Conflict isn't the problem — how you handle it is. Mitch Weisburgh shows founders and team leaders how to turn tension into teamwork.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A practical framework for turning workplace conflict into collaboration, tools to interrupt fight-or-flight reactions in real time, and a strategy for using AI to script difficult conversations before they happen.
Most business owners treat conflict like a fire to put out. Mitch Weisburgh says that's the wrong move.
Mitchell Weisburgh is a lifelong educator, founder of the MindShifting community, and author of Mind Shifting: Stop Your Brain from Sabotaging Your Happiness — with a second book, Mind Shifting: Conflict and Collaboration, on the way. He returns to Knack 4 Business after his Season 3 episode to go deeper on what he calls productive disagreement: the idea that tension between people, handled well, produces better outcomes than harmony ever could.
In this conversation, Mitch breaks down the neuroscience behind why we react the way we do under pressure — fight, flight, or freeze — and what it takes to interrupt that cycle before it damages a team, a sale, or a relationship. He walks through how to prepare for high-stakes conversations in advance, why self-awareness is the single most transferable business skill, and how AI can help you script difficult exchanges before you walk into the room.
Key topics covered:
Connect with Mitch Weisburgh:MindShiftingWithMitch.com | LinkedIn | Blog | Substack | Instagram | Facebook | X
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Bernie (00:05)
Question to the audience. How do you turn conflict that drains my business into something that actually helps it grow?
Our guest dives into how constructive conflict, mind shifting and sense making can turn tension into teamwork, confusion into clarity, stress into productivity, especially for founders and small business owners who feel stuck or overwhelmed. Which brings me around to our guest, Mitch Weisburgh And he's a lifelong builder of people and possibilities and also very super cheerful. His mission is simple and bold to grow a critical mass of individuals who live happier.
more productive lives by becoming resilient, resourceful, and collaborative, especially when challenges hit. Since founding and scaling personal computer learning centers of America 130 employees in the 1980s and 90s, Mitch has spent his career helping others learn, adapt, and thrive. He co-founded academic business advisors, launched education-focused nonprofits like Games for Ed and EdChat Interactive.
and continues to teach mind shifting and sense making to educators through his growing mind shifting community. Mitch is also the author of Mind Shifting, Stop Your Brain from Sabotaging Your Happiness And upcoming Mind Shifting, Conflict and Collaboration.
He writes the Mindshifting Educators newsletter and returns to the Knack for Business podcast after his season three episode, Mindshifting Secrets for Entrepreneurs Who Want Real Success. Mitch, absolute pleasure having you back here sir. Thank you so much for joining us. Get a favorite quote or saying.
Mitch (01:32)
First of all, thank you so much for having me back on Nack for Business. We were doing the pre-show chatter a little bit and you mentioned that your audience is growing exponentially. I just wanted to congratulate you because you obviously are hitting a real hotspot that people really want to hear. Kudos to both of you for ⁓ such an engaging podcast and conversations.
So if you come back to your question, like, do I have a favorite quote?
speaker-0 (02:01)
and
Mitch (02:02)
I knew you were going to ask that question. So I went on AI and I said, what are some of the most important and interesting things that I've said over the last year? And it came back with 15 different quotes. And so I had to choose. So I'm going to choose three quotes from the 15. So quote one is going to be, conflict isn't the problem. It's how we handle conflict that determines whether a group grows or falls apart.
So that's one. Second, everybody has within their own brain the power to be resourceful and resilient and collaborative. And then number three, life is better when you build it around cooperation, empathy, and trust. So those are the three that I picked.
Bernie (02:45)
Your story is really interesting to me in that you were in a corporate, a corporate you built, but you actually then when you were in it found something that, I have to do this instead. Tell me about that journey where you decided this was the thing and how, because most people just live in cages.
Mitch (03:04)
Right.
speaker-0 (03:05)
All right, so.
Mitch (03:06)
You can look at me and you can tell I'm not in my 20s, right? I'm 73 years old. And so when you say, how did you decide to change? I've changed like four, I probably had four different careers.
speaker-0 (03:18)
So.
