PPP 521 | Neuroscience-Based Principles to Resolve Conflicts, with Dr. Jeremy Pollack

Summary In this episode, Andy sits down with Dr. Jeremy Pollack, a social-organizational psychologist and founder of Pollack Peacebuilding Systems, author of Wired for Peace: Using 7 Neuroscience-Based Principles to Resolve Conflicts. Jeremy looks at conflict through the lens of the brain and nervous system, which helps explain why disagreements escalate so quickly and why the fixes we reach for often make things worse.

Andy and Jeremy talk about why de-escalation has to come before problem-solving, since solutions and stress do not mix. Jeremy walks us through his Sapien Model of six basic psychological needs, giving us a far more useful lens than labeling a stakeholder difficult, defensive, or resistant. You will hear how memory and prediction shape the way we read the person in front of us, what a team learns when its leader consistently avoids conflict, and why changing our experience of conflict requires new experiences, not just new beliefs. Jeremy also shares how this shows up at home, in marriage and parenting.

If you're looking for a practical, evidence-based way to handle the conflicts that come with leading, this episode is for you!

Sound Bites "The most fruitful relationships from what I've seen at work, at home, et cetera, are those that can weather storms without the real fear of abandonment." "That was pretty interesting to me to see how much of the science is telling us that, like, our brain is mostly a predictive machine." "Anytime we're in an escalated or emotionally charged state, there's something going on in our brains, usually subconsciously, that's tracking a threat or an impediment to our basic needs." "It's de-escalate first because solutions and stress just don't mix." "What I'm feeling right now is not a result of what the person's saying. It's a result of the way my body is responding." "I call it an experiential thumbprint. It's completely unique to you and no one else has your nervous system, and you don't have anyone else's." "If we have a negative experience with someone and we go into a place of fear or pain or anger or something like that, the way that we see them going forward can change very, very quickly, and it's a lot harder to get us to unsee that." "We access memories in edit mode. And so after we retrieve it, and when we write it back, it's not always quite the same thing, and that's always made me question not is that memory correct as much as is it completely correct." "All conflict is an opportunity for learn