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Field guide: Dan Berstein

Field Guide is where I ask three questions of people whose approaches and habits are good guidance and worth learning from.

Today we learn from Dan Berstein, a mediator and mental health expert living with bipolar disorder and working to adapt conflict resolution best practices to help people have empowering mental health communication while preventing mental illness discrimination.

One belief that fundamentally guides how you approach conflict? I often face people who have published discriminatory content about mental illness, who may get defensive or avoidant when I ask them to consider updating it. I anchor myself to a core dispute resolution value of self-determination, reminding myself that I must respect their decision to reject me even if it is explicitly rooted in something that I know is wrong, like mental illness stigma. Respecting their walls — as inappropriate as they may be — leads me to develop innovative ways to move forward and reorient by connecting with new people and trying new ideas to move forward, ideas which accept that those parties were too hostile or dismissive to be involved, even though my idealistic hope had always been that they would collaborate to address the problems with me.

One practice you use to anchor yourself when a conversation gets difficult? Because I live with a mental disorder that impacts my emotional regulation, I realized I had to find a way to protect myself and practice self-care, especially after my therapist and support system were concerned for my well-being. I eventually developed a model called Trauma-FREE where I name the trauma affecting me in the situation, my future plans (F), a record of events (R), exit criteria for why I will leave the conversation (E), and engagement criteria for how I would reengage if things change (E). This allows me to notice when I am in a situation that may be dangerous for my mental health (typically when people are avoiding contact with me or something is overwhelming me) and then I can structure effective paths to free myself and move forward in alternative ways, while keeping open the possibility that we can reengage if things change.

One personal quality you nurture for disagreeing better? Conflict resolution skills taught me to accept that other people have different perspectives rather than persist fighting to change their minds, and these skills helped me hone a quality of creative adaptability. I have learned to come up with new ideas that build off whatever someone else is doing rather than attempting to force them to change. For example, after years of arduous successes getting organizations to change their discriminatory guidance about mental illness, I evolved to an addendum model where I create free supplemental material my organization can independently distribute to address the problems, so this way we can make progress immediately without being stymied by an inactive organizations’ internal politics or reluctance to make important changes.

Learn about Dan's Trauma-FREE approach

Field study

Field Study is where I share something I’ve spotted that’s worth thinking about.

Dan learned how to build off what someone is doing or thinking instead of demanding they change their position. His creative adaptability reminded me of an improv rule I learned as a first-year college student in my first (and last) theatrical improv performance. I’ve always considered the concept invaluable for negotiation, too.

Side note: Big thanks to Jono Hey for permission to use his sketch. There are a lot more gems at his Substack, Sketchplanations.

Field test

Field Test is where I offer one small practice to try out, a tiny experiment in the quest to disagree better.

This month’s field test:

When you find yourself trying to convince someone, see what it feels like to accept their offer instead of disagree with it.

Accepting their offer doesn’t mean agreeing to do what they want. You're not conceding it's correct or that you agree with it. You're acknowledging that it exists and that it's now part of what you both have to work with.

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Hello -

August is a month I make time to step back, reflect, and then look forward. Many do this as a new year starts, but it’s August for me. I was in academe before I was a mediator, and August was always the last chance to take a breath before the new academic year’s frenzy began. I think the rhythms of my year will always feel most inclined to follow the academic ebb and flow.

Thanks to the many of you who responded to my one-question survey last week. Your responses were so helpful and more than a little gratifying. You made me smile and you gave me much to ponder.

I’ve been thinking about the resentment that builds up when one person in a conflict believes their efforts to disagree better aren’t matched by the other(s). It’s come up in coaching several times in the past month, and so I wanted to write about it. Hope it’s useful to you.

Take care of each other,
Tammy

Years ago, I was sitting on the couch, arms crossed, annoyed by a disagreement I’d just had with my husband. He’d retreated to his office, and I’d remained in the living room.

This was our predictable pattern. I’d stay put, he’d depart. I’d want to continue the conversation until we sorted it out, he’d leave because he wasn’t ready.

It drove me bonkers.

I’d end up more irritated by his abrupt ending of the conversation than whatever the disagreement had initially been about. As I used to tell my grad students, “The how can matter more than the what.”