Mitch (03:19)
So the change from corporate to education was really first, I was teaching a company that we taught people how to use computers back in the days where nobody had computers up through say around 1999, 2000, where by that time most people had computers. But I could tell, even though we had grown and we were profitable and we were doing well, I knew that the days of teaching people how to use spreadsheets
or wood processing were really numbered because A, people were coming up and they already had those skills and B, even the people who were working in companies basically knew them. And so I was looking for ways that I could transform the company. I came up with ⁓ that, you know, online learning was going to be really critical. And so I went about trying to go to our different offices and train the salespeople how to sell.
speaker-0 (04:01)
and
Mitch (04:15)
corporations on online learning and quickly found out you can't completely change a company and have the same people doing what they've always done also. And so that was my big mistake. I flew down to the Washington office. I trained the people how to do and sell online learning. We'd make some calls. We'd get a couple clients. And then I'd go to Philadelphia. And as soon as I left Washington, they went back saying,
speaker-0 (04:17)
and
I'm an E.
Mitch (04:41)
⁓
How many Excel classes do you need? They go back to exactly what they were selling before. So the company started faltering and then I had a choice. Do I A, shrink the company and put more money into it or do I close the company and go into something else? And through talking with advisors, family, decided I was going to close the company and move into something else. So first was
speaker-0 (04:46)
So.
Mitch (05:06)
how do you close a company that's privately owned with pretty wide ownership? so we decided that the cleanest way to close the company was to declare bankruptcy, even though we had assets and revenue coming in. But we closed the company that way. And then I'm looking around. It's like, well, know, I can make a really big difference in education because education is going to be changing. in
Right now, everybody's learning from textbooks. This is back in 2001, let's say. But technology is going to be coming into education. And since I really know instructional design, and I know technology, and I know how to make people effective, I can really talk to education. And we can really make education be the force that gives every kid a chance to live a great life. And so that became my focus.
And lo and behold, 15 years later, I'm looking around and saying, technology is in all the schools, but are kids really able to do things better than they could before? Are they prepared to be adults? You know, they prepare for the workforce, or they prepare for family, or they're prepared to be citizens. And it's like, no, they're no better prepared than they were 15 years ago, even though they're using technology. So, you know, started getting depressed about that. But then,
I got a call saying, can you teach some college kids a little bit about how education is using technologies? And I'm like, I don't want to do that because it hasn't really made a difference. But you know something? What I think that what kids really need today is kids need to understand how successful people are successful. How do they look at the situation? How do they work with others? How do they come back after failure? All those different things. And if kids understood that.
They would be a lot more successful, and they would live much better lives. And I said to the university, I can introduce the kids to that. And we agreed that I would teach a two-day course. basically, we do this all the time. We see a need. We come up with how we're going to do it. And then we sell it. And then all of sudden, it hits you. my god, how am going to do this? Somebody bought it.
speaker-0 (07:03)
You know, so.
Mitch (07:05)
So that's happened. And so I had six months. And I decided what I would do is I would look into a whole bunch of different disciplines and see what the best advice was for being successful. So I looked at sales. I looked at ⁓ instructional design. I looked at management. I looked at military strategy, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, economics. These are all different ways people make decisions.
And everybody had a slant, but nobody put it all together. And so as I'm reading across all these fields, it's like, there are certain, I don't know, you call them foundational things or transversal skills that seem to go across all of these things. So I tried to put them together and I came up with three different elements. And so that's what I taught is the first element is how do you tap into your own brain? So even though your brain is trying to keep you safe and trying to survive,
but is also capable of critical thinking and executive function. How do you tap into your own brain to be your best self in every decision? And so that's the first element is, and I call that resourcefulness. The second element is we go into things thinking there's one best solution, and we're going to find it. And anybody who disagrees is obviously wrong, and then we're going to do it, and it's going to be successful. And that never works out that way with anything that's meaningful, right?
