Hey, everyone. Tom here. I want to pop in for a second before we start and tell you about the latest PDF we've posted for you.

It is about feedback. If you have ever looked through the episode library, you know how many episodes I've done on feedback, giving feedback, getting feedback, reacting to feedback.

Feedback is such a crucial skill. Well, this PDF has our newest thinking about feedback.

The PDF is in the Toolbin on the Essential Communications website. Please go help yourself.

I am back from Bali and a wonderful visit with my daughter. It was fabulous, as you can imagine.

I look forward to bringing you a new episode next month, but for now, here is a rebroadcast from 2017, an audience favorite called The Conflict Conversation.

It has a ton of tools for you. I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.

Welcome back to the look and sound of leadership. An ongoing series of executive coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.

I'm Tom Henshaw, your executive coach, and today we're talking about the Conflict Conversation.

Ashley wanted coaching on how to argue. I had told her about a concept I call Conflict House. Conflict House is a place where any person with any conflict has to go in order to resolve their conflict, whether an argument's larger small, whether it goes well or is a disaster, every conflict happens inside Conflict House.

Ashley and I had discussed the two ways to enter Conflict House. The one used most often is marked right wrong. People who enter through right wrong are anointed with the powerful belief of being right.

The second, less frequented door is marked, curiosity, entering here causes everything that happens inside to become easier.

Once inside Conflict House, there are only three rooms. You can visit them in any order. During any given argument, one room might be more important than the others. The next time a different room might be more important, but they all need to be visited some time or other.

Inside the three rooms, different conversations take place. The three conversations are what happened, feelings, and identity.

People who learn to recognize which room they're in, which conversation they're actually having navigate Conflict House more effectively than those who don't. Ashley wanted the code for recognizing the rooms.

That coaching conversation was last month's executive coaching tip. The episode is called Conflict.

Now, she wanted to know what to say when she found herself in each room.

I suggested our conversation would be more useful if we used an actual situation from her life. She said, oh my, I've got a humdinger. It's about our kids and their damned phones. She laughed.

You see, I've already got feelings about it.

Ashley told me that she and her husband, Jeremy, were arguing about rules for each kid's phone usage. Ashley had read a lot of articles which had spurred her to want to talk about rules in the first place. This was an important issue to her.

Jeremy's argument wasn't with Ashley's reasons, but he felt strongly he didn't want to become an enforcer. He felt her rules would provoke endless battles with little benefit.

Now, understanding the basics of the argument, I asked, so when you're arguing about the kid's phones, what does the what happened story sound like?

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