I knew he would not return. I knew he would not walk back upstairs and say I’m sorry. I knew he would not offer to pick back up where we left off. Maybe he’d bring it up tomorrow, but certainly not today.

I knew that I’d get up, walk downstairs, apologize for my part in things getting heated, and ask that we find a better way to finish the conversation. And that foreknowledge irritated me even more.

I resented having to do the heavy lifting. Again.

I knew I’d do it, but I absolutely did not want to do it.

“Why am I always the one to extend the olive branch?” I grumbled to myself. “Why is it always me?”

And a sardonic voice in my head replied, “Because, you moron, you’re ready much sooner than he is.”

The unexpected answer made me laugh out loud.

The voice in my head was right. I am quick to burn but almost as quick to cool down. My husband takes much longer to get really irritated but also longer to cool back down. I’m ready for repair work sooner than he is.

The epiphany shifted me from scorekeeping to clarity.

It eased my resentment instantly.

I think a lot about the emotional labor of conflict because it comes up in my coaching work. It’s often raised as a burden or a fairness issue, a resentment I recognize.

Of course it would be nice if everyone we conflict with carried their share of conflict’s burden. The burden of keeping things civil. The burden of making them feel heard even when we’re not feeling heard ourselves. The burden of initiating repair work.

We can carry that burden as resentment for the unfairness of it all. Or we can recognize what we happen to be good at and use it, even when they’re not stepping up in the ways or on the timeline we want. When we do the heavy lifting anyway because we’re better at it, or ready sooner, the benefit isn’t just theirs, after all.

Over to you

• In a personal or business relationship, have you found yourself resentful of the heavy lifting in disagreements? What is the heavy lifting you’re doing more of?

• What do you tell yourself about that heavy lifting? What’s the internal narrative?

• Are you sure they’re not doing any heavy lifting? How do you know?

• What would it be like to feel gratification or satisfaction or pride in your heavy-lifting capacity rather than resentment?

Hello there, I’m Tammy Lenski, and I work with conflict…on purpose.

That nurse’s reaction says a lot about what we think of conflict: a pain to avoid or suffer through. We don’t like how it makes us feel. The time and energy it consumes. The way it alienates us from those who are vital to our work and lives.

But conflict has value. Colliding viewpoints are the seeds of clearer thinking, fresh insights, wiser decisions, and deeper trust.

Every conflict, whether at the conference table or kitchen table, has a message for us. It’s working hard to get our attention and tell us something important. About the situation. About them. About ourselves.

As a mediator, coach, and conflict resolution professor, I spent the last three decades up close to what works and what doesn’t. Do you know what makes the difference?

How we disagree.

When we disagree better, we reduce the noise of conflict so the message makes it through. What to do about the conflict gets clearer.

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I write Disagree Better for people who want to lower the noise and figure out conflict’s message. For people who want to handle conflict with a bigger toolkit and wider range.

I share evidence-based and field-tested ways to make sense of conflict, calibrate how we show up, communicate effectively, and protect our vital relationships when viewpoints collide.

Here are a few articles that give you a taste of my work:

A little more about me

I’ve been helping people disagree better for over 30 years as a mediator, conflict resolution teacher, speaker, and author. I’ve taught conflict resolution in four U.S. graduate programs and co-founded the world’s first master’s degree in mediation at Woodbury College. I created this newsletter in 1999 and brought it to Substack in 2024. If you’re keen on more, you’ll find my formal bio here.

When I’m not working, I’m usually on a hiking trail, in the dog agility ring, or in the garden. My husband and I have been together for over 35 years, with occasional outbreaks of bickering.

Disagree Better

Your field guide for handling conflict with a bigger toolkit and wider range.

By Tammy Lenski

When Laura Chasin and colleagues founded the Public Conversations project in 1989, they preceded the group dialogue with dinner. They asked participants to introduce themselves without referencing their view on the polarized issue they were there to discuss. Participants found that that the experience of breaking bread without being able to pin a label on others raised their awareness of the stereotypes they held.

— Fostering dialogue across divides

Idea 2

Walking together can facilitate both the intra- and interpersonal pathways to conflict resolution. Walking supports psychological mechanisms for cooperation, reconciliation, and creativity. It signals to the body that we’re moving forward together.

