Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I’ve met people who feel a deep inner echo to the idea of making peace.  I’m a bit mystical about such things. The inner echo is one mark of a calling and I have a lot of time for people hearing it.

But then it gets complicated.  How to get from inner echo to outer action? Sustaining my own call over 37 years and observing others, I’ve learned a few things:

1.  View a job in conflict resolution and peacebuilding as a long-term objective.

   Almost nobody gets a degree in conflict resolution and then walks straight into a job in the field. You prepare and position yourself, you build experience and relationships, and if you are lucky a path slowly opens. Which means that, unless you are independently wealthy, you need to….

2. Maintain at least one area of expertise or credentials besides peacebuilding.

   Most people with a job in conflict resolution subsidized their interest for a number of years with something else.   It takes a while to build up experience and a reputation in conflict resolution. In the meantime you’ve got to eat.  Whether law, social work, editing, teaching, web freelancing, pastoring, or carpentry, you’ll probably need something else to live on. This is not a bad thing because there’s more than financial reasons to have a second set of credentials.

3. The path to full-time work in conflict resolution often runs through something else you’re already good at.

   People in conflict don’t want just any old mediator. They want someone competent in the area of their disagreement. Businesses want assistance from someone who understands business; schools, an educator. Religious organizations want “one of us.” International organizations seek facilitators, trainers, and consultants with deep knowledge of a region or relevant disciplines. So expertise in another area gives you your best opportunities for building a career in conflict resolution.
   
   Even if you cannot yet credibly present yourself as a resource on conflict resolution, you can still  advocate for creation of structures and processes for constructive resolution in the settings where you are connected. Start a playground mediation program in your school if you’re a teacher, encourage clients to explore mediation if you’re a lawyer, counsel a client in dealing with a conflicted family if you’re a social worker, lead a workshop on conflict resolution for a group of youth if you’re a youth worker.
   
   One great way to start is by leading a conflict styles workshop. Groups and teams of all kinds benefit from spending an hour or two reflecting on conflict style preferences of individuals in the group. So long as you are comfortable with basic group facilitation you don’t need to be a conflict resolution expert to lead a successful learning experience. Download my free “Trainers Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Workshops” for help in designing the workshop.
   
   In all the above, you’ll make mistakes but you’ll learn fast! If you enjoy it and others respond well, you’ll want more and you’ll find ways to do a repeat. Over time,  more and bigger doors will open.

4. Expand your vocational goal from mediator to peacebuilder.  

   Mediating is a valuable but rather narrow go-between role, often confined by professional or social expectations, for which there is limited need in our world. Peacebuilding is a way of being and contributing to constructive resolution of conflict that can find expression in any number of roles and functions. There will never be enough peacebuilders because human beings are diverse and therefore conflict is inescapable.
   
   You might find, if you are, say, a lawyer, that you love being known for handling legal cases in ways that encourage early settlement. An administrator might take deep satisfaction in becoming highly effective in managing staff disputes. Even if you are sure you wish to end up working fulltime as a mediator, one of the best things you can to do open doors for that is to become known in your existing profession as someone with great conflict resolution skills.

5. Polish writing skills.

   Conflict resolution work almost always involves the creation of new processes and structures. You have to advocate unusual ideas, develop proposals to get approval and funding, draft reports, create summaries. All have written communication at their core.  So at a minimum make it a goal to learn how to write clearly and simply.
   
   In a world where digital communication influences everything, learn tools for use of visuals in writing as well. You probably already know how to use Word and Powerpoint. What about Canva.com, where you can easily craft killer visuals with attractive fonts and pictures at little cost?  (I have no relationship to any of the mentioned products or sites.)

6. Learn inbound marketing.

   This is a recent and still tentative learning based on the eye-opening education I've received marketing my Style Matters conflict style inventory. Seemingly unnoticed by people in the social change, peacebuilding, community development, and human rights worlds, a transformation is taking place in how businesses reach buyers and clients.
   
   Many successful online businesses now avoid the loud, attention-getting sales strategies once considered necessary to sell. Instead they invest in listening carefully to the people who use their products. They give away a lot of useful knowledge and services for free. They emphasize collaboration and networking. People come to view such businesses as helpful and trustworthy and don’t need to be persuaded to buy.
   
   Clear strategies and tools have emerged in the business world with tremendous potential for peacebuilders and other agents of social change. Do a search on “inbound marketing” for resources, many of them free, at least for small users. Two of my favorites are hubspot.com and smartpassiveincome.com.
   
