Episode 187: Restoring Empowered Choice with guest, Cherise Hairston

Conflict can make smart people act out of character. When emotions spike and the stakes feel personal, our thinking narrows, our defenses go up, and “good communication” advice suddenly stops working. We sit down with Cherise Hairston, a veteran conflict resolution professional and transformative mediation practitioner, to unpack what’s really happening inside us during conflict and how coaches can help clients regain clarity without rushing to a fix.

We explore why conflict is often less about the stated issue and more about the internal experience: anger, fear, guilt, disappointment, and the sense that something important has been violated. Cherise explains how this destabilization can leave clients feeling disempowered and reactive, and why the coaching task is to restore a sense of competency, dignity, and choice. We also dig into the neuroscience of conflict, including the threat response that can short-circuit the prefrontal cortex, and what it takes to get “mind, body, heart, and soul” back into alignment.

From there, we move into practical conflict coaching tools: creating a psychologically safe container, slowing the conversation down, and working a simple pathway of awareness, alignment, and action. We talk about “dream justice” the hope for an apology or accountability that may never come and how values-based decisions can help clients move forward even when the conflict is not resolvable. If you coach leaders, teams, families, or anyone navigating high-stakes relationships, this is a grounded guide to coaching through conflict with more skill and less advice-giving.

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Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Cherise here.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Garry Schleifer 0:07

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into this latest article, have a chat with this brilliant author behind it, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we share groundbreaking ideas, expert tips, and techniques, and do what we love to do most, make a real difference in our clients' lives. This is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But for now, let's dive in. In today's episode, I'm speaking with author Cherise Hairston, who is the author of an article in the latest issue, The Power of Choice. Her article is entitled, Restoring and Powered Choice: Coaching People Through Conflict. Different take, thank you. A little bit about Cherise. She is a 30-year tenor in the field of conflict resolution and a community mediation. She's a certified in transformative mediation and a fellow with the Institute of the Study of Conflict. So she's the very person to write this article. She provides professional and leadership development coaching for the Dayton Mediation Center. She owns her own private consulting and coaching practice called Inter Aligned Design. She teaches coaching through conflict at George Mason's University's Carver School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. She holds a PCCO and is also trained as a CPCC3 Collective Coaching. She also holds an MA in a CPQC. What's the CPQC3?

Cherise Hairston 1:56

Positive intelligence.

Garry Schleifer 1:57

Wow, there we go.

Cherise Hairston 2:00

Mental fintness.

Garry Schleifer 2:02

She integrates transformative conflict theory, professional coaching, and professional development formation principles to advance an innovative approach to conflict coaching. Oh, I can never say that word, pedagogy. Teaching. Okay, folks. Welcome a lot. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Cherise.

Cherise Hairston 2:28

Wonderful. Thank you for having me, Garry. I'm so excited to have a conversation with you.

Garry Schleifer 2:34

Yeah. And you as well, because this article was come from a little different angle. But before we get into it, what called you to this particular topic, this particular theme of of choice?

Why Empowering Choice Matters

Cherise Hairston 2:49

Well, that word choice and the word before that was an empowering choice, I believe, for the article for the power of choice designing empowering conversations. And so that word empowering caught me because that's so central to the work that I do with people who are experiencing conflict, and conflict can happen in all kinds of ways. So I was really drawn to that and feel that I had something important that I wanted to share with our coaching community.

Garry Schleifer 3:24

Awesome. Well, thank you for stepping forward and doing exactly that. It's an excellent article with, for those who haven't read it, with some tips and techniques on the right hand side on the sidebar. In the meantime, let's talk about this topic of conflict. I'm a coach, you're a coach. We try to help our clients solve or manage conflict. What's different about the approach that you describe in your article?