— To resolve conflicts, get up and move

Idea 3

While building a 30-foot-long stone retaining wall by myself some years ago, I used to fantasize about bringing clients home to work on it with me. I did once take two conflicting department directors to the county fair and persuaded them to get on scary rides with me. My one rule: No discussing what divided them.

— The everyday activity that can set the stage for a less difficult conversation

Question

What activity would you choose to precede, coincide with, or replace talking it out?

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The director of the unit told me that the staff had marginalized her from day one. She had moved completely across the country for this job, and by the end of the first day she’d known they were never going to accept an outsider.

What happened that told her this so soon? She overheard a staff member inviting the rest of the crew out for a beer at the local pub after work. No one invited her.

She told me she knew from that moment how hard it was going to be for an outsider like her to break into their tight-knit circle. And, sadly, that had proven true.

You’ve surely noticed, as I did, how quickly the director went from one overheard invitation to a settled conclusion about who these people were and how they would treat her. What looks like a single leap to judgment, though, is actually a series of mental moves, each one feeding the next, each one hardening the interpretation a little more.

Let’s walk through how that hardening might have happened, one move at a time.

Construal

A construal is a subjective interpretation of a situation. It’s often an immediate, automatic response to what we’re experiencing. We all construe. It is the human condition to construe.

Our construals are influenced, in part, by our mental models, those ever-present lenses through which we view the world. Construals act as prediction machines; the meaning we assign shapes what we expect and how we act next.

In the example of our department director:

The event: Staff planned a post-work meetup and didn’t invite her.
The question our mind asks: What’s the meaning of this?
The construal: They don’t like outsiders.

At this point in the nascent conflict, there is incredible opportunity for things to go in a perfectly fine direction. But then naive realism appears on the scene.

Naive realism

Naive realism is the human tendency to believe we’re seeing things objectively, as they really are. We are all prey to it. Instead of thinking of our construal as just one interpretation, the illusion of naive realism causes us to commit to our interpretation.

So, back to the director:

The event: Staff planned a post-work meetup and didn’t invite her.
The question our mind asks: What’s the meaning of this?
The construal: They don’t like outsiders.
The naive realism trap: I am seeing this as it really is. No need to reconsider.

Think of naive realism as the psychological glue that causes a fluid construal to harden into a calcified narrative.

Stuck stories

Once naive realism lures us into certainty that we’ve got the right view of what’s happening, we begin, without realizing we’re doing it, to notice the data that supports our narrative and to filter out the data that questions it. This is confirmation bias at work: the tendency to favor information that confirms our hypothesis. We’ve now created a feedback loop that keeps reconfirming we’re right.

Our Stuck Story is the calcification of the narrative we’ve construed. Like our personal movie trailer, our stuck story focuses on the moments most interesting to us, with certain scenes magnified and others omitted.

The event: Staff planned a post-work meetup and didn’t invite her.
The question our mind asks: What’s the meaning of this?
The construal: They don’t like outsiders.
The naive realism trap: I am seeing this as it really is. No need to consider.
The Stuck Story: They’re hostile to outsiders, and they need to learn who’s boss.

In real life these mental moves don’t occur in a precise sequence; they overlap and reinforce one another. I’ve presented them sequentially to tease them apart and make it easier to see what’s happening.

Stuck stories are not impossible to shift. I wrote a book to describe a way to do it. But Stuck Stories take more commitment and harder self-work than would have been required if we’d been able to challenge our construals and naive realism illusions.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t recognize our construals and constructed narratives for what they are until we find ourselves locking horns with someone who considers themselves unfairly judged by us. And we may be feeling similarly misjudged by them.

So what to do?

First, we recognize that this is just one way to understand what goes on in our heads as we size up people and situations. It isn’t the only way. I offer it because years of working as a mediator, teacher, and coach have shown me that these are helpful concepts for those of us who want to disagree better.

Next, we learn to take note of our construals and ask ourselves, What else could this be? We question the certainty naive realism creates in us. We begin to recognize what’s happening while it’s happening, before it calcifies.

Had our director paused at her reaction to the pub non-invitation, the relationship with her staff may have gone in a very different direction. The staff had, indeed, deliberately not invited her to join them at the pub. Why not? She’d told them her belongings had just arrived, and she was overwhelmed. She’d said she needed to leave promptly at 5pm for just that week so that she could begin unpacking. Instead of trying to exclude her, they had been trying not to pressure her.

