In this episode, Clair Canfield tells us that, for many, conflict is considered a negative experience and an indication that something has gone wrong. When viewed from that perspective it frequently creates interactions that leave us feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.
During this podcast, Clair shares a new way of approaching conflict that could empower us to create the change we want to see in our relationships, in the family, in the workplace, and in our communities.
Clair Canfield is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communications at Utah State University and is a founding member of the Heravi Peace Institute at USU. He has an undergraduate degree from Weber State University, a master’s in communication studies from the University of Montana, and received a graduate certificate in Conflict Resolution from the University of Utah.
Clair is a certified mediator and has taught in the field for 20+ years. His experiences of helping others to resolve their conflicts has led to insights about what it takes to transform conflict into something beautiful. He has shared these insights with thousands of students over the years.
TEDx Talk: The Beauty of Conflict
full transcript
Elizabeth Cantwell: Hello, and welcome to Future Casting with Utah State. I'm Elizabeth Cantwell. I'm the president of USU and host of this podcast. So today I'm talking to Clair Canfield. Clair is a senior lecturer in Utah State's Department of Communications, and he's a faculty member at the Heravi Peace Institute.
The holidays are just around the corner, so we typically will all be excited to get together with family and friends. But there's also, I think, for all of us really an appreciation that conflict can arise about any number of values, topics politics, especially in an interesting election year like the one we are living through. So I've asked Clair to help us really better understand how to navigate hard conversations, especially in holiday seasons, so we can cultivate meaningful relationships with those that are closest to us. And, you know, Clair, this is really, you know, your specialty, but this this idea of, how do we first, why, and how do we struggle with conflict, and then how can we turn that to the advantage of our relationships, to make our relationships stronger and or better?
Clair Canfield: Yeah, I love that you mentioned that it's about cultivating relationships. And oftentimes we think about conflict as being some sort of problem in our relationships. Yeah, exactly. And we experience it as that like you can bring up distress, fear, all kinds of absolutely anxiety, which is why, for the vast majority of people, they avoid those types of conversations they don't want to engage in that way, because they feel like it's not going to cultivate the relationship, it's going to damage it. And that's the way I grew up thinking about conflict.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Yes, I grew up in a very conflict averse family, yeah, what was that like?
Clair Canfield: What was, oh, there's lots of things we didn't talk about. Yes, yes. That was very similar to my family. It's like you could know that there was a concern, a problem, a conflict, and even the other person could know, and they probably knew that you knew, and you knew that they knew that you knew, but still nobody was talking, no talking, yeah. And so from that perspective, a lot of people avoiding conflict makes a lot of sense, but yet it's not helping to cultivate relationships. It's often creating additional distress or problems within it that can fester grow. I'm always concerned with people being able to cultivate the kind of relationships they want.
Elizabeth Cantwell: My understanding is that your story, your own personal story, sort of got you to this place, both of scholarship around conflict and is really kind of, we thought, well, particularly for our students, it's really important to hear someone provide permission where it's where maybe these kinds of family relationships like we're talking about, don't really provide permission to not only think about it, but talk about it and kind of be in it in a way that's healthy, not harmful.
Clair Canfield: It's not uncommon for people to feel shame, uncertainty, doubt, because they don't know how to handle it, even though they haven't been given anything to handle it any differently than the way they grew up, learning how to do it, watching it within their families of origin and on the playground. And so even though there's been very little in terms of support for that. People can feel bad about their inability to know how to navigate it. And sometimes, when students come into a class where you know, I'm talking about this sometimes taboo subject, this highly emotionally charged subject, they can feel like, well, he can do it because he's just good at that, and has always been good at that, but I can't do that because my family never taught me how to handle these kinds of things. For me, really useful that I come from that kind of place of not being good at handling conflict, because I think it provides some sense of hope for people that, oh, well, if he could improve on it. Well, then maybe there's a pathway for me to do that too.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Do you model in class? Because for me, at least, it seems like you have to see it and observe it to really fully internalize the ability to just be in the face of conflict and not avoid it.