⁓ and everybody who's listening here, who's in a business and running a business, you know, like, gee, I was so sure I was going to do this and it was going to work and then it didn't. And if your, business is successful, you figured out what to do next. And if you're really successful, then you're going into it and you're thinking, you know, something, I'm going to try something. And I'm going to use the results of that to figure out what to do next. And so I call that resilience. And so how do you get into resilient mindset both before you go into something?
And when you start failing at it so that you're not just blaming and judging what's going on and saying it's this person's fault or it's this situation, but you're constantly moving forward. So that's the resilience part. And then the third part is that if we want to build businesses or if we want to build anything, we're to be doing it with other people. And so if we're going to be working with other people, we've got to be able to influence them very often. They're not going to do what we thought that we wanted them to do.
They're going to disagree with us. Sometimes they're going to compete with us. Sometimes they're going to try to harm us. Sometimes we're not going to like them. And yet our natural ways of dealing with things like that is we fight, we use power, we bribe, we punish, we reward. And those things, very often they don't work at all. Sometimes they make the situation much worse. And sometimes they work over the short term, but they're
effectiveness dissipates very quickly over time. But there's like 50 years worth of research into how do you work with people to get them to do something together with you so that the result is better than any one of you could have done alone. And that's really kind of the history of mankind. We've become the alpha species on the planet because
were able to bring people together to do things that no one person could do. that third element is what I call conflict and collaboration. How do you deal with those in a way that you move forward? And so I put those together in the six months. I taught them to the kids, 18 to 25-year-olds. And at the end of the two-day workshop, they stood up and cheered. And so it's like I knew.
A, that they'd never heard this before, and B, that they got it. And this was 2018. And I'm still in touch with 10 or 15 of those kids that I taught. they're starting to do remarkable things. Or they are doing remarkable things. And they're leading good lives. I get an email every once in a while from one of them saying, you know something? This turned my life around. So that's what I decided to move to is
what I initially called sense making and now more often I call mind shifting because we're shifting our mindsets in order to be successful and really shift from working with the education sector, working with education publishers to how do I get a critical mass of people on this planet to be able to think that way and act that way so that they could live successful and happy lives and
as a planet we could start working together to solve all these things that are tearing us apart and all these real threats that we're coming up with. And so that's my mission.
Bernie (11:30)
That is so absolutely cool. And I think college training, college kids is wrong. And here's why. This should be in high schools. Forget college. I'd rather do this and learn how to make a tack box in grade eight, which I did. How do we get this into the high schools, Mitch?
Mitch (11:46)
Well
You're wrong. No,
speaker-0 (11:48)
Let's
start a conflict about that.
Bernie (11:49)
There we go.
Mitch (11:50)
There we go. That's the huge question. And I'll go back.
speaker-0 (11:55)
⁓
Mitch (11:56)
And I'll say a lot of these skills can be taught even in pre-K. And that's how early you can do it.
speaker-0 (12:02)
⁓
Mitch (12:03)
I'm teaching teachers free. So I'm teaching teachers in New York state and in the state of Washington. And I would love to expand that to Ottawa, to Quebec, to other states in the US. And again, this is my mission. And part of the lessons are that at the end of the course,
every educator has to create a lesson plan to teach something that they learned in the course to kids. And so we have lesson plans for pre-K, we have lesson plans for third graders, we have lesson, you know, when I say we, you know, the teachers have done them, all the way through community school, and there's a huge group of educators from the, what's it the judicial system, like,
the kids who are in detention, in jail basically, and the educators who are teaching those kids. So a lot of those teachers are ending up taking the courses. So we have courses geared towards those kids also. And the stories that come out of the teachers about the kids being absolutely sure that they couldn't do something and then the teacher using something from mind shifting and the student coming back and say, yeah, I guess I could do this.