In the next article in my naive realism series, I’ll share some ways to counter naive realism and its insidious role in the daily conflicts of our lives.

Over to you

Most of us are carrying around a construal or two about someone we’re sure we’ve read right.

• What’s the construal you’ve settled on, in a single sentence?

• Can you recall the specific thing you saw or heard that turned an impression into a verdict?

• Ask the question the director didn’t: What else could this be? List two or three interpretations that would also fit what you actually observed.

• Is this story still soft enough to reconsider, or has it already calcified? Be honest about which, because the two call for different work.

Then the Dalai Lama heard the monk had committed suicide. The monk believed he’d be reborn in a younger body and be able to do the essential yogic exercises.

Years later, when an interviewer asked the Dalai Lama if he felt bad about anything he’d done in his life, the Dalai Lama talked about the elderly monk. American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön described the exchange between the interviewer and the Dalai Lama:

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A study found that 19 specific words used when delivering criticism improved performance and effort. Bestselling author and speaker Dan Pink shares them here:

— 19 words to use in providing feedback

Idea 2

Expressing gratitude fosters motivation to change behavior. In a study of romantic partners, when someone asked their partner to change something about themselves, and the partner said they were willing to try, being grateful increased their motivation to make that change, making it more likely to happen.

— How gratitude can help you get more from your relationship

Idea 3

Reframing is expressing a thought, idea, or proposal differently. In conflict resolution, reframing typically refers to reframing the problem to make it more solvable, or to reframing the message to make it more understandable, neutralize it (make it less explosive), or better convey the core point.

— Reframing the message (with examples)

Question

How can you help them walk away with the insight, not the sting?

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I taught a version of this class in several universities and found that students wrestled with the same fear regardless of their background or history with the other person:

What if I make things worse?

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Yet, many of them still appear on road maps and sometimes GPS routes people through them. The map reflects the road’s legal existence but not its condition. Have you ever tried backing a mile or more out of a winding, muddy, pothole-ridden Class 6 road with thick woods and glacial erratics along each side?

We carry maps like that of the people in our lives. Our mental models, the invisible maps we use to make sense of things, influence what we notice and how we interpret our experiences. They play a crucial role in the ways we navigate conflict.

Our mental models are serviceable most of the time; they help us navigate our days well enough. They work seamlessly enough that we forget they’re just maps, not the ground itself.

This gets us into trouble when we’re in conflict, because we mistake the map for the territory. Like trusting GPS to guide our drive safely, we trust the map we’ve developed about the other person is accurate and we use it to guide our response.

The term naive realism was used by social psychologist Lee Ross and colleagues in the 1990s to describe the belief that we’re seeing a person or situation as it actually is. Ross said that there are three parts to this cognitive bias:

1. We believe we see the situation as it objectively is.

2. We believe any reasonable person with the same information will see it the same way.

3. We believe that anyone who disagrees with how we see it must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.

Ross called naive realism an unavoidable conviction, a default setting in how normal perception works. We mistake perception for objective fact. It doesn’t feel like a bias because we believe we’re just seeing things clearly.

I’ve begun to think of naive realism as one of the most insidious problems lurking behind conflict in our ongoing personal and business relationships.

It is striking how often someone will state their opinion about someone they’re in conflict with as fact: “He is conflict avoidant.” I’ll say, “That’s possible. And what additional reasons might he have avoided raising these problems with you, other than being avoidant?”

This doesn’t seem, from the outside, like a hard question. You and I can conjure multiple reasons someone might avoid confronting someone about a problem, many of them reasonable. But from inside, this is a very difficult mental exercise. Sometimes, the person I’m talking with can’t come up with a single plausible alternative reason. They are not alone; you and I struggle similarly.

This is the trap created by naive realism. From outside someone else’s conflict, alternative interpretations are easy to see. From inside our own conflict, the story we’ve constructed feels like the only realistic one, one we built from the evidence, objectively.

None of this means we’re always wrong about people, of course. Occasionally the map is accurate. The trouble is that from the inside the conflict, an accurate map and a distorted one feel exactly the same. Certainty doesn’t tell us which one we’re holding.

This is why naive realism is so insidious. We file away the interactions that confirm the story we’re building about them. We may not even notice the disconfirming data. The longer we know them and interact with them, the more set in concrete our story may become.