Clair Canfield: Yeah, that's an intuitive comment, because I don't know if this metaphor will work for you. Have you ever fished? Yes, I have fished. So there's types of knowledge that aren't just purely rhetorical, where it's like, you can have somebody explain it and then you know it, or can do the thing. There's types of knowledge that in order to develop it, you either have to watch a master do it or do it yourself. And if you're going to learn to fish, you can't just sit in a classroom and have somebody explain the arc that you should, you know, toss your line or so embarrassing learning to fish Yes, and like when I need to pull in and when I'm pulling too hard, and I'm going to just yeah. Think the hook out of the mouth. It's like, if you're going to learn to fish, I need to watch somebody that knows how to fish, and I need to get in the river and fish myself. And that's true of this type of learning, right? With conflict, you've got to watch somebody who knows how to do it, and you have to practice it. So my work is often focused on, how do you apply this? How do you not just think about it and talk about it, but how do you use it?
Elizabeth Cantwell: How do you do it in your relationships, so that you can cultivate them so in class or in your work? Do you talk about your own process, how you came from a family that I mean, whatever situation you grew up with, to being able to not just face conflict, but teach.
Clair Canfield: Because if for anybody to change the pathway that they are in in life, you kind of have to own where it came from. If you're going to be the author of your life, you have to know that the chapters that led to where you are, and for many people, conflict are generational patterns. Oh, that doesn't surprise me at all, and those things just continue to get perpetuated. So for me, I frequently will share with people my history so they kind of understand where it started for me, and for me, it was a heavy influence by my dad. So my dad grew up in really challenging circumstances. When he was only one year old, his mother left, took his only sister and left he and his four brothers behind with their father. He was always behind with dad. Yeah, and dad was an alcoholic, hard story. He was not interested in taking care of them, so he put them right into foster care, which was not a great situation for them. There was abuse and neglect. He eventually took them back when he remarried. But he remarried a fellow alcoholic with five sons of her own, and then they had seven more together, and there was lots of tension, and the kind of conflict that existed in his family of origin was often violent, so he learned to just avoid it, to make himself small and invisible. And when he was forced into it, then he reacted very violently, like he was going to end it quickly and make sure you never messed with him again. And his parents again left later in his life, he was put into the foster care system again. Eventually, he was taken in by my great uncle, who I thought was my grandpa until I was 18 and he learned to start to deal differently, relationally with people. But of course, all those experiences get carried with you. They leave behind scars, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional. And he, you know, with his family of origin and then his family of creation. I'm one of eight kids, and I was somehow in the middle of a lot of I'm the third of eight, and I was kind of in the middle of a lot of stuff. And my dad was so uncomfortable when we would be in conflict, he'd put an end to it immediately. He'd be like, stop fighting, hug, kiss, makeup, and then I'd be sent out into the garden to pick up a bucket full of rocks is like my penance, exactly. And because he loved to garden, and there were always rocks to pick up, and I was picking them up and pouring them over into the pasture, and I had a monument of conflict growing faster than I was, and it taught me to avoid it, because it never was positive. It always hurt me in the relationship. So he influenced me, and I had to own that led me to where I was.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So at some point in this discussion, I would love to take not right away, but I'm giving you a heads up this us to the place where our societally generalized personal approaches to conflict become societies whole approaches to conflict to the detriment of whole communities and whole peoples, because there is a way that we certainly see those differences in how conflict is ideated and thought about and things like that. But for now, I think people, and I generally also see this very much with our students, maybe more as time goes on, a real increasing level of challenge with conflict. Sometimes that's because of the emotional content and how much that's modulated and controlled by what media does today. And I don't just mean social media but just where media is at and the amount of media content that gets thrown at people today. And you know what? What's real anger and what's not real anger? And what does anger have to do with conflict kinds of but we also don't have language, or we have less and less language to gracefully address conflict.
