Resolve Conflict Now. Say "Enough."

No resolution of conflict is possible without the willingness to let go of the past. Another way of saying this is that someone has to say "enough" and mean it. Or, as Harry Truman said, "The buck stops here."

I saw two movies in the last two days that reminded me that the word "enough" begins to create a future distinct from the past. "Enough" draws a line in the sand that demarcates who we were from who we will be.

The first movie that reminded me of this is called, "War Witch" and is the fictionalized story of an unnamed African country where children are abducted and trained to be killers. In the movie, the main character, a girl who is 12 at the beginning of the movie, is forced to kill her parents, then later her husband and, still later, is raped and has the baby of one of the rebel leaders. It's a story we've read about in the newspapers and will continue to read about until enough of us say enough.

The second movie is called "The Gatekeepers" and is a documentary in which six former heads of the Israeli security forces (called Shin Bet) tell the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the so called Six Day War in 1967 in which Israel annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after defeating the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies.

This violence will never end until someone says, "enough" and means it. As one of the former Shin Bet leaders says, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Similarly, I was attending a fund raising breakfast for a group in Phoenix that mentors at risk children. At the breakfast, several of the children spoke, as did a father whose son was being mentored and who had attended parenting classes.

The father was a big, broad shouldered man who dwarfed the lectern behind which he stood.

The man started crying from the moment he began speaking and was barely able to finish his talk. He spoke about how he had abused his children before attending the program, had stopped as a result of the program and was committed to a very different life for his family. In other words, he had learned to say, "enough."

He also talked about how his father had beat him. I imagined that his father's father's father's father had also been an abuser and the abuse would have continued into the next generations were it not for the man behind the microphone who had learned to say "enough."

And that's what it takes for our world to change. Enough people have to say enough. Enough to violence. Enough to conflict. Enough to being right and righteous about being right.

Our conflicts can end now. We just have to say "enough. It stops with me."

Strategies For A Thriving Business and A Thriving Marriage

In the February 18th, 2013 New York Times, Jane Brody writes about research into what it takes to ensure a long, loving marriage. What struck me is how applicable this research is to having a long term, productive and happy business.

Brody cites research by Richard Lucas at Michigan State University who notes that, "the happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness."

I noted how applicable that two-year threshold was to my own business experience.

Years ago, one of my first tasks as a training and development manager was to do a turnover study to find out why people voluntarily left the company where I was working. The results of my study clearly showed that the majority of voluntary turnover occurred within the first two years of someone joining the company. If people got past that two-year mark, they were likely to remain with the company for many years to come.

To overcome this "two year itch," in marriage, Sonya Lyubomirsky in her book, "The Myths Of Happiness" recommends "making time to be together and talk, truly listening to each other, and expressing admiration and affection."

Again, that marriage advice aligned with advice I give to businesses. For example, I was recently teaching a "Leadership Fundamentals" course to a company that wanted to shift the culture from one that was authoritarian where employees were afraid to be proactive to one that produced a "motivated, engaged and high performing workforce." Sonya Lyubomirsky would have been proud because the course basically dealt with scheduling time for dialogue between managers and employees, listening to one another and providing motivational feedback.

In her book, "Love 2.0," social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson notes that a flourishing relationship needs three times as many positive interactions as negative ones.

Same in the business world.

In the company mentioned above, the tenor of the conversations had been negative, focusing more on what was wrong than on what was right. This led to an environment in which people avoided taking the initiative for fear they would make a mistake. It's hard for a business to grow in that environment.

To change the culture, I trained the company executives and managers to "catch people doing something right" rather than catching them doing something wrong. In fact, I suggested they play a daily game the object of which was to give three times as much motivational as improvement feedback.

It seems that a thriving business can benefit from the same strategies that will produce a thriving marriage.