Conflict hooks are your personal hot buttons. They come from within you, not really from someone else pressing them, though that’s how we generally talk about them (He just presses my buttons). They’re based in your identity, or how you see yourself (and want others to see you) in the world.
If conflict resolution approaches for “dealing with difficult people” worked, we wouldn’t be here, almost 25 years after the book of a similar name, still trying to find the right path through a conflict.
They don’t work because there’s a missing ingredient: You.
What irritates you isn’t necessarily what irritates me. And what hooks my attention might be something that doesn’t cause you a passing thought. That’s because your conflict hooks may be different than mine: We don’t all share the same hooks.
Conflict hooks are your personal hot buttons. They come from within you, not really from someone else pressing them, though that’s how we generally talk about them (He just presses my buttons). They’re based in your identity, or how you see yourself (and want others to see you) in the world. The idea is that when you perceive a threat of some sort to an important part of your identity, you’re hooked.
It may be a real threat. Yet in my experience as a mediator and conflict management coach, as often as not, it’s a perceived threat…you feel threatened whether or not the other person intended to convey that threat.
If you’d like to change how you respond to conflict (or someone else has suggested you ought to), one of the most successful ways to begin doing so is to learn how to manage your conflict hooks. When you’re aware of your hooks, you increase the likelihood of managing your emotional responses and decrease the chance of getting snagged by the conflict.
I’ve found it fruitful with clients to use Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey’s taxonomy of six core identities as some of our most common hooks. In my experience, most precipitating events can be tracked back to one of these:
- Competence – you’re hooked when you perceive that someone is questioning your intelligence or skills.
- Inclusion – you’re hooked when someone appears to be excluding you in some way (from a group, an event, a committee, etc.) or implies you’re not a good companion.
- Autonomy – you’re hooked when someone appears to be trying to control you, imposing on you, or threatening your self-reliance.
- Status – you’re hooked when you perceive that someone is threatening or dissing your tangible and intangible assets, including power, position, economic worth, and attractiveness.
- Reliability – you’re hooked when you perceive that someone is questioning your trustworthiness or dependability.
- Integrity – you’re hooked when someone appears to be questioning your moral values or integrity.
Properly identifying your conflict hooks is a first major step to changing the way you interact with others at home and at work. The next step is to develop ways to prevent those hooks from engaging too quickly and to back yourself up when you’re on the brink of getting hooked. If this is work you’re interested in for yourself (or for an employee), I’d like you to consider hiring me as your coach, as it’s one of the areas I most enjoy in the conflict management coaching portion of my work.
Next time you find yourself blaming another for a conflict that has unraveled unproductively, consider these words from psychologist Jeffrey Kottler:
Every person you fight with has many other people in his life with whom he gets along quite well. You cannot look at a person who seems difficult to you without also looking at yourself.
If you’d like a deeper dive into conflict hooks and how to manage and use them to help you during conflict, I recommend my 2014 book, The Conflict Pivot.