Clair Canfield: I think that language part is a really important starting place, because without different language to wrap around it, we can't think about it. We can't approach it differently. Way than the way we always have, and that's been a part of what I've tried to do with students. To shift from a conflict is bad. It's something to be managed or resolved, to get over that. It's a problematic part of our relationships. To change that way of thinking requires new language right to approach conflict as a transformational process, one that encourages change within ourselves and within our relationships and our communities, means we have to start talking about it differently, thinking about it differently, because any tools that I try to offer people when they're still thinking about conflict as a negative, detrimental experience, they can't use them because they don't want to be engaged in it. It still feels bad and negative. And so once they can shift some of the language and some of the thinking and the ways of understanding it, then those tools start to work.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So do you use examples or in your class work, do you have scenarios that you work through? Yeah, yeah. Describe.
Clair Canfield: We sometimes will do some role plays, but most frequently, I like people to just engage with the conflicts they currently have. Like, let's look at what you're experiencing, because those are the places that are meaningful to them, and everybody's conflict is tied to the things that they value and that are important to them, right? It's so much deeper than the surface level that we usually are talking about, like the intensity that people can have around a conflict over which way to put the toilet paper roll on. It doesn't make any sense logically that like it could be so intense, but it is because it's not actually about that. It's about something deeper. It's about our relationships, our identity, our sense of competency and likability. There are so many things driving it that are deeply at the core of who we are and the changes we want to create that once we can understand that and have this new language, then we can start to get under the surface and start to address those things. Because research shows that 70% of conflicts in long term committed relationships are systemic, repetitive conflicts. We keep having them over and over again, and in part, it's because we haven't ever addressed what they're really about. They are not about the dishes, which is the most common form college roommate mine either like I tell stories of like, four decades worth of conflict that has occurred over dishes in various phases of my life, and students here on campus, that's what they number one, right? Is cleanliness and dishes in apartments are arranged in the refrigerator. Yes, and it's not actually about those things.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Did you teach this semester as we were running up to election? But what? What are our I am not asking for insight into our students personal matters, but, but as a teacher, now, what kinds of conflict are most challenging?
Clair Canfield: Yeah, the kinds that are most challenging are the things that speak to the very core of a lot of our identities. And politics is one of those. Religion is one of those, right, our relationships. So when you really get to the core of what matters to people, you're going to see conflict around that. Because conflict isn't really about I did something wrong. You did something wrong. It's about I care. I care about something deeply enough that when I get in in relation to you, and we bump up against each other because we care that's going to be a place of conflict. So it's not actually awful that we're having conflict around politics or religion or in our relationships. It's that we're not navigating them in a way that cultivates connection and relationship. We're instead navigating it in a way that feels destructive and counterproductive. I'm happy when people have conflict because it shows them what they care about, and those are some of the areas that people care deeply about.
Elizabeth Cantwell: We could go down a deep rabbit hole about divisiveness in politics today, just I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly educated people, but politically all over the map, and I remember our parents having picnics with one another, or parties and people like pretty vehemently disagreeing about one candidate running for office or another, but not alienating one another, not alienated from one another, right? In a way that I really, really see today, which is a that is a rabbit hole, but I think our forms of media also underscore differences and not similarities. Do your students and do we? Do you think we're seeing more fraught holiday experiences? Absolutely can. Trick. I mean, this is the so we're all going to negotiate this through, through our holidays this year and going forward, my family has increasingly focused on kind of elaborate food preparation, because it's like my, well, my family, when I was young, focused on playing games instead of talking about stuff. So elaborate food preparation is another way to sort of have a distraction, not just the preparation, but then the plating and all of the all that stuff. How can we invite the community that listens to this podcast to think about navigating conflict around holidays, when maybe people you only see once a year or every two years or three years in your space,
Clair Canfield: I like your use of the word invite, because it's pretty common for us to get stuck in conflict because we aren't inviting someone into a collaboration, into working with us. We're sometimes trying to control the outcome or fix things or make things different. And maybe you've heard this term before, but sometimes we take the short, long way instead of the Long, short way.
