As I mentioned in my previous post, in my view it is disagreements and the lack of preparedness for them, that are the biggest cause of sadness and anger in business and personal relationships and ultimately lead to their breakup. So it makes sense that we not only try to understand more what causes disagreements but also agree beforehand, on what they are and most importantly, how to prevent them.

What Are Disagreements
The state of disagreeing and a lack of preparedness (agreements) to prevent them from occurring.

What Causes Disagreements
Well this is pretty obvious, disagreements are caused by dissent and differences of opinion and maybe egos that are more focused on their individual selves (personal pledges) rather than the team (agreements).

How to Resolve Disagreements
By understanding them enough and where they come from and why they occur first and foremost, can allow us to prevent them occurring in the first place by having agreements in place.

If an agreement is made up of two personal pledges or promises and we already have agreed to value the state of agreement more than the components (the pledges), then whenever we feel that we are disagreeing and heading for a disagreement we can focus on rearranging the agreement by altering the individual pledges.

Of course once again we would need to have discussed this and made our personal pledges and there by formed the agreement around this premise.

I believe a disagreement or the state of disagreeing occurs when we do not have a process already prepared (an agreement) to deal with disagreeing in the first place and the disagreeing escalates into an unresolved disagreement as we part ways.

One way to prepare for this is to have in place an agreement that if we ever about to end a conversation or discussion and we both were disagreeing that instead of ending up with a disagreement, we agree to continue to consider the issues raised, to be  followed up at a later date. So in effect they are agreeing to disagree, for now.

This seems to be especially true for when the two people already have existing agreements that this new disagreement will effect. However if they have little or no previous agreements then there really should be no reason to have a “disagreement” as such just differ and like ships in the night, move on.

To be continued….