Talking about conflict

Guest blog by Nancy Ansheles, M.Ed, from Catalyst & Co in the USA

We love hearing how facilitators and coaches are using the CCS Cards in their practice. When we saw this post on LinkedIn from an experienced, and much loved, facilitator in the US, we knew we just had to share it with you! It is a simple, and powerful use of the cards to help draw out from participants before diving into a topic. As conflict is something that we’ve all experienced, and is often coupled with a lot of emotion, it was a skilful place to use the cards to open the session.

Before we hand over to Nancy Ansheles, here are some of the comments on her post that demonstrate we are hearing from a professional!

You are an inspiration, Nancy! There is no doubt you generated new insights and understanding with this exercise. What a gift you are to your clients!

Thank you for sharing, Nancy Ansheles, M.Ed. you’re of the most talented facilitators I’ve ever met and I love this story about your use of visuals!

Over to Nancy …

Yay! Even with 30 years in the learning and development business, I keep learning and developing, and fortunately, so do my clients!

Recently, I facilitated a workshop on Understanding Conflict with a group of financial leaders. To kick off the discussion and exploration (of what can be a difficult topic), I requested that each leader select 3 – 5 cards that reflect their beliefs and experiences around conflict from a pack of CCS Cards.

While I could have just asked the managers questions about their attitudes and practices, I wanted to mix things up to capture their attention and support a richer understanding of how our beliefs guide our behaviors.

After selecting the cards and sharing with a partner. We opened discussions about their choices up to the whole group. I was fascinated to hear how the use of these visuals helped the participants dig deeper and explore a variety of directions.

Some leaders selected cards that illustrated how an adult in their young lives dealt with conflict. Others picked a card that showed current conflict experiences – who knew traffic and road rage were so prevalent? Many chose cards that expressed their feelings of confusion, comfort, or even conflict about conflict!

In the end, each leader acknowledged that the activity helped them become more self-aware of how their thoughts drive their actions. They recognized the need to validate, accept, or discard some beliefs and committed to developing new skills to replace some of the habits that are no longer working for them.

As a side benefit of the exercise, I learned (again!) that as a facilitator and trainer, it’s important to provide a variety of tools to help engage learners. The physical handling of the cards, the open-to-interpretation visuals, and the ability to choose, all mattered.

I also learned and appreciated how amazing and inspiring the people I work with are; especially the courage they exhibit to be vulnerable, honest, and even humorous while learning. It reminded me again how fortunate I am to be in this profession.

A shout out of thanks across the planet to Leonie Cutts and Craig Browne for designing a tool that promotes such rich self-awareness and discovery.

I can’t wait to see how I can use these cards with other groups and topics!