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Welcome to Module 9 Return to Dashboard
Module 9.1
Module 9.2
Module 9.3
Welcome back for the final module. In the last two modules, you learned how to create win-win solutions to solve conflicts. When two people are in a conflict of needs, they sometimes don’t believe that things can be sorted out. Using I messages and reflective listening to define their basic need or goal, possible solutions can then be brainstormed so that both sets of needs can be met. These solutions then need to be checked to establish how well each meets the needs of both. You then choose the best solution and put it into action. Sometimes the solution that you chose turns out not to be the best one, so you need to evaluate how well the solution is meeting both people’s needs.
There are occasions, when a conflict is not about a need but about an opinion or a value that the person has. In order to change somebody’s behaviour when they think “it’s non of your business”, you need to have slightly different skills to the ones you learned in the last module. This final module will give you show you these skills so that you can practice using the Transforming Communication skills in the values area.
The following story has an important message about values differences. It comes from an indigenous South African nation and is retold in the book “The Heart is the Hunter” by Laurens Van der Post.
This man of the early race… dearly loved his black and white cattle. He always took them out into the veld himself, chose the best possible grazing for them, and watched over them like a mother over her children, seeing that no wild animals came near to hurt or disturb them. In the evening he would bring them back to his kraal, seal the entrance carefully with branches of the toughest thorn, and watching them contentedly chewing the cud, and he thought: “In the morning I shall have a wonderful lot of milk to draw from them.”
One morning, however, when he went into his kraal expecting to find the udders of the cows full and sleek with milk, he was amazed to see they were slack, wrinkled and empty. He thought with immediate self-reproach he had chosen their grazing badly, and took them to better grass. He brought them home in the evening and again thought, “Tomorrow for a certainty I shall get more milk than ever before.”
But again in the morning the udders were slack and dry. For the second time he changed their grazing, and yet again the cows had no milk. Disturbed and suspicious, he decided to keep a watch on the cattle throughout the dark. In the middle of the night he was astonished to see a cord of finely-woven fibre descending from the stars; and down this cord, hand over hand, one after another came some young women of the people of the sky. He saw them, beautiful and happy, whispering and laughing softly among themselves, steal into the kraal and milk his cattle dry with calabashes.
Indignant, he jumped out to catch them but they scattered cleverly so that he did not know which way to run. In the end he did manage to catch one; but while he was chasing her the rest, calabashes and all, fled up the sky, withdrawing the cord after the last of them so that he could not follow. However, he was content because the young woman he had caught was the loveliest of them all. She agreed to be his wife and from that moment he had no more trouble from the women of the people of the sky. His new wife now went daily to work in the fields for him while he tended his cattle. They were happy and they prospered. There was only one thing that worried him.
When he caught his wife she had a basket with her. It was skilfully woven, so tight that he could not see through it, and it was always closed firmly on top with a lid that fitted exactly into the opening. Before she would marry him, his wife had made him promise that he would never lift the lid of the basket and look inside until she gave him permission to do so. If he did, a great disaster might overtake them both. But as the months went by, the man began to forget his promise. He became steadily more curious, seeing the basket so near day after day, with the lid always firmly shut.
One day when he was alone he went into his wife’s hut, saw the basket standing there in the shadows, and could bear it no longer. Snatching off the lid, he looked inside. For a moment he stood there unbelieving, then burst out laughing.
Over this seminar, we’ve collected many fine things for our basket. And now is an appropriate time to get an overview of the whole Transforming Communication model.