This post is about conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training. How can we create the Compassionate Connection if we cannot shake off the stresses of what has come before, as we walk towards what is to come next?
📊 Research note: We can improve systems, improve the registration process, better explain tests and procedures, reduce waiting times — but it will not improve overall satisfaction as much as if we anticipate needs and show empathy to pain, stress and grief.
Further Reading
Two short papers that informed this work:
The Showtime Mindset
We introduce the Showtime! mindset (from our partners at Vistelar) to staff on our conflict resolution training programmes, asking them to explore how their own emotional equilibrium could set the stage for the types of encounters we need to address.
Activating the Showtime Mindset is critical when walking into a potentially stressful or challenging work situation:
- Remind yourself: “It’s showtime!”
- Re-set posture and release areas of tension
- Take a deep, cleansing breath
- Assume congruent body language
- Put on the appropriate face for this situation
- Have a chat with yourself (positive self-coaching)
- Now, you are ready.
There was a consensus that, in addition to knowing the Showtime Mindset activation steps, naming and reframing our own triggers was hugely powerful. It gives us control and a sense that we can choose our responses to people’s behaviour — rather than be intimidated or abused by those behaviours and placed in a reactive mode where we might say and do the less-desirable things, despite what our professional brain knows is the correct conflict management response to the person in front of us.
Using the conflict management tools above, we hope that you can create a Compassionate Connection with your patients, visitors and colleagues at your NHS hospital.
Dynamis provides a comprehensive conflict management training programme which spans the whole spectrum of encounters in a hospital environment. In this series of posts, our Director of Training reflects on key ideas in addressing conflict and reducing violence in the hospital.
This guide on conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training is part of our ongoing work with schools and academies.