We're back with another episode in our Conflicts series and we're talking about a helpful mantra, No Set Outcome. When we find ourselves in conflict with someone in our lives, it can be natural to enter the conversation with our solution and our needs top of mind. From there, we try to convince them and win. But when we come into conversation with that agenda, we can get caught in a back and forth conflict. Instead, what if we release our agenda before we start talking? What if we stay open and curious, with no set outcome in mind. From there, we can figure out a path forward that works for everyone and considers everyone's needs.

We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.

Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!

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EPISODE QUESTIONS

Download a printable PDF of this week's questions here.

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1. What comes up for you when you contemplate the idea of going into a conflict-related conversation with no set outcome?

2. Does it make sense to you that the bigger picture context of the conflict can contain helpful information for finding a path forward that works for everyone? Why? Why not?

3. What blocks or fears do you find rising up?

4. This isn’t a “now you have to do this forever” kind of thing. The next few times conflict arises, no matter how small, can you try going in with trust and curiosity instead of an agenda? Just play with it and see what happens. But not halfheartedly, you won’t learn much that way.

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast! Navigating relationships can be challenging, because people are so different. In this podcast, we dive into tools, strategies, and paradigm shifts to help you decrease conflict and increase connection in your most important relationships. We talk about concepts like self-awareness, compassion, context, consent, all the big Cs, and so many more.

If you're new to the podcast, we encourage you to listen to our foundation series, which is specifically the first 14 episodes until we think of some more. But in them, we talk about our favorite fundamental relationship ideas and tools. If you hear us mentioning a concept over and over, chances are it has its own episode in the foundation series that you can check out to learn more.

So, this episode is part of our Conflict series and our miniseries inside that about developing self-awareness. Today, we're diving into the idea of No Set Outcomes, and this can be confronting it first. I mean, what do you mean go into a conflict-infused conversation without an answer or a solution in mind? What, why? This can be particularly challenging for internal processors, like me, because we often like to do our own thinking ahead of time before we have conversations about ways to move forward.

Yet the challenge is that when we have a solution in mind, we often come to the conversation with an agenda and a different energy. We may not even recognize it at first, but once we bring this self-awareness lens to things, we can start to see it.

Interestingly, it's often easier to recognize it when we're on the receiving end. So, do you recall a time when a partner or a friend came into a conversation with an agenda in mind? Just think about that for a moment. Often you can sense it in their body language, in their tone of voice, and in the words they choose, which are often a bit more presumptuous and maybe belittling is how they can feel. They tend to try to dominate the conversation, trying to convince us that their perspective and solution is the right one. When that happens, we can feel like our perspective isn't being heard or respected, like we're being bullied into accepting their solution. We can worry that they'll think less of us if we don't agree, and it just doesn't feel good.

So, now let's take a moment to flip that. How does the other person feel when we are quite sure that we have the right solution? When we come to the conversation with our agenda, thinking, my goodness, if only we could explain it the right way, they, too, could see that we're right. When someone comes into a conversation with that agenda, we just can quickly get stuck, caught in that back and forth of trying to convince each other that our solution is the right one. Conflict, one person is right and the other is wrong, which means that in the end there's a winner and a loser, and none of that helps maintain a connected and supportive relationship.

Instead, what if we release our agenda before we start talking? What if we come into the conversation with the energy of being on the same team and trying to figure out a path forward that works for everyone, something that considers both our needs and goals and theirs.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. It's such an important shift. And it isn't always easy. In the Be Kind, Not Right episode, I talked about making the shift from needing to prove that we're right to choosing kindness, which helps us to get to that place of curiosity and openness. We don't have to let go of the idea that we're right or that we think we have a good solution. But we can choose to be kind and give some space and hear the person in front of us. And finding whatever tools we can that will help us release the urgency of our agenda, I think, is key.

Another one that we've talked about is that there's plenty of time and there's this feeling in our body when we're bringing a sense of urgency to a conversation. When we feel that we must convince them that we're right and that this thing needs to change right now in this particular way.

It's such a different energy when we can switch to curiosity and trust in our ability to solve problems, because whatever is happening, it isn't feeling good for one or both of us, but there's so many possible solutions. We don't want to get fixated on ours. We want to remain open to finding one that feels good for both of us, and that is truly fostered by slowing things down, being more open, and leaving space for that. And it's such a different energy and it feels so much better to move towards a solution that way.

PAM: Exactly. Exactly. And notice that not bringing an agenda into the conversation doesn't mean not thinking about the possibilities beforehand. We want to get curious. It can be really helpful to spend some time considering our needs and goals as they relate to the conflict at hand before getting into deep conversations. That's part of the self-awareness that we're talking about in this miniseries of episodes. Not only will we learn more about ourselves, we'll likely be able to more effectively communicate that information to the other person involved.

So, we can also get curious about the bigger picture context of the conflict, too. So, from the environment, has a similar conflict happened before? Is there a pattern to it? Does there seem to be a consistent trigger and so on. To the needs and goals of everyone that's involved, are there conflicting underlying needs that need to be resolved? To the current circumstances of each person that's involved right now, and this can call back to our previous self-awareness episodes around triggers and HALT.

So, the more we explore, the more little bits of information we have floating around in our minds that we can connect in creative and fun ways to navigate through the conflict or the challenge that work for everyone involved.

But to be able to recognize these many other possibilities, I do first need to let go of any outcome I have in mind when I go into the conversation. It's great to have all these possibilities. But if I don't let go of what seems to be the best one to me, I end up just picking out the pieces of our conversations that fit that particular path and just ignoring the rest, letting them go in one ear and out the other, because I'm going to use what they say as ammunition to show them or convince them why the path that I have in mind is best. But when I can release that agenda, that set outcome, and not bring that with me into the conversation, just having thought through things from my own perspective of possibilities and my needs, that just brings so much more when we can work together as a team, because there really is no one right way through a conflict. 

ANNA: Right. And so, I want to reiterate the point that you just said, because it's so important, which is that if we're going into a conflict or conversation with a set outcome, it really tunnels our vision. We are looking for anything to affirm our position to the exclusion of all other posit