient agreements and collaborate
on the ones where we may not be seeing eye to eye. While we may not have the
same vision, we somehow need to see the “forest between the trees.”
Forming long term collaborations is
another step in the right direction of creating a healthier relationship with
my mother. If we could just find a way to think of what minor changes could
lead to long term changes then that would make our short term disagreements
less frequent as we would be working on the bigger issue at hand. We needed to
be teammates and act as friends instead of enemies. If we were the last two on
earth, we’d only have each other. The world shouldn’t need to have to come to
an end for us to figure out how much we need each other.
Relying on feelings and intuition is
a very important aspect of fixing our relationship as it allows my mother and I
the ability look beyond the five senses and really feel and become in tune with what needs to be resolved and how to
go amongst that resolution. If we share what we are feeling and allow each
other to be there for one another then we can both start to feel as though the
other cares enough to be there for the other. This principle is important as it
opens up a world of emotion for each of us to consider when giving and
receiving the affection we are both looking for.
I think in using the above listed
principles and many more from the principles of new thinking list, my mother
and I could both start to take the steps that are necessary to build a
relationship with one another. While I realize that it is important for me to
stop being so guarded with my mother, I mostly learned that building our relationship
is a team effort to which both of our dedication is needed. I wouldn’t be here
if it wasn’t for my mother and part of the reason I am successful is because she
was so hard on me to make the right decisions. She never wanted to see me fail
and in turn failed to see how our own relationship was failing. While some
things may be hard to let go of, I know that it is my job to let go of all the
bad so I can make room for some of the good.
Cassandra
R.