Elizabeth Cantwell: That’s how we end up with four generations of issues around plates or
Clair Canfield: Absolutely, refrigerators. To think about conflict as again, I want to get over it and past it and fix it and have it done. Makes us start to feel kind of a sense of scarcity of how to handle this, instead of realizing that, like the short way is actually the long way. It's building and cultivating the relationships. It's seeing each other as people and working together. And I think that's part of what you're illustrating with media and issues around politics, is we may not be looking at, how were we working together on these problems, but rather, how do we win? How do we win an election? How do we win our point? And that just pushes us further away from working together and collaborating on really significant issues that all of us face. So
Elizabeth Cantwell: for the other dynamic that occurs to me, for our students is going to be that while they're not children, they're probably not the elders in the room, and may feel that their voice doesn't necessarily have a place. I actually feel like we should have a conflict hotline, because it's not the same as serious life tragedies. It's not the same as other kinds of hotlines. But the number of times I think, what do I do now Exactly, exactly, as President of a very large institution, I can guarantee you that there are many moments where I have the and, you know, my response is to because I sort of trust that I have enough experience at this point is to dive in, yeah, but that little voice is there a fair amount. Do I do now?
Clair Canfield: Yeah. Yeah, it is so frequent for people in conflict to get to a point where they feel stuck, and you have been able to find ways to navigate that right, and it's probably taken a lot
Elizabeth Cantwell: of experience, a lot of experience,
Clair Canfield: And a lot of mistakes, right, because our experience and our wisdom comes often from making mistakes, and we do sometimes need a place where we can talk through that, right? You're still going to have to make the decisions, but I need somebody that's going to listen to me, that provides a place where I can navigate and think about that and notice where I'm getting stuck, pick up on patterns that aren't working for me. We actually have a hotline like that here, here at USU, it's the conversational space Makers Program, which I started a few years ago. Because as you can imagine, when you're talking with students and encouraging them to engage in their own lives and conflicts, they end up in your office asking me about what they should do. Because here's the situation, here's where I'm stuck that voice in their head about I don't know what to do next, and they need a place where a person is going to listen, that isn't going to judge them, isn't going to tell them what to do and give them advice, because they've got plenty of places that they can go and get bad advice or good or good advice that they will take only if they already agree with it, and then they have somebody To blame if it doesn't go well, or they've learned I can't figure it out on my own. So there's problematic aspects, even as somebody who might have a lot of experience in telling them what to do. So rather than telling them what to do in their conflict, I ask them questions that help them think about what they care about, what the conflict really is, where they're getting stuck, what their emotions might be, helping them to pay attention to and notice and they've got a place where they know I'm going to not going to talk about it with anybody else. It's confidential. It's a safe place for them to do it. I'm not judging them. So I've been training students to make those kinds of conversational spaces for each other, and we have a program now that which is
Elizabeth Cantwell: huge. That peer to peer is something I think about a lot with just, not just students, but our whole community. How do we stop looking for someone to save us and start saving each other? Yeah, so. But what a lot of what you appear to be talking about is really flipping the paradigm yes from and I'm, I make, I mean, I'm making this up as I, as I, because I haven't read a lot of your publications. Apologies for that. But from negative to both self investigation and again, this permission to invite a different kind of interaction, yeah, at least on a one to one level, yeah, with a person or persons you know you're in your home, or the home you grew up in, or a place that generally feels like you've been taken care of there perhaps you haven't, but and then there's conflict that isn't in your best interest. How do you flip that paradigm?