Boy, you something, I never thought I could do this. Look what happened. Or the kid constantly getting into arguments and using the techniques from the conflict and walking the kid through. It's kind of funny when you hear the question, but is your goal to do something and be punished by the teacher? And the kids are like, no, that's not my goal. Well.
then what is your goal? Well, my goal is to stop these other kids from bothering me. OK. Hmm. Does it make sense that you're doing these things and the kids are still bothering you and you're doing these things and you're getting punished every time? Are there other ways that you go about doing it? And, you know, having the kid come up with, well, you know something, maybe I could just leave them alone. Maybe I could. And it doesn't matter what the kid comes up with, because there's like
a thousand different things that they could do, any of which would work better than punching them in the head, right? But once the kid comes up with it themselves, they're committed to doing it. And that flows over to business also, because as business people, you know, we have people who are working for us or selling to people. And when the suggestion comes from us. Yet you end up, you you end up causing a conflict very often or you don't get the full commitment. But if we if we could learn
the questions to ask so that the people come up with the solutions themselves, and then we help them move forward and gain commitment to them, then they're going to be a lot more engaged in the process just as these kids are more engaged. Now, this is changing from your question, like, how do we get this into high school? I'm not doing this fast enough. I'm teaching probably 500, well, yeah, about 400 or 500 teachers a year. Those teachers are then teaching kids.
I would like to be teaching, not just me, because there's three other people who could teach this now. I would like to reach 10,000 teachers a year. And 10,000 teachers a year, that's going to multiply through all these different kids. Because a teacher is in front of 20 to 100 kids every school year. So I would love that. And if there's anybody here who can help me,
connect with states or provinces or school districts who want to bring this in, I would love your help.
Bernie (15:29)
You know, as you're talking and describing things, I'm going back kind of the route to conflict. So we've just talked about disbursement of the construct. Lately, I noticed on Instagram, I managed to pick up this one feed and the guy's talking about, you know, situations and how to re-re-evaluate what you're looking at. And one he picked up was road rage. And he says, most people, he says, we treat our cars like territory.
And it kind of goes to a primal route where, know, basically, you know, don't mark my tree. It's my tree. You know, you know, that's very primal thing. And he says, reframe what you're doing when you're looking at something that's causing you to go, and go, you know, and you don't understand what's happening in the person's head. So maybe that person's having an emergency and maybe they're having a really cruddy day, whatever the case may be, or they're, you know, they're trying to get someplace quick because it's a virgin matter.
that you would agree upon or who knows. And that's trying to make sense out of what's going on. Is that the sense making component of what you're teaching to people is like, you know, take the point of view, adjust a little bit or step back. You know, if you're spiked, that's not the time. You have to have that calm clarity and thought, right? And yeah.
Mitch (16:42)
What are you talking about? It's crazy stuff.
speaker-0 (16:45)
You know? So when...
Mitch (16:50)
So when we react to situations, that's a function of the fast-acting parts of our brain. And those fast-acting parts of our brain evolved from the earliest animals to help the species and help the organism survive. And so they have to react in hundreds of a second to very little information.
The organism, the animal, the person can react and stay safe. the primal three ways of reacting are fight, flight, and freeze. So when we're in our car and we have that road rage and somebody does something, it's those survival parts of the brain who are saying, this is a threat. This is what you have to do. And
Once that starts, they start flooding our brain with stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, and those stress hormones increase our strength, our ability to react with whatever our survival brain has said to do, focuses all of our attention on doing that, and shuts down all the other functions of our higher order abilities to think. And so at that moment,
Unless we've primed ourselves to be able to do this, we're thinking the reality is this driver is a complete idiot who just threatened me and I have to honk, give them the finger, cut them off, tailgate, whatever it is that we've decided we do. our higher order parts of the brain are just justifying what our lower order parts of the brain have determined that we have to do.
If we want to get into responses that are more aligned with what our long-term goals are, we have to learn how to do that pause that you mentioned before. And that begins with our ability to be able to be self-aware. might, know, psychologists may call this, you know, metacognition, thinking about thinking, where once we're aware that, wait a minute,
this is just my survival brain, this is just my limbic system reacting to a situation, sometimes that's enough to calm us down. And that happens in conflicts, it happens in situations in traffic with road rage, it happens in situations with family where we get triggered by our spouse. Not that that has ever happened to me, but some people I've heard get triggered by their spouse or by their kids or by their parents.
