Kelly sits across the table from Robert Bordone and Dr. Joel Salinas who have written the new book “Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In.”  

My guess is that you weren’t surprised to learn that Second City has worked with folks in the hostage negotiation space. 

“Improv is just a great way to give people an opportunity to rehearse skills and also to be able to go through the mental processing and the emotions that can come up. You know, the more vivid they make it, the more powerful the exercise is. But the more you’re able to rehearse a skill set or a situation, the more brain pathways get to form and create and get those right connections that when you’re in the situation, you’ve got a path to walk on as opposed to having to blaze a whole new trail.” 

You saw first-hand how folks who were supposed to be learning the skills of having a difficult conversation avoided it. 

“I had been teaching negotiation and conflict resolution, and this was an advanced class and part of the idea of this class was to train lawyers to help facilitate really hard conversations across lines of difference. But what I discovered in this class, despite a huge amount of energy and effort to give skills to facilitators to sit with the discomfort of the conflict, at the end of the class, what I found most of the students doing was ensuring that as soon as disagreement came into the room, they steered it away to something that was more comfortable. And what’s interesting is that although folks had signed up to come in for the hard conversation, in the moment it was happening, they became complicit with the facilitator and then later on would report that they were disappointed that they never got into anything. So, all of this made me hugely fascinated with what is going on in this moment when even when we’re supposedly willingly signed up for something challenging and we’re trained to do it, we don’t do it.” 

Joel, you saw this play out in the hospital where you work. 

“I’ve always been very avoidant when it comes to conflict and seeing in the hospital setting, not just in myself, but in colleagues, on patients, nursing staff, consultants, situations escalate pretty quickly or progressively get worse due to people avoiding too much or like steamrolling through the conflict. Like, it’s this way and that’s the only way. And I think if we would be better at being comfortable with sitting with and being with conflict and learn that skillset and that mindset, we’d be so much better equipped to exist as humans. And I think the last thing I’ll say about this is just the fact of the matter is if we’re really looking for connection, you really can’t have connection without conflict. Without conflict, there’s no connection.”