Clair Canfield: Yes, it is absolutely a paradigm shift. The way I describe this kind of transformational approach to conflict is that it's beautiful. I don't know how to describe it in any other way, because of the way that those kind of conversations can build connection, create intimacy, trust, safety, cooperation, that it can facilitate change when students actually start engaging in that, and when I've had experiences with that type of transformational conflict, that paradigm shift around it, they've been some of the most deeply impactful, meaningful conversations I've had in my life. They're transformative. They're beautiful.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Is there a I'm thinking about this around holidays, where we, I think all have experienced a lot of weird conflict, or your people arguing in the kitchen or whatever, to draw attention to what we're actually doing together, something different than the conflict. Now that may be avoidance, but, but it also seems like for holidays anyway. It's part of why we are even together, even if we dread it. We do it because it's mean. Talk about generational it's so evocative of what we do as family and have for many, many generations, is gather around the holiday, and we gather and fight, but, and
Clair Canfield: That's really at the heart of it, that tension of like we'd care deeply, right about these relationships and these times and these traditions, and like there are things that matter there, And also, we have not learned how, sometimes, to connect or to work through those tensions. And so, how can we, how can we flip that, right?
Elizabeth Cantwell: So, so, how can we flip that? I'm hearing a fair amount about a little bit of sort of know thyself, learn to sense the physical reactions in the body, that that can be the tell tale for you, that that not only are you in conflict, but you have this opportunity. Do you do breathing meditate, something to change your physiological
Clair Canfield: So you're identifying, you know, some of what it takes, one is how we're going to think about it. And second, how are we going to engage in it? Yeah, so if we can start by thinking about it as, this is an opportunity to connect. This is a place to cultivate relationships. This is a place that I can create change and then also understand what, what's the skill set, what's the interactional ways that I can that I can allow that to start to unfold and happen. For example, one of the most powerful skills is asking questions. Instead of making statements, we're so quick to tell a story of what we already think other people are thinking and feeling and why they did what they did, that we don't leave a lot of room for curiosity or to see them, or to ask a question that might help us understand themselves and ourselves. Martin Buber says that really all or all knowing is in meeting like that's how we come to see ourselves and other people. But if I'm not asking questions, as you said to like, what is driving this? What's important to me here, right? What are my emotions trying to help me gain attention towards and then what's going on for them? I tell myself a story of why I think they're behaving the way that they are, or how they feel or what they care about, but I'm often wrong and even if I'm right, I hate being told what I think or feel or why I did, even if you're right about me, you're creating a defensiveness, a disconnect, a distancing instead of, instead of a drawing closer together.
Elizabeth Cantwell: How do you do that? I mean, we're, you know, we're sort of talking here at the intersection of psychology and sort of social. Or, you know, just normal social interactions. Do I say? I don't really agree with you, but I would like to hear more, yeah, and that's I'm just trying to see something where it's like A and then B shifts it,
Clair Canfield: Yeah, yeah. We can recognize, like, this is something that's important to me. This brings some stuff up for me, and I can see that this matters to you too, and I'd like to understand more. Like, help me understand what this is about for you and that invites you to also be curious about what it is for me when we are when we are focused on, let me tell you my version of things and how I think, and we're like, just trying to get a word in, edgewise, always thinking about what we're going to say, then we're kind of having a dueling monolog, instead of a dialog like,
Elizabeth Cantwell: if it is that not what lawyers do. Yes.
