EP366: Carol Bowser - The Conflict Management Crash Course

Michael Palmer: Conflict resolution skills are skills, which means that you have to kind of learn them. You have to continue to refine them. And the people who make it look amazing, seamless, effortless practice a lot. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today Today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is the president of Conflict Management Strategies and is a workplace conflict expert. Carol Bowser, welcome to the show. So pleased to be here. It's wonderful to have you. And conflict management, I mean, my goodness, there's— we don't need any of that, right, in the today, right? Yeah, because it's such a natural skill. Everyone's born with it that, um, you know, It's no conflicts. That's right. We're all just happy getting along. It's all good stuff. Seriously, though, an important topic. I'm excited about it. And before we get into it and get into your wisdom and expertise, please share a little bit about your career journey leading up to this point.

Guest: Well, I am a former employment lawyer who got into conflict resolution even before law school because I was interested in this thing called mediation, where people were actively involved in kind of solving their own problems, but with the help of someone who had a system, a process, and tools. And I felt it was much more empowering. And also, the more I learned about mediation processes, I found out that not only is it a process where people can have a voice in the resolution, but also have a voice in talking about what's important to them. And then also, if they were an active participant in that process, they were much more likely to follow through. And I don't know about your guess, but I mean, don't we have great intentions? We have a plan, but maybe our follow-through is lacking. And if we don't have that follow-through, then maybe we just dampen something but don't actually make a substantive change. So I did mediation training, I practiced law, and I found out that that probably wasn't a really good fit. You know, we talk about having, you know, certain knowledge and