Have you ever wondered why your “gut feeling” was telling you to respond in a way that did not seem logical? It’s amazing to me how powerful the gut feeling really is. Every time I go against it; that gut feeling ends up being correct. Oftentimes it was the best response to my circumstance based on the information that I knew at the time. I believe that the gut feeling that we all have from time to time comes from the culmination of our senses. Our senses subconsciously pick up on things that consciously we overlook. For instance, consciously we may not pick up on the body language of the people that we are talking to because we are so focused on the message we are trying to convey to them. Fortunately for us, subconsciously we are still absorbing the environment around us via our senses. I believe that this collection of information (gut feeling) helps us determine how to respond to our circumstance.
The opposite of being heard and understood is fear and mistrust. We all have the innate desire and right to be heard and understood. But, when we are not heard and understood, we start to have a gut feeling that is unsettling. This unsettling feeling starts out with frustration that the message that we are trying to convey is not acknowledged. As we continue to not feel heard and understood, we start to feel a sense of fear and mistrust. We may not fear the person or people we are talking to, but we may fear that they don’t really care and may not have our best interest in mind. As we recognize this, we begin to have feelings of mistrust toward this person or the people we are trying to communicate with.
I believe these feelings of fear and mistrust are the foundations for conflict. If we truly want to work on conflict mitigation or conflict resolution, we must work towards ensuring that we truly hear and understand the other person or people we are communicating with. Of course, communications and relationships are two way, but we cannot expect conflict mitigation or resolution if we don’t start out by extending our hand to truly hearing and understanding the other side. As Stephen Covey said, “we must seek to understand, then be understood.” Hopefully, over time, the other person or people will feel heard and understood and want to extend a hand to ensure that you feel heard and understood. Why? Because every human has the right to be heard and understood. Heard + Understood = Love. This Love means that I care for you.
P.S.
One major thought to consider when reading this is that I do not believe that we can have true conflict mitigation or conflict resolution as sinful people in a broken world. Only in heaven could this be achieved, where there is no sin and brokenness.