Clair Canfield: They don't ask open, honest questions. They ask questions, as my lawyer friend has told me I never ask a question I don't already know the answer to,
Elizabeth Cantwell: striving towards a particular outcome yes
Clair Canfield: Versus a question that comes from a place within me of true curiosity and desire to understand and that I can't possibly know the answer to. I haven't already decided what I think it is or what you're going to say, and I'm not trying to guide you somewhere honestly looking to see and understand you.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So let's go to the thing that I that I talked about earlier, and maybe examine for a minute how this kind of flipping the I mean, you work in the Heravi Peace Institute, which is many things, but among them is a place where we hope to influence at its highest level, global peace, which change means changing the nature of conflict at a societal level? Yeah, maybe nations, but even down and into communities, which definitely crosses the line these days, almost always of politics and kind of Clan affiliations and these really strongly held ties. And I think this is relevant to the holidays, because it's not just us experiencing things around our family table. It is all the houses on either side of us. It's everybody in our neighborhood. It's the difference between coming home from Thanksgiving dinner and gaming and going and providing, you know, serving Thanksgiving dinner to somebody else. Yeah, these kind of really societally driven choices. How do we do that in our own communities? Yeah,
Clair Canfield: it's such a great question, and I think it's one that I often see students struggling with, because we recognize at the heart of all of that is a lot of suffering there. There are people suffering at all those levels, right? And it exists at societal levels, yeah, national levels. And when we look at that and students are more connected now to seeing it than ever, right? It's on their feeds. It's in their face all the time. And there can be a sense of powerlessness, of like, I don't know what to do in the face of all this suffering and this conflict, and I don't see how I can impact it. And it's true that it's important that there are players at certain levels that can have more influence around those than others. In the end, building peace starts within yourself and within the relationships you have around you, because all of those levels come down to the interactions we have with other people, and that is a way you can start influencing all of that is to find a way to capture that peace within yourself, within your relationships, within your communities, and that's where we build it, and that's where We do make a difference, and can, can have choices day to day on how we walk with peace versus walk with violence or in a state of distress and discontent.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So do you have examples to I mean, I think people listening to something like this, we've been a little bit abstract. Not I mean, we've talked about holiday meals, let's say, but where else can we give our listeners some examples of this kind of shift, of approaching conflict differently, and then having that almost enduring kind of shift?
Clair Canfield: Yeah, so you're asking if there are examples that they can look to,
Elizabeth Cantwell: Yeah, or even in your mind, you know, we are there famous examples that aren't, that aren't people who have more patience and love in there. I mean, I am not a saint. There are saints out there. Truly, truly are. Remarkable human beings we can all look at, yeah,
Clair Canfield: and it, it may feel like some of those saints are born that way, but certainly others, I think, develop those capacities. I think of someone like Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, who, who's learned to walk with peace in every step right that is deeply engaged. You know, in in a lot of conflict, peace isn't the absence of having conflict, it's committing to non violent conflict and committing to human thriving in the face of conflict. And I think those examples of people who have just committed themselves to walk a certain way in life can be enough of an example of what it might look like for us, because certainly we all start from where we start, and I I started, you know, with an inability To know how to navigate those types of conversations, or to walk through life with peace. I just thought I had to avoid all conflict
Elizabeth Cantwell: for that gets to be a giant burden.
Clair Canfield: Yeah, I find my life is changed because of my commitment to try and engage with people differently, to try and understand myself and what I care about, what drives my conflicts, and how I want to be with other people, what's important to them, how we can work together around things. Think all of it is doable but hard. It's the long, short way of creating change. It's the much harder thing to do than the quick life hack conversation that will just get us over this.
Elizabeth Cantwell: You know, for me, some of my most impactful life examples have been religious leaders who really have that ability to intake who you are. And you know it they are. They don't have a voice in the back of their head going, I don't know about this person, and I've personally experienced that in in religious contexts more than almost any other part of my life and my world is much more Christian. But not that. All of my experiences with religious leaders have been people who manage conflict well, but at the start was I actually felt like I was experienced as who, as who I was, yes, and that that's a freedom in and of itself, yes. And I
Clair Canfield: think you know you experience there, it there within that context. But all of us can make the choice of what I think I hear you saying is starting by seeing each other fully, and it's like, yeah, I see your human dignity, your humanity, yes, and your value, yes. And that that is not dependent, is not dependent upon which political affiliation you have, whether or not I like the color of your hair and the clothes you wear and the teams you root for and the areas in which you live and how you spend your money, that is not going to impact that I see you as a valuable person, worthy of dignity, belonging, and
Elizabeth Cantwell: that seems like the core of it right there, both at the at the societal level, at The you know, at the war scale of conflict, and at the personal level, is valuing other human beings dignity and their individual grace. Yeah, it's very easy to lose sight of that. Absolutely it is. So how do we you know, here we are at an educational institution, and I encourage myself and everybody to think about how to be open to individuals when we're talking to them or interacting with them. But how do we, or how can we think about promulgating, supporting, keeping in the public eye the value of humans, other humans, and people's inherent right and ability to have dignity and to individually give us more than if we didn't have that person?
