Bob Bordone

You know, I'm in favor of problem solving.

But the paper, this paper on conflict resilience, its original title was called Against Problem Solving.

Mostly because I thought that if we had opened the possibility of problem solving as a precondition for entering the room,

then we might never enter the room, particularly if we've told the demonized and dehumanized story about them.

And so that somehow we had to make the case that sitting with the discomfort of the disagreement, even if it didn't mean problem solving,

although we hope for that, even if we didn't mean that, it was worthwhile and it was important.

And so part of what was really kind of attractive to me about joining up with Joel is that he just brought all of this brain science aspect to it that, you know, I had this kind of teaching and kind of academic in the negotiation and dispute resolution research experience, but couldn't bring to bear

the kind of brain science parts of what is going on in our brain when we do want to run or when we get into that really unproductive battle.

Hey, Eric, on our bad days, sometimes I probably inadvertently bully Joel still today, but he's pretty resilient now.

So.

Sure.

I mean, I'll say a little bit about that.

A big part of this chair work idea, frankly, is influenced by work in internal family systems.

And I was very fortunate early in my career, even though I was teaching at a law school, to start partnering with some folks who did IFS work.

They call it peace work often, right?

But the chair work is really identifying some of these conflicted sides of ourself, right?

The side of ourself that maybe feels like

it's important and okay to raise this issue because it's something that matters to me.

And then maybe the side of ourselves that feels like it's pointless and it will hurt the relationship and maybe the side of ourself that's fearful and to name each of them and then to actually give each a

in preparation, a physical chair where we sit in that chair and give voice to each of those sides.