Chapter 1: How did Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas collaborate on their book?
Well, hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and we're going to get into a new book called Conflict Resilience, Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. And we're lucky to have its two authors, Bob Bordone, who is a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, and Joel Salinas, who is a physician, neurologist, a clinician scientist at NYU. So welcome both Bob and Joel.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah, so first, how did you guys get together? You know, this is pretty diverse. You got law and medicine. Usually they don't talk to each other very much.
Well, we were very fortunate. I mean, we basically were friends, but part of that friendship, I think, emerged from work that I do around conflict issues in the mass general system. And then just kind of the kind of larger, bigger mass general Harvard community. And yeah, so this began really as a friendship where we were each swimming in very different waters.
But then as we would start to talk, We realized there was a lot of kind of connection and maybe the possibility to bring two different disciplines together in a way that might be practically useful and make an impact.
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Chapter 2: What is the concept of conflict resilience and why is it important?
And even when we started writing this, which was during COVID, what seemed to be some pretty polarizing times that were unlikely to resolve by the time the book would come out.
Yeah, well, you sure hit it with the divisiveness and the polarized world that we live in is perhaps worse than ever, certainly in all my years and probably long before then as well. So this topic of resilience, it's a very interesting concept because some people might think of resilience as just being tough. So you go into a conflict and just go heavy tough.
That obviously is not what you're writing about. And I guess maybe we can start off, you know, what was the goal here? Obviously, there's other books that have addressed this topic, I'm sure, but yours is somewhat unique in many respects because it brings in the science of it and many strategies perhaps that have never been developed.
But when you got together, what was the mission that you set out to do?
Yeah, maybe I can start out and then you can add on. So my research has been all around understanding how social relationships influence brain health. And one of the things that I was seeing was social isolation and loneliness have been steadily increasing. I want to figure out what kind of interventions or what are the factors that are involved here?
And I think one of the things that has stood out is just the difficulty with being able to navigate conflict in different contexts.
And so the idea around conflict resilience is really, even though there's been lots of books on kind of how, like, what to say and what specific tactics to use, I think that there was this skill set around just being able to sit with the discomfort of that disagreement, which will ultimately help kind of make it much more useful to take on those tactics.
One way to kind of think about it, if it's like all these tactics are like learning how to cook with a set of recipes in the kitchen, what we're really proposing here is that you also need to be able to stand the heat of the kitchen to even be able to cook.
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Chapter 3: What role does neuroscience play in understanding conflict?
Okay. Go ahead, Bob.
Yeah, and I would say, you know, I was starting to write about my first kind of piece on this topic where I used the word conflict resilience was in 2018. And it really came from an observed dynamic that I was seeing in my teaching of Harvard Law School students. I was on the admissions committee. I'd been on the admissions committee for many years.
I knew that we worked very hard and were quite successful, in fact, at bringing together a very diverse student body, including politically. And people sometimes maybe think of elite law schools as being very progressive. But Harvard Law School, the biggest student organization, is actually the Federalists, which is the conservative students.
And despite that effort, what I noticed in the classroom was was a reduction in conversation, diversity of viewpoint across the board. Interesting classrooms became boring. And even though I was teaching around conflict and negotiation and difficult conversations, I would read in students' journals things like, I want to avoid conflict, or I don't want to get into it.
And so it occurred to me that quite a part, as Joelle said, from any skills If we don't develop this capacity to sit with disagreement, then we will never get to problem solving.
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Chapter 4: How can individuals effectively manage their emotional responses during conflicts?
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.
Yeah, I agree. The unique part here is that whole scaffolding with the neuroscience, the behavioral science, and those five Fs that you mentioned you alluded to, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fester. Yeah, so avoidance of conflict has kind of been the default for many people now because we have political divides, we have anti-science versus pro-science divides, and on and on.
There's a quote in the book that I thought we'd start off with because it really kind of lays the groundwork from you both. The biggest hidden barrier to being conflict resilient stems from the inability or unwillingness to face and sit with our own internal conflicts. the negotiations between our divided and sometimes contradictory selves.
Even more surprising is that although there are dozens of self-help books on negotiation and conflict resolution, almost none of them spend any meaningful time on this critical intrapersonal barrier to ending conflict.
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Chapter 5: What is chair work and how does it help in conflict resolution?