Clair Canfield: Yeah it's a choice to practice it. Yeah, right? Because we'd love to think that I can just be that way all the time, and maybe we look to certain saints, as you said, right, as capable of doing that. But our default is oftentimes not to see others dignity and humanity, but to see them as an object or something in my way, an obstacle or irrelevant to my life. Yeah. So rather than it being something that we can only aspire to, you know, the saints that that can do that, it's actually a choice that I get to make on how I practice it, and if I can't help. People understand how to practice something. It's tough to just talk in, as you said, in those high level general ideas, I need people to understand now, you have moments throughout your day, and especially in conflict, where you're going to get to make a choice, and here's how you would practice humanizing this person. Here's how you would practice seeing them fully, right? Here's how you practice non judgment. Because people know what it feels like to be judged. They know when it's happening. It occurs at a level. It's not you saying I'm not judging you that makes me feel unjudged. I feel it in the interaction. And if I can help people understand here's a practical way to practice non judgment, here's a practical way to practice humanizing people, then that's something that they can then develop within themselves. And now we're influencing each other in a different way. Because when I practice seeing you and treating you as a full human being, and you experience that you're influenced by it that starts to change the dynamics of the interactions we have. And you're more likely to treat me with humanity. You're more likely to treat the next person you interact with humanity. And
Elizabeth Cantwell: do you teach these? What do you this is going to sound silly, but what do you teach, but in terms of practices and things that our students take into their not just their personal lives, but their professional lives, and their the rest of the work that they do in college in order to finish and have that additional component of who they are be associated with those practices? Yeah.
Clair Canfield: So I have, for example, a theory or a model that allows people to pay attention to what's happening in the given moment and to focus on process and what it calls for. And then there are a number of practices within that. And so, for example, with getting stuck, objectifying the other person, trying to control them, not really seeing their humanity. Here are a few examples of things that they can practice to get re grounded in reality, to do the acceptance work of like, this is another human being, and I can't control them. And so a few things, for example, in practicing humanizing other people is to first realize they have needs, just like I do, right? I'm experiencing, in this moment, an unmet need or a value that I have and if I can realize, Oh, they're experiencing that too, that helps me re humanize them, they're experiencing emotion in the same way do a uniquely human experience, right of such a wide range of emotions that we can go through that helps me humanize them. A big one for me is everybody suffers. If I can see right in in your state, which might make me feel like you're causing suffering. For me, that may be because you're hurting. Everybody Hurts. So when I can see that, it starts to more fully humanize these practices shift the way I'm seeing you and therefore the way I interact with you. And there can be practices for non judgment and a variety of other things that we get choices to make moment to moment on how we engage in that kind of process,
Elizabeth Cantwell: For me that seems like empathy, which is really challenging if you have children in teaching certain ages where the other isn't part of the Personal paradigm yet, and I can imagine that for our students, it's can be enormously empowering. And I would hope for our entire community just to be able to just have that knowledge, that you have the power to shift the narrative so that it's a, not all about you, and B, you don't feel stuck. And then, I mean to me, that's enormously powerful right there. And whether you can shift the narrative or start having a different conversation, or open your mouth and say things or not, is a whole other thing, which is, yeah, which is harder to do, especially if you feel some sense of fear, which I think we experience a lot more, maybe not as fear, which I think it is, but as kind of caution or a weight I should be careful here, or maybe I should whatever it is, I think that's a fear of the outcome, or not being able to manage The process right that right out the gate. So let's kind of finish up on holidays and stress and conflict and all the things that come for so many people with this part of the the year that we're in, and maybe at least for me, Part. Of that conversation can be around the dichotomy between expectation, you know, the word joy is thrown around all the time, or, you know, happiness family, the dichotomy between what these experiences really feel like and the societal expectation, again, the media expectation and the kind of weight, yeah, of No, no, no. This is like different than your normal everyday life, because this is supposed to be joyful, and I think for a lot of people, it isn't, or it it's hard, it, it is, but it's really overwhelmed by all this other stuff that uniquely also comes with these experiences.
