86 vs 33: The Number That Predicts Your Relationship

Big thoughts, quick talk, flip facts, tick talk, level up your mind, every single line, here's something that nobody tells you. You are in conflict right now, like right now at this exact present moment in time while you're listening to this, right? There's somebody in your life could be your spouse, your child, your business partner, your neighbor, your teenager, your mother, your father, sister, brother, your boss. And there's a thing between the two of you that maybe hasn't been said, maybe there's a conversation that you've been avoiding, a text that you've sent or drafted three times and then deleted and not in your stomach every time their name pops up into your head or phone, right?

Conflict is inevitable. This has been shown again and again and again and it's perpetual. And on the other side of that phone call, that neighbor, that friend that there's the other person is probably feeling a similar way about you, right? So conflict is ubiquitous. I'm right. I'm a mediator. I sit between people in conflict for a living mostly divorcing couples, but I've been in rooms with business partners, splitting million dollar companies. I've been in rooms with co-parents who can't look at each other. I've been in rooms with neighbors who are really struggling, right? And the thing, the things I've learned in that chair, the things that I'm learning are the tools of conflict.

And that's what this this podcast is about. The thing that I'm rediscovering again again is that nobody ever taught us how to handle conflict, right? And that's what this podcast is about. This is a podcast about the skills nobody has taught us that nobody is teaching us yet. It is how to be good at conflict. Or let's say it differently, how do we better at conflict? Not necessarily how to win arguments, not how to communicate better in some kind of HR poster child kind of way. I mean actually getting better at very genuinely difficult conversations.

And what I'm interested in is, can we develop a muscle in a data backed way such that complex management is a skill not a personality trait, not something you're born either good or bad, right? It's a skill set that you can train. Right now it seems mostly we treat conflict like the weather. We've got our good days and our bad days. We've got our rainy days and our sunny days and conflict comes kind of like the wind blows in, right? From the west. It just happens to us and we either survive it or we don't. We manage it. We get through it.

But we don't yet ask ourselves, what if we can get better at this thing, improve at this thing? Get good at it. Like it is a skill. And so I don't think this is universally true. But I think this is sort of the framework that we're generally operating under. And so what if the next time your partner says something that lights you up or your co-workers throws you under the bus or your mother-in-law made that kind of comment at dinner, what if you actually had pre-planed strategized moves, test moves, thoughts, plans? And this is where it gets really interesting. This is the meat on the proverbial bone. It's a question of tools.

And it might sound crazy, but I think it's true in the data shows that it's largely true that the principles, for example, in FBI hostage negotiation that they use to talk somebody down off a ledge, they also work at your kitchen table. That the framework that a mediator uses to help to see sweet executive split a company, that framework also helps you figure out how to manage Thanksgiving with your divorce parents or your co-parents or your uncle Fred, right? The context on face seemed wildly different. The stakes are wildly different, but many of maybe most of the underlying mechanics of how humans get stuck and how they get unstuck, those are universal.

And we're not speaking hypothesis, we're speaking in data, what's been shown and proven. So on this show, we're going to go a lot of different directions. On this podcast, we're going to go a lot of different directions, not today, but over the course of the podcast, over the life and breath of the podcast. We're going to talk about couples, and not just the ones getting divorced, but the ones trying really, really hard not to.

What happens in a fight between two people who love each other and why does it love as much as our wedding vows and wedding days seem like it might, why doesn't the, when you profess your love, why doesn't it instantly, you protect you from fights, from terrible fights, from conflict habits? We're going to talk about the workplace. For example, that pastel aggressive email chain that's really about power and it's not really about the project you're talking about, the coworker who like moops in your boss on everything. Like what is that about? What does that mean? How do you handle it? The performance review that you're dreading giving or receiving, right?

That environment and we're going to talk about family and neighbors, Uncle Fred, proverbially, and the political opinions that Thanksgiving, particularly now with the riff between the left and the right, particularly as a podcaster coming from Minnesota in the spring of 26. We'll talk about your sibling who treats you like you're still 12. You're in law dynamic that makes you want to eat dinner in the car and not go to their house, right? Avoid them in all costs. Yes, we're going to talk about extreme stuff too. Hostage negotiation. I think are great examples. International diplomacy.

Now more apropos than ever. What happens when the conflict is legitimately life or death? Because these situations have been studied. They've been studied and researched obsessively and I think that the lessons will find apply more broadly than you might expect. So here's what I want to provide in every episode. Here's the sauce. Here's the promise. I want to give you one thing you can actually use and deploy. Not theory, not wonderful stories, not intriguing stories, not a bunch of academic jargon, but an actual chess move you can put in your front pocket or reframe a sentence you can say out loud, a realization, a psychological phenomenon. We need to train ourselves in this art and this science.

We need to think about asking different questions. We need to shut up for 10 or more seconds. We need to have the courage to develop the courage to say the scary honest thing instead of the safe dishonest thing. These are all tiny little baby small moves. When you start stacking these small moves, what happens when you build a toolkit? What is the cumulative effect of stacking these tools? And that's the game. That's what we're going to play and I'm really excited about it.

So stick with me. That's the podcast. My name is Ryan McLaughlin. I'm a mediator. I sit between people in the most difficult, edgy-esque, rustiest, gnarliest, hard conversations of their lives and I want to share and explore everything I've learned and I'm learning in that chair. I'll see you in the next episode.