Disagreements don’t need to be agonizing. Get your free tip each week and take your conflict skills to the next level!

Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers) is excited to offer a fresh video series of short tips for better conflicts and disagreements!

Years in the making, this series distills expert knowledge on what works in difficult conversations down to simple bite-sized tips.

It’s a calendar, one tip to reflect on each week for a year. Sign up to get the tip right in your inbox!

Curious what you’ll discover in this series? The tips can be summarized as these four:

Four tips for more rewarding disagreements and conflicts

1. Distinguish between the problem and the person. When something is wrong, name that problem, but don’t confuse that with being opposed to the other person or their feelings. To address the problem, try to engage with the other person as someone you care about and respect, not something to defeat, control, or persuade.
2. Bring out everyone’s best. Conflicts are demanding. As much as possible, pick a place and time where everyone can be their best self—the one who’s most open to positive engagement on the issue.
3. Listen slowly and generously to find feelings and needs. Keep slowing down and listening—interpreting generously and identifying the basic feelings and needs. Check with the person that you got these right.
4. Simple and clear definition. Together with the other person, give definition to the story of what’s happening. Try to be simple and clear. Avoid being clever or making a broad analysis that includes too many problems.

But how do I take my skills to the next level?

Trouble with your neighbour? A difficult boss? A family member makes a cringey bigoted comment?

If you’re hungry for more details to really improve your skills for that tough conversation, sign up for your free weekly email.

You’ll find a breakdown of the above four tips into a calendar: 52 tips, one you can focus and reflect on each week for a year! At the end there’s a story showing how these tips could be used.

If you’re like most people, you’ll learn best through practice. Yes, you can read about how to swim, but really, you have to get in the water. Practice is what makes any new skill possible. Eventually it may even feel easy and natural.

This long list of 52 tips is for those who prefer detail and want to practice to take their conflict skills to the next level.

Each tip is carefully selected. They’re based on scientific evidence and advice from experienced people who’ve dedicated their lives to transforming bitter conflicts.

These tips are offered in the hope that some will be helpful to you, but they’re only suggestions. Nothing here is meant to be memorized or repeated robotically. There’s no “one right way” to be in conflict.

General information always needs to be adapted by the person using it. These tips can’t anticipate your particular situation. It’s up to you to decide when something feels right to try, or too dangerous, too emotionally demanding, and so on.

Why did CFSC create this series of free tips for difficult conversations?

If Quakers are known for one thing, it’s their deep commitment to peace, pacifism, and social justice. This dates back centuries. There’s a reason that Quaker service agencies won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Canadian Friends Service Committee has more than 90 years of experience with peace and social justice work.

This is a rich and complex history. We’ve reflected deeply on peace for a very long time.

But we haven’t always done a good job of sharing our knowledge in simple and accessible ways. This is something we’ve been trying to improve on for the last decade.

To get there, we’ve held multiple consultations with Quakers across Canada. We found out their priorities, hopes, and fears. We discovered what Friends believe and are doing at the grassroots.

While thinking and talking about it, we never stopped doing peace work. We’ve been continually learning and refining our knowledge about what’s possible, and our theories about how change happens for a more just and peaceful world.

We’ve developed a clear sense of what peace means to us. It’s informed by so many great ideas from academics and practitioners doing transformative work in all sorts of incredibly difficult situations.

All of this careful research and reflection—grounded in our values and history as Quakers—has led to not one but two books: The Four Elements of Peacebuilding: How to Protect Nonviolently, and Are We Done Fighting? Building Understanding in a World of Hate and Division.

We’ve now had countless conversations about peace and justice issues, facilitated lively workshops with hundreds of participants, done podcast interviews, given presentations, and written an ongoing blog for Psychology Today.

There’s so much inspiring and practical peace content in our books and interviews, on our blog, and in the free workshops we offer.

But we realize that many people who need to hear how conflicts are being transformed positively every day, and how justice is being achieved right now, aren’t going to read a book. They aren’t going to take part in a workshop series. And reading a short blog post is too easy to forget.

So we worked with a social media expert to develop a series of short videos for you!

This series is totally free.

It’s setup as a calendar, sharing one tip each week for a year.

This will give you a reminder, once a week, to spend just a few moments (most videos are under 1 minute long) reflecting on a particular peace skill. Many are deceptively simple, but powerful.

Sign up to get an email with the tip each week. Then watch the video and reflect on the tip. You could discuss it with a partner or friend. You could even try the tip out if the opportunity arises. See how it feels!

This series is here for you, to help you strengthen and spread your peace skills.

Let’s get started.

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