Shifting Focus

Workdays don’t always begin with coffee and end with high-fives, head nods and complete agreement among colleagues. Gaining the confidence to share your opinions can be difficult. Let’s say you overcome your inhibitions and share an idea with peers on an important subject. It could be discouraging if it doesn’t earn the reaction or support you expected. Colleagues might ask questions which could make you nervous if you didn’t anticipate them. You may listen more intently as you attempt to express your thoughts and find the middle ground. You may begin to question your problem-solving skills when your idea doesn’t seem to address the problem in their eyes. According to lifehacker.com, if you’re feeling discouraged at work, one of the best things to do is pause and work on something else. Shifting your focus could help you gain a fresh perspective and perform at your best.

Positive Intent

You may feel frustrated, stressed, or maybe just confused. Second-guessing your thought process may cause you to incorrectly assume your colleagues don’t respect your opinion. You could experience various emotions warping your thoughts and causing you to doubt yourself and your colleagues. The hrplaybook.com challenges us to assume the positive rather than the negative. Doing this can prevent jumping to conclusions and letting your emotions get the best of you.

Adapt Your Thinking

You can’t allow disagreements to poison relationships at work. While you may have many accomplishments, there’s always room for improvement. If you’re willing, there’s a lot you can learn from colleagues. Living in a multicultural society provides access to people with different upbringings and traditions. These differences are what make each one of us unique. Acknowledging and embracing your colleagues’ differences as they do yours, allows you to appreciate their perspective and the underlying factors that influenced them. Adaptability, as defined by your.yale.edu, is a person’s ability to accept change. Listening to your colleagues will make you a better communicator, help you follow their train of thought and adapt to new ways of thinking.

Learn Something New

As you engage colleagues, you will undoubtedly learn how to see problems from different points of view. This ability to leverage new perspectives will no doubt help you develop and generate more unique ideas. Whether at work, at home or in public, disagreements happen every day, but you can’t take them personally. How you handle workplace conflicts will go a long way to deciding where you succeed and where you come up short. Navigating disagreements constructively, creates ongoing opportunity for productive discussions that lead to solutions.

In the end, disagreements aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Different opinions and perspectives will challenge you to dig deeper and think more creatively. Without opposing points of view, ideas can lack vision and not reflect consumer insights or behaviour. If your colleagues never challenged you, what would you learn?

 

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