Conflict As An Internal Experience

Cherise Hairston 3:50

Well, what's different is we often think about conflict in a singular way. It's a fight between two people. They're fighting over the child, fighting over the dog, they're fighting with their boss. And often the historical approach to conflict has been, you know, let's find compromise, let's look for interest and underlying interest. And while that's an important part of conflict, it misses what's really difficult about conflict. And what I always encourage people to think about is think about the last difficult interaction you had with someone in a meaningful ongoing relationship that could be a coworker, could be boss, could be family, could be neighbors, right? Over issue, an issue that's really important to you and which is not going well. There's some type of wrong that feels that's been done, or um, some kind of violation. If we just think about conflict as a problem to be solved, what we miss is what happens to us internally when we experience the conflict. And so when I ask people, yes. So think about it, Garry. We're gonna go right here. Think about the last difficult interaction you had with someone. You can call it a conflict, call it whatever you want, but it was difficult, it didn't go well, words were shared, or you felt something. Tell me what comes to mind in terms of a feeling that you've had going through that interaction with the other person. m

Garry Schleifer 5:45

Anger for sure. Guilt, disappointment, fear, you know, losing a relationship. Um, yeah, I think that's that's top of mind.

Cherise Hairston 6:01

Right. And probably all those things all at once. Anger, guilt, fear, fear of losing the relationship or impacting the relationship. And so that really is at the heart of why conflict is so challenging to engage constructively, because the next question I usually when I'm training people is to ask, are you your best self when you're angry, frustrated, fearful, defensive? Are you doing your best? Are you doing your best thinking, your best, you know, keeping curiosity, wondering why, well, I wonder how they see the situation. No, right?

Garry Schleifer 6:44

No, definitely not.

Cherise Hairston 6:46

Definitely not. And why? What makes it hard to be your best self or do your best thinking from that place of kind of anger and frustration?

Garry Schleifer 6:58

Oh, like emotional emotions, what do I want to say? Attachment, love, concern. Like you're just feeling all this stuff boiling. It's for me, it's it's boiling up. Like by the time I have a conflict, it's because I've held stuff in for too long, so it's a bit of an explosion.

Cherise Hairston 7:21

Absolutely. And it's boiling up, and I love that. Thank you. It's boiling up, and you've already said you're not at your best there. You're not able to re-engage, and these are my words, putting on top of it. But what's hard about conflict is, I like to say it's it's like being temporarily under the influence of conflict. I am, I can't see, I can't think, it's blowing up. I'm not able to engage like I normally would before that situation happened.

Garry Schleifer 7:58

Right.

Cherise Hairston 7:59

And so that's really what's hard about conflict is that we become disempowered by it. We become weakened by it. It's not that we're weak, a weak person. We are when I'm feeling hurt by you or I'm that fearful you may hurt me, I become a more protective and defensive. And it really is hard to engage from that kind of that, you know, we like to talk about the neuroscience of things, right?

Garry Schleifer 8:29

Right, yeah.

Cherise Hairston 8:30

It's it's our fight or flight, where our oldest part of our brain takes over and we do react rather than being from a a more settled and grounded place.

Garry Schleifer 8:42

Right.

Cherise Hairston 8:42

And so I think that's the piece that is unique to how I help people through conflict as I come in through the door, creating this space for them where I get what's hard about conflict, and that's really important is that internal, you know, we're temporarily less effective, less resourceful. We can't draw on less in control, less in control.

Garry Schleifer 9:11

I can of the emotional part, so less in control of our emotions, yeah.

Cherise Hairston 9:16

Absolutely, and our emotions can be our friends because they're signaling to us, this doesn't feel right, this isn't right to me, you violated something that's really important to me. And so, as a transformative conflict coach, that's the lens I look through is conflict tends to destabilize people, right? It propels us into this place where we feel less empowered internally, and so it's from that place that I can begin coaching, providing coaching that allows them to work through some of those feelings and stabilize a bit a bit more, right?

Garry Schleifer 10:05

Wow, what a great place to come from and great service. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Now, I couldn't help but think how is all of this connected to the power of choice?

Under The Influence Of Conflict

Cherise Hairston 10:21

The power of choice. Well, you know, I love that you readily had your own experience of conflict, unfortunately, because all of us do, we can't escape this world. But do you want to make an important choice from that place of anger and fear and frustration?