⁓ you know we that that immediate reaction but when we were aware of wait a minute that's just my survival brain protecting me going into fight flight or freeze sometimes that's enough to calm us down now sometimes that isn't enough in which case if we want to prevent you know destructive conflict or or actions which we're going to regret later on you know sometimes we can do positive self-talk and positive self-talk is
Stop acting like an idiot. That's not positive self-talk. Positive self-talk is, is there another way I could possibly react? Or is there a way that I can calm myself down? Or what is really important? Or what would make this fun? Or questions like that that open us up, not focus us on the situation that, on the action that we've already chosen. And then the third way that we can do this ourselves is some type of distraction. And...
You know, one type of distraction is a form, you know, you could do meditation or you could do mindfulness if you're in a position where you can do some exercise or you could do something that you really like. Maybe it's listening to music, thinking about pleasant things, thinking about what you're grateful for. You know, any of those things, if you can, you know, it takes 60 to 90, maybe even up to 120 seconds of distraction.
to let the stress hormones kind of dissipate from your brain. if you can do that for even 30 seconds reduces them. But if you can do that for a quick amount of time, you can get the stress hormones down. And you can go back to being much more resourceful and much more resilient and tap into your ability to collaborate and empathize much more than you can when you're just in the moment. So did that answer your question?
Bernie (21:01)
it does. There are different types of conflict, right? There's one in the heat of the moment, it be that or someone says something and it just puts you right off on back of your heels. And there's other conflict, I guess, that crosses our paths where, whether you're doing political or religious, typical ideologies, right? There's a conflict.
Mitch (21:02)
Yep.
Bernie (21:22)
But it doesn't mean you're in the wrong spectrum. It just means you now you have to start that communication process a bit, To sort it out without getting ticked off, without getting wound up, know, getting the stress hormones going.
Mitch (21:34)
Or I'm going to say very often, it's how fast can you recover? you know, so if you can't prepare for a situation in advance, you can steel yourself not to go into those stress hormone reaction. If you're in the moment, the question is how quickly can you recover? Because the reaction
speaker-0 (21:51)
Thanks
Mitch (21:58)
to fight, flight, or freeze is happening before you're even aware that it's happening. But to be able to, and the more you do this, the quicker you're able to recover from it. But to be able to realize, my gosh, I'm in my limbic mode right now. I'm in fight, flight, freeze. I don't have to be. And then how quickly can you recover?
Bernie (22:17)
I noticed there was an event that happened up here in Canada and the reporters were asking a political party and it's one of the smallest political parties. They didn't do well in the last election, but it swayed the circumstance without getting into the thing. But I'm listening to the scrum and listening to the reporter ask a question, buddy gives an answer, all right, and a proper answer. And it's like his point of view.
And about five questions later, that same question surfaces again. And I'm sitting there from a different party and knowing full well that some of the, some of the reporters are from different, ⁓ from different spectrums politically, right? They have a different background. I was asking the same question again, and I'm almost sitting there and going, you know, if this were me, it'd be like, I think you should refer to my first answer. And that would answer your question now. But the guy didn't, he, he just straight and he says,
This is the answer. just reiterated it and with kindness and, and gentleness internally, I'm thinking he's probably thinking, you you're not paying attention or are you just trying to goad me right now to get going? How do you maintain that level of, and I thought the guy was doing, you know, that particular person, he's not part of my writing, et cetera. So it's not, it's not somebody who would cast a vote based on how we handle that. It's like, you're stable.
speaker-0 (23:25)
the
Bernie (23:35)
And you're like, and again, not trying to get into the end of the area of politics, because this could have been a conversation in a classroom. This could have been a staff meeting. Right. Yeah. How do you how do you get to that state where you go in Zen like, right. And you go, yeah, that's not going to get to me. It's annoying. Yes. But.
Mitch (23:53)
You know, as you're talking, I'm envisioning, you know, Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings, OK? Or possibly, you know, a Jedi in Star Wars. It's like they're always in a resourceful state of mind. And...