   Look at Craig Zelizer’s Peace and Collaborative Development Network for a rare example of inbound marketing in the social change world. Lots of freebies there – good ones that clearly respond to needs. Extensive use of social media. Blogging. Networking in all directions. Obviously the site requires revenue and generates some – ads, requests for support – but revenue generation doesn’t dominate.  And no, you don’t have to be as big and ambitious as that site to benefit from inbound marketing approaches.

7. If you aspire to do peacebuilding internationally, get a foundation in community development.

   The cutting edge in peacebuilding internationally lies at the intersection of peacebuilding and development. Reflect that awareness in your career path and you will be more credible to agencies doing serious peacebuilding work.  The single best career advancer for someone interested in international peacebuilding would be to spend several years in development work, paid or volunteer.
   
   But do not make the mistake of targeting the large, monied international organizations that are widely considered the pinnacle of international work as your ultimate career destination. You will pay dearly to elevate yourself in such organizations, in currencies that are priceless – the health and stability of your personal relationships (“Consider the UN your wife,” a seasoned UN peacebuilder once advised me, not in jest), your rootedness in community, your hopefulness for humanity, your contentment of soul.
   
   That is not advice against a sojourn in such places, but rather a caution against staying too long in them or assuming too much regarding what can be achieved there, how you will be treated, and how you will feel about your life as a result of your time there.
   
   If you like this post, click on an icon below to give it visibility on Facebook, LInkedIn or Twitter!
   

   Ron Kraybill has worked as an in-residence peacebuilding advisor and trainer in South Africa, Lesotho, the Philippines, Ireland and other locations for the United Nations, Mennonite Central Committee, and other organizations since 1979.  He now resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and blogs at www.KraybillTable.com. Copyright Ron Kraybill 2016.  All rights reserved. May be reproduced if this statement of authorship is included and links are made to http://www.riverhouseepress.com/blog/career-in-conflict-resolution/.

By adopting practices of interaction largely stripped of symbols and moments to engage Depth, we cut ourselves off from the most powerful source of energy for creativity, connection, and change available to us.

Are you exploring the power of symbols in your work in conflict resolution and human development?

I am moved by an email I recently received from Samaritan Inns, which serves homeless people. “At Samaritan Inns, during every counseling session, we sit out one empty chair. Every client knows that this chair represents the person who isn’t here yet. This is the next client that walks through our doors and onto the road to recovery.”

That empty chair is a potent symbol of hope. It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to place it, or to explain the meaning of its presence. It will be forgotten during most of an intense counseling session.

Yet it serves as a tangible, here-and-now reminder of things every person in counseling benefits from remembering. He or she is not the only one who suffers. The journey of recovery awaits, for all, whenever they choose to begin it. There is hope for things to get better.

As a symbol, the empty chair invokes these things without preaching, without words. It speaks silently, by its mere presence, to the depths that reside in all human beings but often remain untouched.

The Call to the Deep is often abused. All of us have been subjected to people who shout the Call or try to impose their interpretation of it on others.

As modern people we've rightly reacted to such manipulation. But we’ve also thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In adopting practices of interaction stripped of symbols and moments to engage Depth, we cut ourselves off from the most powerful source of energy for creativity, connection, and change available to us.

The Deep that resides within each human being (or “beyond”, if you prefer) offers its power only to those who seek it through hopeful choice. Loud proclamations, angry condemnations, and invocations of guilt obstruct access to this place.

In today’s  world of competing narratives we’ve exhausted the power of words to call upon that place of deep knowing where we hear and remember Depth.  I’m quickly bored and rarely moved by verbal strategies to take us there. I’m refreshed, intrigued, and inspired by non-verbal ones.

Movement, symbol, sound, smell, silence.

If you were to place an empty chair in your classroom, workshop, session, or meeting, what would you want it to symbolize?

With what symbols do you or might you remind the people you work with that they are not alone in their pain, that “this too shall pass”, that warmth and love still exist even if we don’t feel them right now, that moments of “better” will come, that forgiveness is possible?

What strategies and practices have you experimented with, or better, built into the routines of your work or life that invite all present to the River, that place of the Deep where human beings meet hope, light, and possibility for fresh beginnings?

Conflict style awareness is truly useful in day-to-day management of differences.  It's easy to learn.

But not so easy to do!