Garry Schleifer 10:44

Yeah, of course not. Yeah.

Cherise Hairston 10:45

Of course not. And so what we can do in transformative conflict coaching is help people slow down and work through and speak to what's going on and re come back to that self part of us that is more grounded, more clear, more stable, and more reflective and intentional, and begin to answer really a powerful question that we have in conflict coaching is what matters to me most in this situation? And it's that place that we begin to look at intentional and informed choice. So we want to be making these really important decisions that can impact our workplace, our work, our family, our relationships, we want to be doing that from an empowered place, not a a place that's responsive, that's open, not about compromise here. It's if I'm helped by my conflict coach to really say what's hard about the situation and why it matters, and what's important about the situation, a person begins shifting into that more empowered place where intentional choice that's rooted and aligned with what matters to the most. We talk about and we coaches talk about values, but people don't walk around talking about their values. And it's and that's what that's what I'm offering and my colleagues who do this form of conflict coaching. We're offering that intentional, self-determined place of of choice. That's really that's really powerful. And what's really powerful to me, and as long as I've been doing this, is often conflict isn't resolvable. We often don't have a meeting of the minds. We often sometimes agree to disagree, which will in my work over these 30 years, the conflict is so deep and so hard for people because something's been violated that they're not able, they haven't been supported, if they haven't worked with us, to even agree to disagree. It just it just stays intractable and stuck and hard. And sometimes we have to live with no, as my colleagues Eric Clevin and Judy Saul, when we're doing community conflict and political conflict, sometimes we're not able to resolve it. Sometimes we're not able to resolve it in our relationships, in our workplaces, and so we have to figure out a way to move forward. And live in spite of that. And I think about my own situation. I've been embroiled in my own difficult conflict situation that to my best efforts, I haven't been able to resolve it in the way that I needed it to be resolved for that person to the business transaction, right? that didn't go well, and no accountability, no ownership on their part. And often in conflict, when we don't get what we feel, my colleague Sam Hardy talks about it as dream justice. She's another conflict coach out in Australia. My sense of dream justice, I need for you to to see how you've harmed me and be accountable for that and apologize.

Garry Schleifer 14:44

Right.

Returning To Values Based Choice

Cherise Hairston 14:45

And that never's gonna come. It never comes. And so, do I stay like angry and frustrated in my chronic stress? Do I stay there? And I got really clear in my own situation that have I acted the way that I wanted to in this situation? Did I did I behave in a way that is important to me? Yes, I did. Did I get nasty toward them? Did I call them out of their name in our interactions over these two years? No, I just engaged in direct communication and asked for what I needed, right? And that's what's important to me. That's personally valuable to me to conduct myself in alignment with my most treasured value, which is love, right? Love in all things. Is my behavior based in love or fear? Is it am I angry? And so I had to get really clear about I'm not gonna let this situation have me act from my less resourceful best self.

Garry Schleifer 15:59

Not let it hold you hostage.

Cherise Hairston 16:00

Not let it hold me hostage, and how do I move forward and not let it rob me of the joy of what was being you know created for me in this in this transaction. And so I got really clear about what mattered to me and that shift that I did some some of my own self-coaching here, but also my colleagues can have helped me too. That's what a good coach does, conflict coach does is it helps me reflect on and think about what's hard about the situation, what matters most, and what I want to do about it. So that's again, we come to the empowered choice. And in my situation, um the legal option wasn't really an option, right? And so sometimes we often think, you know, I'm gonna get an attorney and this is resolved, right? Yeah, and that that may or may not resolve it, and you're still living with all the frustration and the anger, and so a transformative conflict coach is gonna help, as I do, help people get restore their sense of competency, their sense of clarity, their sense of what matters, so that they can make an intentional choice, like I did, which was to rather in then lose my money through legal representation, which probably, based on my attorney, would not have resolved the situation.

Garry Schleifer 17:44

Right.

Cherise Hairston 17:44

I would have had more money going out.

Garry Schleifer 17:47

The lawyers are the ones that always make money in these situations, right?