And the only way that I know of that you can do that consistently is preparing for it in advance. So I'm going to say that that political candidate probably over time had said, know something, reporters are going to ask me the same question over and over again. I've been popping off when they answer those questions and that hasn't been doing me any good.
So what are other ways that I can respond? You know something? What if I just, with compassion, answered the question pretty much in the same words as before, and if I don't refer to the fact that somebody just asked the question two minutes ago? And what if I responded that way? And then they practice that. And then when the situation comes up, they're ready to do it. So.
preparing in advance for those types of conversations can be very valuable. And that goes, we're talking about a political situation. In sales, right, how many of the, I would think that virtually every high producing salesperson scripts out possible conversations before they have them. Like the person, I'm gonna be trying to sell this $100 million deal.
to this one organization or this one company, what are the objections that they're going to raise? How am going to meet those objections? And so when those objections come or similar objections come, it's not like, my gosh, I'm going to lose this deal. They're thinking, OK, I was prepared for this, or I was prepared for something very similar. Let me go with this remark. And so they're prepared in advance for this situation. And they're also.
have steeled themselves to how they want to be, what they want to feel in those situations. the salesperson is thinking, I'm going to, you know, this is just one, but, you know, I'm going to come off as if I was this person's physician and giving them advice that was going to help them live happily. And that's the...
that's the demeanor that I am going to have as I'm talking to this person. And then that demeanor carries forward because the person asks question that you may not have been prepared for and you're automatically thinking, well, if I was this person's physician and I were really giving this person life-saving advice, how would I respond to this person? so a lot of it is preparing in advance for those conversations and
not beating yourself up when you've had those conversations and they don't go the way you want, but using those as learning opportunities. What did I get a chance to practice? What did I get a chance to learn? And how am going to reward myself for actually having the conversation and getting through it, even though the results weren't exactly what I wanted?
Bernie (26:47)
Most of our listeners, I think, have spent some time in corporate. It like corporate is just a seething bin of passive aggressive behavior. And then you know, no one wants to appear publicly arguing, but I'll just see. And you have something that's pretty exciting.
Mitch (27:05)
That sounds like my marriage. What are you talking about?
speaker-0 (27:07)
Bye!
Mitch (27:08)
I would just say I've been married for 40 years. I'm very happy. You know, like so I just but I couldn't resist saying that
Bernie (27:14)
But you have something called productive disagreement that I think could change how we view our society. What is the difference between productive disagreement and a destructive one?
Mitch (27:26)
So to a certain extent, you you you only know that after the disagreement has happened, right? So you've had the disagreement and you look and the results weren't like what you wanted. And that could be in business where you're, you're not making the sales or you're managing people and they're not doing what you wanted them to, or you're working and your boss keeps on dumping on you and you don't, you know, and
speaker-0 (27:32)
So
Mitch (27:51)
And you feel that you're not being recognized for the work that you're doing or you're doing things that that That the boss has told you to do but you don't feel are the right thing. So so so that's eating at you You know, so it's like looking at the situations and thinking well, where are these destructive? Conversations happening or interactions happening and then thinking through well, what would I really want to happen now?
that answering that question, what would I really want to happen? It's not what would I really? I mean, it's nice to know what I would really want to happen in an absolutely ideal situation. But we're really dealing with it with completely ideal situations. So if you're working with your boss and your boss is constantly dumping on you or telling you to do things that that you don't want to do, it's not like you can just want your boss to just treat you like an equal.
and let you do the things that you think are right. But what you can do is you can think, well, look, I'm in a situation now. My boss really has the power. I'm doing things that I really don't want to do. Knowing that my boss has the power, what would I like to happen in this situation? And so you could come up with different ways, different, first of all, objectives, and then ways to try.
⁓ to talk to your boss or talk to your customer or talk to the people who are reporting to you and try them out and think, well, gee, you say or you do something and then you judge the results from that. then you come back and say, well, you know something, did this accomplish? What did I learn from this? So that's a, you know, ⁓
a way of moving that direction, AI can be really helpful. So if you are having a type of conversation with people and that's not resulting in the outcomes that you really want, you can feed the situation to AI and have AI imagine how that conversation might go if you wanted to accomplish something different.
