Conflict Management Starts with Self Management

About the Combination of Cooperating and Avoiding in Storm Settings

You scored high for both Cooperating and Avoiding styles in Storm. This combination has a particular character you should be aware of so you can maximize its strengths and minimize its limitations.

A strength of this combination is ability to be strategic about management of issues.  Cooperating involves engaging and talking through issues when differences exist.   Avoiding involves a tendency to move away from conflict.  This rather unusual combination can be an asset when it is necessary to engage some issues but not all of them.  Your style combination can assist you in choosing when and where to enter into the demands of dialogue and when to skirt it. 

Weaknesses: Like every combination of styles, this one also has limitations.   Because these two styles have very contrasting energies, other people may find you unpredictable.  If you shift back and forth between the two styles without signalling what is going on, they will experience you as inconsistent.   

How to benefit from the strengths and avoid the limitations:  If the above has a ring of truth, try these ideas:

  1. Study the Support  Tips for both styles, under the tab for each on the Support page.  Those are things others can do to support you, but you should study them so you know what to ask for.
  2. When you are engaging (Cooperating style) build spaces into your work so you can step back, prepare, and re-group.  This will address your Avoiding needs.
  3. Use Purpose Statements.  These are statements summarizing your intentions or purpose.  They help others to see clearly what you want to accomplish and more easily know how to respond.   Formulating a Purpose Statement helps you sort through what matters to you; when you know that, striking a balance between these two styles will be easier. 
  4. Think through your values and principles.  Since these two styles differ more than many style combinations, values clarification will be especially useful for you.  Cooperating is about working together with others and creating new, even daring solutions together.  Avoiding is about preserving existing structures or situations and preventing undue risk. Both instincts have their place but they don't always coexist nicely, especially in one person.   
  5. If you feel inner conflict as you work through conflict with others, take time to listen to your own inner voices (there may be more than one). Test them against your deepest values.  When you are at peace with yourself, this style combination can give you stamina and laser focus on the issues you choose to engage in.