Outcome Over Ego

Some thoughts on how to better resolve and avoid interpersonal conflict.

Read time: ~11 minutes

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Let me tell you something you already know: a large portion of your life's happiness and general well-being is tied up in your social relationships. It’s true. You may be “Completely independent” or “An Introvert” or whatever else you can think of to refute that point but trust me, a large chunk of your happiness rides on the strength of your social bonds and a general feeling of connectedness with your fellow human beings.

While you could just take my word for it, you don’t have to. To prove this point we have data demonstrating that those who feel alone or depressed have a much higher rate of suicide. In Chapter 6 of his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt summarizes some of the findings that confirm the base human need for strong social bonds and the potential risks for those who do not have them:

A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim’s diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.

After acknowledging that strong relationships are critical to happiness, a key question becomes what are we doing to damage or weaken these bonds that we could be avoiding? For me and I imagine most people, arguments that escalate beyond a simple disagreement cause a lot of friction in relationships. To try and figure out how to avoid these in the future, I have been exploring a mindset that has helped lessen the frequency and intensity of these interactions and improved my ability to relate with those around me. That’s what I’m going to discuss in this post.

Arguments as a Major Source of Relationship Pain

It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway: arguments that you have with those you interact with cause an inordinate amount of strain on your relationships and can cause immense internal stress on all parties involved. While there are plenty of other factors that influence happiness in relationships, I’d wager that arguments that escalate are in the top 3 causes of the interpersonal stress that we all experience in the modern world. Mind you, I’m not only referring to romantic relationships, rather I’m referring to any relationship that you have, whether that be the professional ones you share with your coworkers, the friendships you have, or even those you have with your family. Balancing all of these relationships is a key to maintaining your social network which heavily influences your overall life happiness and arguments are one of the major ways that we damage these relationships.

Given I’ve experienced my fair share of these negative interactions, I’ve sought to figure out why they happen and what to do to prevent them.

Why Do We Disagree?

The causes of disagreements in our lives vary predictably with the subject, the person, your history with the person, the topic of conversation, and both parties’ emotional states during the conversation. However, even when considering the variety of causes disagreements can have, there are some fundamental truths about how we humans see the world that explain a lot of the conflict we experience.

The truth that I am referring to is the fact that we all exist entirely within our own reality which is of course a subset of the universe at large. Past experiences, the way we were raised, our genetic makeup, and a host of other factors, directly shape how we all see the world. This tapestry of our biology and learned psyche ensures that the way you experience the world is uniquely yours. There are no two people that have the exact same combination of genetics and experiences (and mental framing for those experiences) and as a result, no two of us see the world and its myriad experiences the same way.

This is important to consider when discussing anything with friends, family, or significant others. You may see things completely differently and find yourself fundamentally incapable of accepting that there is any logical way to believe anything except for the view that you hold. Based on your experiences and biology, you may feel that the only way to see a subject is the way you see it but this blindspot is oftentimes explained by the bubble that we all occupy whether we realize it or not. This problem is exacerbated because putting yourself in another person’s shoes is an extremely difficult exercise to even begin to attempt, let alone succeed at.

With this fact in mind it is no surprise that we find ourselves having disagreements with plenty of people, but even those we would consider close friends or even boyfriend or girlfriend (or husband or wife or … you get the idea). But disagreements aren’t inherently negative. They can help you see another side to an issue or provide a playful back and forth with which to pass the time. It’s when those disagreements turn into full-blown arguments that we all begin to experience social distress and emotional pain. So what causes a disagreement to escalate?

Why Do We Argue?

When we do disagree, especially on those topics that we feel strongly about, we sometimes see ourselves acting in a way that we wouldn’t dream of in another circumstance. Some people are better than others at not allowing disagreements to escalate into arguments, but I challenge any of you to tell me that you’ve never had an disagreement get out of hand and turn into something much more nefarious than friendly discourse.

The escalation of a small dispute into a larger fight can stem from a couple of root causes. However, most of these reasons can be bucketed into a category titled: “We are all humans and humans are emotional, reactive creatures with egos to protect, and when we feel threatened we lash out and act irrationally” Not the most succinct category title but it encapsulates what causes most calm disagreements to turn into actual arguments.

What can happen is that you start off with a simple disagreement and then one party will interpret a point made against their opinion as a personal attack which will then trigger defense mechanisms. From there, the irrational part of the brain can take over and people start attacking each other instead of the views that are being discussed. This can evolve quickly into shouting matches that have completely lost the thread of the original conversation. Here is where we find the emotional pain and weakening of relationships that I am referring to. It’s not pretty when this happens but it is something that we all experience more often than we would like. (Spoiler, if you ever experience it it’s happening more often than you would like).