Easy:  Learning the basics of conflict styles.  Do this in a few minutes with this free "Intro to Conflict Styles".  You can figure out your own conflict style almost as quickly by taking a conflict style quiz (such as my Style Matters; the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, or even a cross-cultural one).

Challenging:  remembering, in the heat of conflict, to use those great conflict resolution strategies.  We are hardwired by nature with a tiny set of responses when we are frightened or angry: flight, fight, or freeze.  Those three simple responses enabled survival in the jungle and you can witness them any time you want in the animal world.  But they have limited use for human beings today.

To build partnerships and solve problems in a complex world we need additional options for responding, and the ability to choose rather than merely react.  We acquire these capacities, not by relying on instinct, but by thought, practice, and reflection.

Injustice is a big problem.   But it's always a symptom of a deeper cause.

Wherever people aren't getting their fair share, you'll find patterns of decisions being made without genuine participation of people affected by them.

You can't build lasting peace and you won't get justice if people feel excluded from decisions they care about.  That works sometimes for a little while but in the end things fall apart.

If you want to fight for justice, go for root causes. Fight for good process, starting with the groups where you hold power or influence. If you don't make good process a priority there, your base will eventually collapse and everything you've done will be lost.

 


 
 
 

This diagram contains important clues about an alternative to the widely held notion that religious extremism can be forcefully countered. It's from Ian White, a key strategist behind the scene in stabilizing the Northern Ireland peace process.

[caption id="attachment_1048" align="aligncenter" width="638"] Diagram by Ian White - more readable here - shows alternative to "countering" religion

Religion is deeply embedded in human experience. The goal in responding to religious extremism must be to work with and constructively engage the powerful energies of religion rather than to remove or thwart them, what White calls "countering".

The latter rarely work out as expected. To the extent that strategies to counter extremism are violent, they share and strengthen the underlying assertion of extremism, that force is acceptable and effective in building a desirable future. Even when not violent, if such strategies fail to engage religious leaders, they are devoid of understanding of the world from which extremism emerges; and thus bereft of potency and sustainability.

Transformation: A Sustainable Response to Extremism

The only option for responding to religious extremism without making things ultimately worse is a strategy of transformation.

Such a strategy works respectfully and knowledgeably in regard to the role religion holds in human functioning and it engages religious people where they are. It actively seeks out and finds common cause with those values, symbols, traditions, individuals and institutions that support non-violent responses to human diversity; responses that exist in virtually all religious milieu, even if not always apparent from a distance.

Because the only realistic goal is transformation, not transmission or domination, such an approach must be a dialogue, not a monologue.

I spent much of the last month writing new text for the score report of Style Matters. That’s the 10 page personalized report from the online version of my conflict style inventory, whose numbers, with my reflections thereon, go out to users after taking the inventory.

Commanders in military establishments, janitors in neighborhood associations, freshmen at Bible colleges, and pretty much everybody in between read (and I like to think, ponder) this thing; according to logs on our server, nearly 365 days a year.

As usual in our multi-religious family, I did both Pesach and Easter celebrations. Sort of. But mostly, while others congregated for holidays, I wrestled epiphanies in text on my laptop.

And got new hope and vision as I remembered why conflict resolution continues to grip me. Here my traditionalist and my modernist, my believing and my agnostic, my monastic and my populist selves meet. Conflict, or at least reflecting on human responses to it, remains holy ground to this once Mennonite farmer, now aging peace process facilitator.

Conflict Style Awareness is More than Technique

“Conflict management starts with self-management,”  we say on the Style Matters frontpage.  The lone boatman there launches his journey to an unknown destination, symbol of the journey that peacebuilding can launch us on.

 

The Pyramid of Conflict Resolution Skills

What is the connection between interpersonal conflict resolution tools like my Style Matters conflict style inventory or the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and big conflicts of our world, like ethnic and religious violence or threat of nuclear war?

There is in fact a connection between what happens between human beings at the smallest level every day and what happens between nations.   We can't build a peaceful world until parents, teachers, and leaders see this connection.  We must all act on it and teach others about it.

Below is a Pyramid of Competency to show the many layers of competence - and how they relate to each other - that are required for humans to live together peacefully.   I use it at the beginning of training on almost any conflict resolution topic to locate it on a map of "the big picture" of peace skills.  I also use it with individuals eager to pursue conflict resolution skill development to chart a pathway for learning. 