So it's like, I'm going to have a conversation with my boss, because they keep on dumping at me. I'm working 80 hours a week, and I can't keep it up. I'm not getting promotions, whatever. It's like, feed it to AI. My boss is giving me this, this, and this. I want to have a conversation with my boss. I want them to reduce the amount of work and not call me at 11 o'clock at night or whatever the goal is. Script out.
speaker-0 (30:16)
Thank
Mitch (30:17)
three different conversations where I could be talking to my boss and eventually we reached an agreement. None of those conversations are going to go exactly the way the actual conversation is going to ensue. But what it will give you is really some incredible things that you can try.
to talk with this other person about whether it's your boss or a customer or somebody who reports to you or a family member. So you're going into the conversation armed. And at the same time, you have to work on your own and say, you know something, I'm going to go into this conversation and I'm not going to be tied to any outcome. I'm going to be whatever. I'm going to be curious. I'm going to maintain a curious demeanor, detached and curious.
speaker-0 (30:48)
.
Mitch (31:05)
throughout the conversation. And if I feel my temperature rising, I'm just going to remember that I'm going to stay curious. And so you have the demeanor, and you're coming prepared with different ways of the conversation could go. And you're much more likely to achieve success. I know I drifted from your question, but I was trying to go towards the end, towards like, how does somebody get out of these ⁓ destructive conversations and into some things that are
they're more constructive.
Bernie (31:32)
It's also dawn on me that sometimes to having a contrast. like, you know, know, the day is daylight because there's no light, right? There's this, you no light, right? And so sometimes the conflict is, and again, with its ideology or different perspective or different approach to things, but that's healthy. Cause now, cause I'm thinking more not as in like you're going to be butting heads.
let's say it's the boss, or you're looking for innovation, you're going, same old, same old, but all of a sudden, there's diminishing returns happening. What do we do next? Or how do we stay ahead of the curve so we don't hit that note and we actually exceed? So how do you make constructive conversation? And how important is it to have
Opposing views, does that help filter out the strong, like the pros and cons to get a good result?
Mitch (32:24)
So I'm actually hearing a few different questions in that.
You know, and I'm thinking, you know, how do you, you know, first of all, is it helpful to have different points of view to, you know, diversity of opinions in a conversation that actually that might actually lead to heated disagreement? And and, you know, I'll say it enthusiastically and emphatically. Yes, it does help. As long as you know that you have an end goal in mind.
⁓ I, when I was, when I was consulting to education publishers, I had a partner and, and her way of approaching problems was 180 degrees away from my way of approaching problems. So the two of us could sit in a meeting with a publisher who described an issue that they were having or a goal that they had and
Whoever, you know, we would both chime in like, know exactly what you should do and are exactly what you should do would be polar opposites of each other. And we actually had to have somebody coach us how to work together because we couldn't figure this out among ourselves. But in hindsight, it's like, wow, we could have, but
But in fact, I don't know that we ever would have come up with this without having a coach. But it turns out that we would then go to a client, and we would prearm the client and say, look, our approaches are going to be really, really different. And you're going to hear us, and it's going to sound like we're fighting. But this process of creative disagreement is going to come up with something
that's much better than any of us could have possibly come up with on our own. Because, well, her name was Farima, because, you know, Farima is thinking about certain goals and certain approaches, and I'm thinking about other ways of doing business, and you're in the middle of it. And so when we can come together,
and come up with something that meets what I think the goal should be, something what you think the goal should be, something that Forema meets the goals could be, that's going to be a much richer solution than anything anybody else could have come up with. And that then bought us really incredible solutions to companies. sometimes you do need an outsider to teach you how to work with somebody who is so different from yourself.
do learn how to work that way, you end up with things that you never would have come up with because you don't think that way. And that's what the beauty of the human race is, is that we have eight billion people and every single one of us is different.
Bernie (35:05)
Are you saying that a referee is always important?
Mitch (35:08)
But that, yes, yes.
Exactly.