Clair Canfield: Yeah, I'd love to offer you know, you mentioned Joy several times, and I think that's certainly something people would like to access. Yes, absolutely. And this is a time of year you would hope to be able to do it yes, and, and so, yeah, let's leave the listeners with something that might allow them to access that a little different. Yes. Now what, what research has shown is that gratitude isn't something people feel or experience because they have joy. They experience joy because they practice gratitude. Gratitude is actually a pathway to experience that however, gratitude isn't something that normally just descends like rain on us, like other emotions that we might feel throughout a day. Gratitude is usually accessed as a practice, and that as we practice gratitude, it allows us to access joy and the experience of feeling gratitude, right? So it's not like I feel gratitude and then I express it. It's I practice gratitude, and it allows me to feel it, and then I can have access to joy. Yeah, yes, yeah. So people practice it in different ways, and it doesn't often work. If you have misunderstanding of what gratitude actually is, many people think of it as what I'm thankful for. Like, around Thanksgiving, we're going to go around the table, and people hate being like, Oh, I have to say three things that I'm thankful for, and it's often I think it's something that I have to have, that other people don't have in comparison, right? Or that I'm supposed to be grateful for. In actuality, what gratitude is something that allows us to feel more connected to ourselves and our values or others, which means that opens up gratitude to a number of things, including hard experiences and conflict, because those things can allow me to feel more connected to what to who I am and people that I care about. So when I have that understanding, gratitude is something that allows me to feel more connected to myself and others. Now I can start to do something like create a list that helps me see, oh, I'm so grateful, for example, that I get to do this podcast. Now it's not something that I necessarily enjoy, like there's some nervousness around right? You know, how will I sound on the end? What will I say? And so it's not that, oh, I have I'm happy about this thing, but wow, I'm really grateful for it, because this is so connected to things that I care about. I deeply value the kind of conversation we're having, and being able to offer things to other people that can be helpful, that can ease suffering. And so I have this gratitude for it that allows me to feel more connected. And now, as I express that, and as I think about that, I feel differently as I access gratitude, you can do it through writing a letter, through creative acts you mentioned before the show you like baking and cooking. That can be a real way of like creatively accessing our gratitude, right? Some people like to express as a way of accessing gratitude, so they practice it by letting people know how they have allowed them to feel more connected to themselves or others. And boy, when you start practicing gratitude like that, you can access it anytime you want, and it brings more joy. So I would hope, around this time of year, if people are looking to have more joy, that they practice gratitude.
Elizabeth Cantwell: I am truly, enormously grateful for the people who listen to this podcast, because they give me, among other things, the opportunity to talk with people like you and others and bring to our community all these incredible people and capacities that we have at Utah State University that I feel like I want the world to know about. I want people to know about it. And this is the kind of thing that I otherwise would really struggle to feel like I can bring I can bring that out. So thank you for being one of the people that comes in sits in the chair next to me and sort of lets me pepper them with questions about, well, what about Uncle Fred? He's really told me the same darn story for 10 years.
Clair Canfield: And, yeah, yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.
Elizabeth Cantwell: How do I get grateful for Uncle Fred? But I think maybe you have actually given our listeners some actual practical kind of approaches. And I encourage everybody to think about it and bring it to your own holiday celebrations, and then bring it back to our campus, and let us have this be part of what we what we deliver to the young people who come and spend some time with us, and then go on and and lead amazing lives, because they're going to be next generation leaders. Absolutely, and I would really like them to know that this is part of what you can bring to your leadership without diminishing yourself at all. Yeah, that may be that experience of gratitude and joy, and may we all source joy with a little help from our friends at Utah State University. Thank you Clair. Appreciate you.
Future Casting with Utah State is a production of Utah Public Radio and Utah State University sponsored by the Office of the President. Thanks to Justin Warnick, the USU Marketing and Communications team and producer Hannah Castro.