If you took my Style Matters conflict styles inventory or the Thomas Kilmann, you've already given some attention to the second level, "Interpersonal negotiation and conflict resolution".

Ponder this pyramid and you get some clues about why, despite all the progress humans have made, and all the institutions we've created, we're still barely out of  the Dark Ages with conflict resolution.

Do you use an angry voice to communicate or give instructions when a firm, even voice would do the job just as well?



I witness this most commonly in sports settings, where it seems to be accepted that coaches and trainers shout angrily at those they are training.  I'm not talking about raising the voice to be heard.  I mean shouting with angry inflections and body language, to convey authority and motivate.  

Sports isn't the only place this happens.  Every parent and teacher - and I speak as a veteran of both roles - gets ticked off at the youngsters in our charge sometimes.   So do team leaders, managers, and supervisors of all sorts, working with all ages.   Frustration comes with the territory of leadership. 

Anger is a powerful tool for many good purposes, when used sparingly.  The volume and intensity of anger say "Listen up...!" and often people do.  When it's exceptional, anger gets attention and underscores a message.

But used frequently, the positive effects of anger diminish.  Anger stresses people.  Eventually they tune out and turn inwards for relief from the bombardment.  Then you have to shout louder for the same effect.  

Worse,  your emotional outbursts trigger similar responses in others.  Drama and disrespect creep into many discussions and become normal.  All communication suffers, frustration spirals, and morale goes down. 

Pain Pushes us to Our Own Healing

Those called to work for healing and social transformation of our world must think about two transformations. 

The first is obvious, the mission of healing, leadership, or change we’ve trained for, and on which we spend our days: To call for peace when the masses clamor for war, to build bridges across no-man's land, to assist wounded people to get to safe space, to build coalitions among those too weak to stand on their own, to be an advocate for the voiceless.

These tasks require knowledge, skills galore, connections, experience, ability to find resources, and more.   Graduate programs of many kinds excel at preparing young people for vocations of healing and social change.

But there is a second kind of transformation that is just as important and just as challenging, a transformation the professional schools and guilds barely acknowledge, let alone touch.  This is the transformation of the peacebuilder, the healing of the healer.

To say others have problems and we want to help is one thing. To admit that in the process of helping others we encounter our own problems and need help is quite another.    

(Part III in a series from a forthcoming book, Transforming the Healer)

As we accept the reality of our own pain and struggle, and begin to recognize their universality,  we open ourselves to the voice of the soul.   We hear and feel things we never heard or felt before about our gifts and our strengths.  There is energy within, a nudge to speak out, move, or act in new or different ways.

We also notice things in the world that we never noticed before.  Eventually the inner stirring is confirmed by an opportunity or request from without.  

In the interplay of the inner and outer comes a message:  “You possess the right capabilities to address a particular problem in the world.  You are the one able to offer that which is needed.”

This is Call, a deeply felt motivation to mobilize our own unique blend of interests and abilities to address a particular need in the world.    As the next story shows, transformation is not only about hearing our own Call, but about relating to others in ways that help them hear theirs.  

You know me as a peace process guy, a conflict resolution trainer, an author of peace training materials. You don’t know this: I love guns.

As far back as I can remember, guns stood in the corner of the pumphouse on the family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Carrying a 12 gauge shotgun down rows of corn on a chill Saturday morning in October, with our terrier on the prowl and all my teenage senses tuned to the hunt, thrilled me. With the deadly power in my hands I could bring home a pheasant or rabbit if I was quick enough. I felt grownup, part of the world of men.

So in 1993, in a remote training camp in the high veld above Pretoria, on the third day of a course in conflict resolution for police in the new South Africa, when smiling officers came during morning break and asked if I’d like to go out on the firing range, I instantly said yes. 

I wasn’t sure what they had in mind. But soon as I jumped into their van after lunch, I knew. A pile of weapons and ammunition sprawled across seats and floor. Three burly police trainers grinned at me knowingly. We were boys in a toy store and my heart was pounding.

We started with rubber bullets, in two varieties.  One was a heavy chunk of rubber an inch and a half in diameter and over 3 inches long.  I had seen these fired at protesters and witnessed a colleague take a direct hit a year ago as a peace monitor working a chaotic line between police and protesters.  She limped into the office the next day with an angry welt on her thigh the size of a saucer.   Centered in dark purple was a perfectly round, pure white circle larger than a quarter, exactly the size of the rubber bullets I was now firing.

