Conflict at Work? 4 Steps to Untangling Your Feelings

It’s estimated that the average person spends around 90,000 hours of their life at work. For most of us, that’s roughly ⅓ of our existence working with people—people we get along with or don’t, or some combination of both. If we spend so much of our lives at work with people, we will inevitably encounter some sort of conflict at work.

Work-based conflicts can be hard to untangle. Conflict comes in many forms, from a small but tense disagreement in a meeting, to large-scale divergences in values within a company. Conflict can arise from a one-time sharp and hurtful comment or from years of enduring discrimination others pretend not to see. Conflict can make us feel confused about who is to blame. It can leave us resistant to owning our share of the strife, or even villainizing those with whom we are in opposition. And  so then the question becomes: How can we navigate through the overwhelming rush of emotions these work conflicts can and will bring?

For those of us who long to lead in distinctly Christian ways, it’s important to do our inner work. Part of that means that instead of running away from our emotions or becoming ruled by them, we get acquainted with them, remembering that our feelings offer insights into our heart’s deepest longings and hurts. And when we understand more clearly what we are feeling in conflict, we can maneuver through it with more clarity and less anxiety.

Below is a simple guide to getting to the heart of the many (many) feelings you might have when facing a conflict at work. And remember, you can always turn to mentors, therapists, and spiritual directors if you need someone to journey this road alongside you.

Step 1: Begin with Prayer

Even as believers, we too often skip over prayer when facing a conflict at work. Maybe we assume we don’t have the time to pray, or that it just isn’t as helpful as venting to a co-worker.

But starting with prayer orients us to the truth that only in partnership with God can we more wholly see and understand ourselves. Romans 8:26-27 tells us that the Holy Spirit is able to unearth the true condition of our hearts, including the mixture of emotions we feel. Prayer also reminds us that we have a Helper—one that possesses more wisdom than all our self-help books combined. God knows us intimately, including the stories that shape our feelings and give context to the pain within our hearts.

Beginning with prayer trains us to do all of life alongside Jesus—including both our outer and inner work. Prayer builds intimacy with Jesus who guides us gently and lovingly through the messiness of relational friction and the emotions that come with it. If you’re looking for a guided way to start praying through conflict, I have two recommendations for where to start:

• Download our devotional guides, 52 Workday Prayers Parts 1 and 2, to learn from the Psalms how to pray through your work, including the conflicts you face.
• Try Praying the Examen, a guided prayer exercise that alleviates you from the weight of trying to find the words to pray in the midst of heightened emotions.

Beginning with prayer trains us to do all of life alongside Jesus—including both our outer and inner work.

Step 2: Name What You’re Feeling

Whether or not you’ve seen the popular Disney Pixar film “Inside Out,” you’ve likely already realized that adults love this movie as much as kids. (Okay, probably more than kids.) I think that’s because this movie does what so many of us deeply struggle to do: name what we truly feel.

In a recent interview, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence Marc Brackett explained that most people struggle to pinpoint the exact emotion they feel. When surveying his research participants, he found that 90% of them couldn’t clearly distinguish the feeling of anger from the feeling of disappointment. (Can you?) Brackett attributes this struggle to a lack of what he calls emotional granularity, or the ability to accurately label the emotions we feel.

Emotional granularity is a skill that needs to be honed. A helpful starting tool is a feelings wheel like this one (though there are many out there). A feelings wheel supplies you with a base emotion, like happiness, fear, or anger, and then helps you get more granular as you move outward.

This skill also has immense benefits beyond just labeling how we feel. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says that categorizing our emotions properly provides us with tools for “more flexible and useful responses” to situations where these emotions arise—like work conflicts. Additionally, “People who can construct finely-grained emotional experiences go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.” Other studies cite emotional granularity as an incredibly helpful coping tactic that can minimize lashing out, reduce our anxiety, and keep us away from other unhealthy coping habits like substance abuse.

King David is a great biblical example of someone who engaged with his feelings. The Psalms are filled with a wide range of emotions connected to specific events in his life. Psalm 55 alone demonstrates his ability to pinpoint feelings such as anguish, terror, fear, horror, violation, and trust. This makes me wonder if David had high emotional granularity, giving him the ability to cope with the immense stress brought on by the many conflicts he faced throughout his life.

Step 3: Accept Your Feelings

Once you’ve done the hard work of labeling the emotions you feel, the next step is to try to accept them.

Conflict has a way of uprooting our deepest insecurities and poking our raw vulnerabilities, leaving us face-to-face with painful emotions. A friend of mine experienced this discomfort recently. After realizing that his boss’s repeated interruptions in meetings left him feeling disrespected and insignificant, he felt severe discomfort. As a capable and confident leader, he felt embarrassed that he let someone else make him feel this way.

But suppressing our feelings or labeling our emotions as “stupid” or “wrong” (also known as meta feelings, or “feelings about our feelings”) have powerful negative side effects such as disrupted sleep, an increase in anxiety and depression, and feelings of shame. Ignoring our feelings does not make them go away, it simply leaves a wound untreated and subject to festering.

Conversely, Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that choosing to accept our feelings gives us more clarity and control over what we do with them. When we non-dismissively and nonjudgmentally accept how we feel, we become less anxious, more confident in our coping abilities, and we can move forward without the weight of shame.

More importantly, accepting any and all our feelings invites us to meet Jesus in these intimate spaces of pain, confusion, and hurt—spaces he already knows and longs to heal. Accepting our feelings means showing up honestly with ourselves in these hard places. And Ephesians 3:14-21 reminds us that it is in these places that Christ already dwells, working to strengthen us and root us more deeply in his love.

More importantly, accepting any and all our feelings invites us to meet Jesus in these intimate spaces of pain, confusion, and hurt—spaces he already knows and longs to heal.

Step 4: Chart a Way Forward

After you’ve named and accepted your feelings, you get to decide what you do with them. Be warned: there is no one-size-fits-all for conflict resolution. Exploring our feelings and doing our inner work alongside God might help us realize a variety of things. Maybe we need to speak with HR, or we feel led to have a hard conversation with a colleague. Maybe our inner work helped us recognize that we are at fault and need to seek forgiveness.

Regardless of where you and God land, here are a few helpful tools to take with you along any road to conflict resolution.

• Read Crucial Conversations – If you decide a conversation is the pathway toward conflict resolution, we highly recommend Crucial Conversations. This fantastic book helps you learn how to have hard, high-stakes conversations well.
• “Reflect, Don’t Ruminate: 10 Journal Prompts to Help You Flourish” – Maybe you’ve discerned that a conversation isn’t the best way forward in your work conflict, but you struggle to move on. If that’s you, try using these reflection prompts to guide you through processing and letting go.
• Order When Work Hurts – Do you need to dive deeper into the burnout and wounding you feel from work? When Work Hurts by Meryl Herr shows that we can take comfort in the fact that God is at work in the midst of it all.
• Download “How We Feel” – Perhaps the same feelings keep popping up and you’re curious as to why. This app, created by Marc Barrett, is designed to track your emotions, helping you uncover patterns in your feelings and give you tools for emotional regulation.

Doing our inner work around our emotions pays huge dividends—and not just personally. People with high emotional granularity are often highly empathetic and non-judgmental, making them incredibly safe and compassionate people. Unsurprisingly, understanding the intricacies and contours of our own feelings allows us to better understand the feelings of those around us, including those we have conflict with. Learning to explore, name, and accept our feelings can aid in the deeply Christian, transformative work of genuinely loving our neighbors—and our enemies.