Cherise Hairston 17:50

Right, and the situation would have the what was being created for me would have sat and been stalled and not moved forward. Yeah. And so the clarity of hard decisions and living with that, I think often with conflict, when we're listening to someone else's conflict, we're we are easy with advice. Well, have you tried this? Did you do this? Oh my gosh, you oh my gosh, you didn't do that. You should go back and ask for this. And it's like that's not helpful. Yeah, it's not helpful. What's helpful is to go, I'm really feeling violated here, or really angry and frustrated here, and being able to talk through that because conflict is an existential crisis, it it's like life and death and birth and all mixed in. It it pushes us to this brink of like everything is hard and difficult, and we often feel like we get stuck there and we don't have to get stuck there. And that's what I'm doing when I'm coaching people through conflict or a difficult situation.

Garry Schleifer 18:56

Yeah. Wow. It must be hard to be in the middle of it and know what to do and then still can't do anything. I'll remind our our listeners that um that uh Sherice has added some uh prompts that help you connect with your uh help you connect with your clients and their inner selves. Those things that we were talking about. Um three steps, three dimensions. Uh awareness, noticing what's happening inside you and what truly matters to your point, alignment, connect your intention and values before acting. So optimal, right? And finally, um, action. Choose the next step that reflects your best self, which is what you were saying, is like we're not always at our best self. So it sounds to me like a little bit of pause and reflection. Interesting.

Dream Justice And Hard Acceptance

Cherise Hairston 19:47

There, I we're we're creating a reflective space and the coaching space. Uh, you know, of course, we're creating a psychologically safe container uh for people through our presence and how we hold that space for them because we become very vulnerable talking about when we get underneath the conflict, there's the issue, but there's how it's making us feel and what it's stirring up. You you talked earlier about boiling up, right? And it's boiling up um things that underneath are are really important to us, and so giving that space and then to be able to talk about, you know, what feels most important here, you know, and exploring in a forward thinking way if it could be different, what would you want to be different? And just even working with that and slowing the slowing the conversation down can be really valuable. We often want to jump to action with conflict and with prepping those things, but as coaches, um that's often not the most important piece in the moment of things, yeah. And so I think those those the awareness piece can take a good amount of time to help people, because we're all stirred up and j jangled up from the conflict, and we often don't hear ourselves, and so just even through reflective inquiry, which I borrow a lot from Marcia Reynolds, I already do reflections in my practice, but to open that space up with you know powerful um inquiry questions that help people explore what feels important, to explore what feels hard about the situation, to explore what matters can be really valuable to people.

Garry Schleifer 21:46

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot of great pointers, and I can only imagine this is gonna help any coach, whether they Deal with clients with conflict on a regular basis or not. Any other tips or or observations that a coach will see when they're walking into this or trying to help this situation get out of this situation?

Awareness Alignment And Next Action

Cherise Hairston 22:16

I think a really important part of the work that we do in transformative conflict coaching and in my own coaching is the self-awareness piece is really important. And so I do my coaching as part of my mediation center that I'm work at, the Dayton Mediation Center in Dayton, Ohio. We're a community mediation center, so we're dealing with people and their conflicts, whether it be landlord tenant, whether it be neighbors, whether it be family and friends. And so we we're dealing with conflict that way. I also provide internal professional development, leadership development coaching. And so I think for coaches, and we all know this very well, you know, the aspects of working with self-awareness and self-management are really what are really important when people are dealing with conflict. And conflict can be everywhere, not just the you know, the typical ways that we think about conflict, you know, differences of opinion not being included in a conversation or decision making in the workplace. And so I think for coaches, I think it's really important for us to do our own professional development. Good catch it's important for us, you know. We you know, for us who are certified, you know, we have our continued education. And if you have not taken a conflict resolution course, and we offer them through the organization that I'm affiliated with, the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation. If you've not taken any type of conflict resolution course to work on your own conflict style and and how you manage conflict, that's really key to this work. Because we have to be able to have our own self-awareness about how we manage our own conflict before we can help anyone. You can't lead guide someone through something if you don't know what that experience is like, and so I teach my students, my graduate students at the Carter School at George Mason. We start there. The first six weeks of the semester course is all about the coach develop coach development. Right. We start with self-awareness. Oh yeah, and you know, there's some recent work by in our coaching field on self-awareness, and I follow all of that, but self-awareness is really key for our own development as coaches, particularly around how we manage conflict. So I and there are wonderful folks out there, my colleague Cindy Noble, who's there in Toronto with you, who has her Synergy Conflict Management coaching model. If you haven't checked her out, check her out. Samantha Hardy in Australia, who has her conflict management academy. If you're looking for coaching for management training, I really encourage that for us to seek that out.