So maybe, Joel, maybe start you off here. I guess you were bullied as a kid, and maybe that gives a little background here. Tell us about, Joel, tell us about that You would.
Hey, Eric, on our bad days, sometimes I probably inadvertently bully Joel still today, but he's pretty resilient now. So.
Oh, yeah. I'm a Teflon. So, yeah. So I think I am generally a conflict of what an individual and I think a lot of listeners and viewers can relate with that experience. And I think that also kind of speaks to some of the neuroscience that comes into this, which is that our brain has really evolved to be a fortune-telling machine.
It takes all of our past experiences, turns them into memories, and then makes projections about what's going to happen. And this projection or prediction of what's going to happen might as well be reality for our brain's kind of sake.
And so if we had really negative experiences with conflict in the past, kind of growing up, whether through our families or the schoolyard or others, there'll be likely a very negative charge of negative emotional charge that comes with that.
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Chapter 6: What strategies can improve deep listening in conflict situations?
And what that does is that it increases the chances that you'll trigger this system for salience and arousal, which then sets off the alarms essentially in your body that then kind of creates these kind of fight or flight type responses where you're more likely to fall back on these really reflexive behaviors to make the bad thing less bad.
And when you do that, whether it's through avoiding or blowing through conflict like a battering ram, that then trains your brain to assign some kind of a reward using the orbital frontal cortex, the system that kind of keeps tabs over how much reward you get for a behavior. It makes it much more likely that you'll do it again.
we, from a very young age, develop a propensity to either avoid conflict or tackle it. And it varies depending on the context and how you're feeling. But it just makes it much, much harder to be able to bring on a much more thoughtful and deliberative approach to conflict.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the salient points is, that avoiding the conflict can make things worse. And as you described, I would have thought that there are some people who are just innately gifted to being diplomatic and artful about having to deal with the conflict issue and others are just, you know, there's just no hope. But in fact, it can be acquired.
And you allude to this kind of neuroplasticity, the brain, and you advocate for chair work. Can you tell us about chair work? Because, you know, that's something I wouldn't have thought would help in this matter.
Sure.
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Chapter 7: How do Bob and Joel demonstrate conflict resolution through role play?
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. And I'm imagining that at least some people listening to this will say, this sounds very hokey.
And does he really mean going to the chairs? And the answer is, yes, I do mean that. Because there is something about the physicality of it that forces you to give voice to something that is true and real in you. And the chair work is very helpful to set up what an opening might be into a hard conversation. Meaning that all of the chairs
Chapter 8: What final thoughts do the guests share about navigating conflict?
are real and authentic and okay. They're worthy of getting some voice. So as someone who teaches in a law school, right, it's all about advocacy. And you would find students who would be very good at advocating on behalf of a client would be incredibly poor at advocating on behalf of themself.
And so separating out the side that maybe has a little bit of feeling it's selfish, but actually giving it a legitimate voice, help them when they get to the table to to be able to say, you know, I'm worried about this, or I realize I may be wrong about this, or it might be upsetting. And also, it's important and deserves to be heard.
Because one of the things around avoidance, right, is we often do avoidance in service of preserving the relationship or not disrupting. And we do maybe preserve the relationship for the time being of the person across the table, except we go home and there's still the side of us that is not feeling good about it.
And the person we're not preserving the relationship with is that side that we just get to have a sleepless night. And so that's really the kind of idea behind the chair work.
That's helpful, Bob. I guess managing conflict, of course, I think we know you don't get emotional. Okay, sure. But yeah, there's kind of three parts to that, three components. Self-awareness, we've been talking about that.
Deep listening, which, of course, when you're engaging in a discussion that's, you know, potentially leading to escalation of a conflict or amplification, that is really important. And then effective assertion. Now, that's where it seems to me things fall apart. If you're making effective assertion, you know, then everything kind of blows up.
So tell us about how you can be assertive and still, you're not trying to win the argument, I get that, but how can you be assertive and still come out in a positive way?
Maybe I can start, Bob. So I think one of the things that really is a good predictor of how effective you'll be at effective assertion is how good you were at the deep listening part.
So the more genuine you are in curious you are about the perspective of the other person really understanding what are the set of facts experiences beliefs that eventually kind of lead up to that headline of kind of what their what their position is or what their what their interests are.
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