Assessing My Conflict Style

Assessing My Conflict Style

Everyone handles conflict in different ways. We can either aggravate the situation by pushing our own agenda or we can look to manage the conflict and push it towards resolution. Pushing toward a resolution requires knowing ourselves as well as understanding the other side. While we may be able to use different styles while handling conflict, our personalities naturally gravitate us to one style making us feel more comfortable with. (Schaubhut, 2007) After completing the Conflict Styles Assessment I learned that my conflict style is “Confronting”. At first glance I was a little surprised at my style being confronting, but the more I read, the more it made sense. With that said, I feel I am almost equally have a compromising style as well. If I had done the assessment ten or twenty years ago, I most likely would have been purely a confronting style, but I have become much more self-reflective over the years. I feel that the confronting style accurately describes me because one of the traits is that they take too long to find perfection. I often find myself in the situation known as “paralysis by analysis”, where I delay things while searching for the perfect outcome. Often there is no perfect outcome to be had and I end up settling after time has been wasted. I also am most satisfied when an outcome reaches a goal without any negative feelings; although I don’t understand what a style would not want that. It seems to me that any style would want the goal to be reached without any negative feelings. It might be inaccurate in describing me as I can irritate others as a result in my behavior. I feel this somewhat contradicts not wanting any hard feelings after achieving a goal.

I feel that the style that I would conflict the most would be the “Forcing” style. I believe that the forcing style believes in only win or lose situations when pushing their solutions. I believe that people who use the forcing style...