Bernie (35:10)
I have a flow and one of the flows is the one tip. And I almost dread the letting them have one tip in this interview because I want them to spend three weeks with you, not an hour with you.
Mitch (35:22)
But they could buy the book, you know.
Bernie (35:25)
Well, that's actually where I'm going now. If you were a, if they were buying this book and they had attention deficit disorder and they were only going to get one sentence out of the book, what would that one sentence be, Mitch?
Mitch (35:27)
Okay.
Well, one set should be to read the whole book.
speaker-0 (35:39)
But
Mitch (35:40)
You're going to have on your show notes ⁓ the ability for somebody to download kind of a quick guide to whether that quick guide is influencing or affecting another person or working through conflict. And that guide is called 50 Questions that Change Minds. That guide walks you through really seven steps to prepare for a meeting that could be
you know, that could be lead to destructive conflict. Part of it is, you know, how do you how do you connect with the people? How do you determine what you want, what they want? How do you find the the the the background information that you need? How do you start coming up with different possibilities? How do you coalesce around a few things that you're actually going to try? And how do you get commitment that people will actually actually do those? So there's a there's that, you know, that there's a free download that people who are listening to this can just come to your
you know, not for business website and and download. And I would say the the the absolutely super skill behind all of this is that self-awareness is to understand that when you're at when you are thinking in a fight flight freeze mode that you're not going you're you're not going to come up with a long term solution, which is going to get you.
or the other party where you need to go. And to be able to prepare so that you won't go into that fight, flight, freeze. And when you do get into it, to become aware that you are in it, and somehow or other distract your mind for a few seconds so that the stress hormones can start dissipating and so you can get better control and use your.
your executive powers, your critical thinking, and your creativity in order to progress.
Bernie (37:25)
So that's tactical. Strategic would be for conflict, not the word conflict as in, some people are drama junkies, right? They always need drama. And I'm sure there's a trailer park somewhere. I'll probably have to edit that part.
speaker-0 (37:41)
in
Mitch (37:42)
politician somewhere who's trying to instigate drama in people's lives so that they can get you to do what they want you to do,
Bernie (37:48)
Well, yeah, that's called manipulation. If you're doing it from a strategic point of view, do you have a place people can go and kind of pick up on the strategy of conflict for the the betterment of either the business, overall life? Where can they go to find you?
Mitch (37:51)
Yep.
Well, to find to find me, I'm very active on LinkedIn. My website is MindShiftingWithMitch.com. So you can find a lot of material on that website. And also I write a weekly newsletter. And so from that MindShiftingWithMitch.com, you could find the newsletter or blog and you could subscribe to that and you get a weekly tip. Actually, so it's a weekly newsletter that always references
four articles. There's one that comes through and then summaries of three others. So go to mindshiftingwithmitch.com and you can sign up for the newsletter. I still think you get a really in-depth knowledge that it's not like you'd necessarily need to read the book page to page, but when something happens to be able to kind of like flip through the book and say, ⁓ you know something, this is a case where nonviolent communication would have been helpful.
This is a case where strength-based feedback would have been, you know, this is a case where I lost it, learning how to calm myself down. This is a case where I was very aggressive, you know, learning better about the five different ways of handling conflict, that would have been helpful here. Let me just brush up on that.
Bernie (39:15)
You know what, Mitch? I want to say thank you so much for being our guest. It's fabulous. It's entertaining. We got our spouse management manual attached to this, which is really good. To my co-host, Wayne Pratt, and you the Knack 4 Business listeners. Because without you, both Wayne and I are getting more edification but this is for you too. All right.
Mitch has often seen people that have been frustrated in a team environment. And you know what? It's to take the frustration out and capitalize, you know, on, you there might be a conflict or difference of opinion. Conflict might be too strong a term, but leverage it so you can build a better outcome and a better community. And at the end of the day, go home. Yeah, we've had a good, successful day.
Mitch (39:57)
And if you're living a happy life, that's what makes me happiest. That's what's driving me is when you're happy with what you're doing, that's what makes my life worth living.