While these types of antagonistic exchanges are universally negative, they also present one of the biggest opportunities for us to improve our relationships. Instead of allowing cordial discourse to metastasize into ad hominem attacks and destructive altercations we can better align ourselves with the actual goal of the conversation and thus prevent us from fighting the people in our lives and actually achieve the desired outcome of any given interaction.

What Is Your Goal?

A pertinent personal example of the type of disagreement I am referring to is that of my brother and I arguing about just about anything. We generally get along quite well but there have been a number of times in the past few years when we will get at each other’s throats on a topic for (in hindsight) no apparent reason. It will begin with us discussing something that we both have an opinion on and quickly devolve from there. We will then proceed to get angry with the other person for failing to see our side, or if I am being honest, because the other person won’t concede that our argument is the better one. It will get so bad that we will start yelling at each other and have to take some time to cool off before we can talk again.

This has been going on for long enough that I now understand the reason that we get this way. The reason is when we enter into a heated conversation we lose sight of the goal of that interaction and start trying any tactic to be “Right”. In any interaction, it helps to keep in mind what you are really trying to achieve. In any given conversation your goal could vary but, if you were to be honest with yourself, the goal would never be to hurt someone’s feelings and damage a relationship. Whether that be a close personal one or one that you need to maintain for your job. No one in their right mind would set out to do that and if they did, then clearly that isn’t a relationship that they care to preserve. Nobody sets out to have these negative interactions but they still happen all of the time.

While I’m far from perfect, something that I have been thinking about more and more is to center myself on what I am looking to accomplish with a conversation, and think even harder about that goal when things get tense or heated. “What am I really trying to get out of this?” as a prompt helps me back down when I’m getting defensive or antagonistic and reminds me that my goal is never to upset those I’m interacting with.

Outcome Over Ego

A phrase that has stuck with me on how to execute this kind of thinking was one that I discovered in a Farnham Street Newsletter a long time ago. “Outcome Over Ego” was originally posted in reference to work disagreements, but I think that it applies directly to our personal relationships as well. Whether you, like me, have a history of arguments with your sibling or face challenging workplace debates, thinking about what you actually want to get out of the situation will direct your behavior on the most constructive path and allow you to set that pesky ego aside while you pursue the result that you want and avoid the one that you don’t.

The reason this has stuck with me and that I think it will be helpful for you is that the second we force ourselves to consider what we are doing to protect our ego, the sillier it seems. On paper, why would I need to yell at my brother for him to recognize that I’m right on any subject? If we can’t agree on something then we can just drop it. If we are having a productive conversation I may learn something either about the world or about how he sees it which is inherently positive.

When things do get heated, if I can stop for a second and think, “Well, I’m getting so frustrated because I seem to have a need to be right in this instance, but does that really matter?” I can better avoid letting it get personal and out of hand. If you’re like me, the answer to that question is “No” 100% of the time, but I sometimes struggle to see that until after the fact. Pounding this phrase into my skull has helped me get ahead of myself and recognize when I’m acting out of ego and prioritize my intended result of the conversation as opposed to whatever lower-level desire my psyche is yearning for.

Take one final example to see how this could be applied. A situation that we have all most likely experienced is one where you unintentionally offended someone close to you and as a result, they are upset regarding something you said. You feel that you were misunderstood but this person is hurt regardless. What tends to happen when people feel misunderstood is that they go above and beyond to explain themselves to make sure that their side of the story is the accepted narrative. I’ve certainly done this in the past. You may default into getting defensive about what you meant, and start questioning why they would assume that you mean to hurt them in the first place, thus displacing the blame from you to the person who you’ve hurt, doing twice the damage, and creating secondary and tertiary axes upon which arguments can arise. This can open up entirely unintended arguments and can spiral out of control.

What if instead, you thought to yourself “What is the goal here?” and agreed that making this person feel better about what you said was the goal. This mindset would allow you to take a deep breath and set your ego aside and do what you need to do to make them feel better about whatever it is that you said to upset them.

This is easier said than done, of course, but having a short phrase that is brief but descriptive regarding the mindset that you would like to adopt helps skip a lot of the conflicts you unintentionally land yourself in and has helped me considerably in thinking about how I want to interact with the people around me. Making this minor change can have the major effect of improving the way you interact with others, thus strengthening your social network and making you a happier and healthier person over the long term.

And at the end of the day, isn’t that something we all want for ourselves?