Garry Schleifer 25:41

Awesome. Well, there we go. Some advice what to do next, people. Take a look. And do you happen to know the website for your uh studies for the one you first mentioned, the school?

Coach Self Awareness And Training

Cherise Hairston 25:54

So if you put in for the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation, you put in transformative mediation.com, that'll pull you up to the website there. T And then if you're interested in community mediation um and the work that my conflict coaching uh is embedded you can Google our website, the Dayton Mediation Center. We'll come up and so you'll come up with conflict management or community mediation, which is the field that I'm in. These are really guides to understanding more of conflict because I think for our coach or you know, our coach colleagues out there, what I'm encouraging is to bump up our understanding of conflict, yeah, and and and what makes it tough. And we often say in coaching that people aren't a problem to be solved. Well, conflict often isn't that easy to resolve. And it's what makes it not easy to resolve is what's underneath it, which is human experience of how destabilizing it is. And so we've made gains in the neuroscience of conflict, understanding what actually is happening to our amygdala and how it shorts all our prefrontal con uh cortex, which we can't make in power choice if we don't pause and work through so that we can re-engage that thinking part. And I like to say to get the whole alignment of mind, body, heart, and soul, that all has to come back in alignment. It doesn't mean that going through conflict is easy, but we feel more empowered, we feel stronger in ourselves, and that's what we want to navigate through the adversity, and that's that's what I'm up to when I'm pushing people through conflict. Wow, well, no matter what happens, if you're if you can't get your dream justice in this situation, how are you gonna move forward with your own sense of self and dignity and self-respect in how you conducted yourself through that? And in my own situation, I have that, and you know, there's a shift in me where I feel more grounded and I am in a better place, and that's really what we want to help people find their way to that empowered choice, and that's how I you know an empowering conversation.

Garry Schleifer 28:35

Well, folks are listening. This is your start. Thanks to Cherise pointing us in this direction and uh giving us some tips and techniques and places to go to learn more about it. Well, of course, we have learned more about it by reading the article and listening to you today. So thank you very much.

Cherise Hairston 28:52

You're welcome. It's it's been a pleasure, and I'm so thankful for you, Garrry. And I love this magazine. It's such a such a wonderful resource for all us coaches out in the world.

Garry Schleifer 29:03

Thank you. Tell all your friends. what's the best way to reach you, Cherise ?

Cherise Hairston 29:08

So, the best way to reach me if you have questions about community mediation and the conflict coaching we do is through the Dayton Mediation Center. And my email address is Cherise.Hairston @ Daytonohio.gov. That's the best way to meet reach me. It's the best way to reach me, and I can connect you to some of the resources that I mentioned. These I really want to just help folks understand conflict better. So because once we understand that human experience of conflict and that it takes us out of ourselves, and that if we help people restore their sense of self and their capacity to walk through their conflict, that that's really the most important thing that we can help people through. Yeah. So I'd love to tell people more about that.

Resources Contact And Closing

Garry Schleifer 30:04

I get your commitment and your love of this work. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe to your favorite podcast app, most likely the one that got you here, or website forum forward slash podcast. If you're not a subscriber to Choice Magazine and you're watching me, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right hand corner of our screen where it says scan me. Or if you're in listen mode and you're not driving or not on a treadmill, go to choice-online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.