 

The passing this week of Archbishop Desmond Tutu brings a flood of memories of an amazing man and a remarkable chapter in history.  I was in South Africa from 1989 to 1995 and witnessed him in action on many occasions.   

For anyone committed to leading peaceful change in organizations, communities, or nations, there's much to learn from Tutu's life about how to be effective in human transformation.

 

First in a Series

for Exhausted Visionaries, Activists, and Healers

How can we assist the healing of a broken world when we ourselves are far from healed?  

The question has followed me across forty years of work on four continents. I first saw it as a problem for others, in the inability of colleagues to “walk the talk”, in conflict within and among the peace organizations that have been my home, and in burnout among colleagues on rugged edges of my field.   

It was another step when I came to see it as my problem, as I grew more aware of my own inconsistencies and wounds, and my own perennial struggle with exhaustion.  Then came a third big step as I slowly realized we all struggle with a challenge larger than any of us.

The very enterprise of helping, leading, and healing others brings complex issues and decisions into the life of any mortal who steps into it.   Those issues can diminish or enlarge us, socially and spiritually.  If we recognize the opportunity they present for growth, we can make our calling a location of profound growth at all levels of being. 

I went to a conference and met - myself

When I arrived in Denver at the National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution in June, 1986, I was excited about the prospects ahead.   The field of conflict resolution was in its infancy and five hundred people were gathering from all over the world to share our experiences and learn from each other.  As founding director of one of the few organizations with full-time staff in the field at that time, I had looked forward for months to this rare chance to engage fellow pioneers. 

In my early days in peacebuilding,  I met with John A. Lapp, the executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee.   I had just been "hired" for a one-year stint of voluntary service with MCC to establish a new unit, the Mennonite Conciliation Service.

“Your goal should always be to work yourself out of a job,” Lapp commented thoughtfully.  In the 37 years since, I have often remembered the words of this veteran Mennonite peacebuilder and development worker.  Like a zen koan, they have provided me with layers of insight about vocation and the requirements of peacebuilding.

Conflict Transformation Starts with Encouraging Self-Sufficiency

As modern professionals tend to do, I thought of my work as responding to the immediate needs presented by individuals I was working with.  I thought Lapp meant  that, when mediating, I should seek timely withdrawal from conflicts and encourage parties to develop their own means of working out differences. It seemed like good advice and I sought to follow it as the caseload of our new unit slowly developed.

I was unable yet to see that my mentor, a veteran development worker deeply tutored by life experience working with communities that were both conflicted and disadvantaged, almost certainly had in mind dynamics and needs larger than the day to day quarrels of individuals.

Transformation Continues with Building Capacity to Make Peace

As requests for mediation increased, I sensed a call for deeper forfeiture than I had first understood.  I could be only one place at a time; conflict is everywhere. To achieve our goal of encouraging constructive resolution of conflict in communities and the nation, I should let go of the goal of becoming the mediator and instead train others as mediators.  I loved mediating, but I recognized I must shift my priority to training mediators, a mission I felt pretty shaky about.

Transformation Expands by Training Trainers

I soon came to love training even more than mediating.  But as demand for MCS workshops increased, it became apparent that a still deeper level of relinquishment was called for.   My calendar couldn’t accommodate all the promising possibilities to lead training workshops.  Rather than training mediators I ought to be training trainers.

I began pulling away from doing training workshops myself and sought to focus my priorities around developing others as trainers and bringing them into MCS workshops as co-leaders and leaders.

This was strange and scary in the beginning.  I was used to being in front, teaching.  Now I was often at the back while others taught.  And if I gave away all my training expertise, wouldn't I soon be left behind, with nothing to do?

Transformation Endures by Multiplying those with a Vision for Peace

Of course it didn't take long to see that being at the heart of a network of trainers grateful for what I had taught them was even more rewarding than training itself!

Yet even this focus eventually proved too narrow.  Peace in our world requires people with broad and courageous vision of possibilities for peace.   Such people are present in every society and situation of conflict, but often they lack the courage and skills to act.

So the “job” as I have come to understand it in recent years is to find and be an ally to those with a vision for peace.  Some may become mediators or facilitators, but others will become advocates of tolerance, bridgebuilders to supposed enemies, conveners or funders of fellow peace visionaries, professionals in other callings who use their connections and influence to create processes and institutions that build peace, etc.