Naive realism is more than just a “factor” in conflict. It’s an engine — maybe the engine — of the friction that can build over time when we work or live together. When we reach our verdict on their character flaws, we close the door on our curiosity.

Naive realism seems to be so baked into the human condition that we can’t just switch it off. Knowing we’re walking around with this cognitive bias doesn’t fully inoculate us from it. Researcher Emily Pronin and others have repeatedly demonstrated that awareness of bias doesn’t, on its own, prevent us from falling prey to it.

Trying harder to be objective doesn’t work particularly well, either. Naive realism makes us believe we’re already being objective, so “be more objective” just strengthens the trap.

So what can we do about naive realism, then? We need ways to treat our own certainty and clarity and conviction as red flags instead of findings. There’s no magic formula, but there are evidence-support approaches that can help. I’ll be writing more about them.

Over to you

• Think of someone you interact with regularly with whom you have occasional or recurring friction or outright argument. What is it about their character that feeds the conflict?

• How would their version of their character differ from yours?

• What additional reasons might explain their behavior? Try to come up with seven, with more than half being reasonable causes or motivations.

A recent study found that how a request is framed shapes whether people feel free to decline it. Here’s the simple language shift the research suggests.

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I created QueryCards early in the pandemic for a client who wanted quick access to the kinds of questions I asked him when we were on Zoom, questions that helped him gain insight or redirected rumination.

I made the cards available for free on my website in 2021, and, well, they’d gotten a little long in the tooth. I’ve included 14 cards in the newest digital set and made them more visually appealing.

Use QueryCards I to think through a disagreement on your own. QueryCards II, in the works now, will have prompts for discussing a disagreement together.

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Field guide: Nancy Radford

Field Guide is where I ask three questions of people whose approaches and habits are good guidance and worth learning from.

Today we learn from accredited mediator, facilitator, trainer, and coach Nancy Radford, based in Durham, England.

One mindset about conflict that you bring to your work? Wondering instead of judging, widening the perspective, and checking assumptions. Asking, “What story am I telling myself, and what other stories are there that I don’t know about?” Asking, “What else could that be?” I believe people act to meet their needs, not to hurt or annoy others, yet we still tend to create negative stories.

One personal quality you nurture for disagreeing better? Radical kindness. The little things count, as does authenticity. For me kindness is whatever makes people feel they matter. Listening is a big part of this, as is giving people as much choice as possible. “Be kind to unkind people—they need it the most.”

One conflict management hack you wish everybody knew? Pause, breathe, then ACT:

A. Acknowledge your feelings. Accept that it might be hard. Assess the chances realistically. Act as if you will be successful.
C. Calm yourself. Consider what you could do. Compose your plan. Choose your time.
T. Think of what is important and the ideal outcome. Trust yourself. Take your time. Try and try again.

Learn more about Nancy

Field study

Field Study is where I share something I’ve spotted that’s worth thinking about.

If you’ve been around me for a while, you know I’ve written and spoken repeatedly about the problems with and unfairness of the “difficult people” idea. Recently, I was drawn to an opinion piece by a Boston critical care doctor who reflected on patients and families who challenge their doctor’s advice or come across as unreasonable. She wrote,

I used to say that I found myself drawn to the I.C.U. because it was an honor to see people at their most amazing during moments of crisis. But the honor is really the chance to see people when they are frightened and vulnerable and angry and ugly and simply trying to do a good job for the person they love.

Labeling someone “difficult,” she pointed out, has more to do with us and with how we tolerate discomfort than it does with the people themselves.

Read Dr. Lamas’ op-ed here: My patient was dying. His wife refused to accept it.

Field test

Field Test is where I offer one small practice to try out, a tiny experiment in the quest to disagree better.

This month’s field test:

Practice a single act of kindness when someone seems difficult.

Choosing compassion over frustration might look like: When someone criticizes your work, thank them for caring about getting things perfect. If someone rolls their eyes at something you said, with a kind smile say, “Seems like you have doubts. Please say more about that.”

Nearly a decade later, Carnegie turned to another problem he noticed in most of the adult students in his classes: Worrying. In that book, Carnegie told a story that anyone who’s ruminated about a conflict can immediately relate to:

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