According to research (Runde and Flanagan, 2010), people experience nine common Hot Buttons that can lead to destructive behaviors in conflict. Hot Buttons are triggers–words, situations, or conditions–that cause us to react with strong emotions or to lose our cool. When our hot buttons are activated, we are often in a refractory period when emotions are holding sway over rationality (Ekman, 2007). In those moments, we often enact destructive rather than constructive conflict behaviors.

How can we cool our hot buttons? We get the “button pusher” to quit what they are doing, right? Uh, no. Good luck with that. What we can do instead is to look inside ourselves to find out why our hot buttons are so hot. One reason is because we cast the other person into the role of Persecutor and ourselves into the role of Victim. We make automatic, negative attributions for the other’s behavior and decide that our perception is the truth about the situation. We fail to look for alternative explanations for the other’s behavior and we fuel our anger with our repeated thoughts about them.

The Three Vital Questions (3VQ) can offer help in our attempts to improve our conflict competence. We can discover the focus of our attention in the conflict, the ways that we are assuming we know the other person’s motives thereby invoking the DDT roles, and the ways that we can take action to cool down, slow down, and engage in the conflict constructively.

Join this interactive session and learn about the nine common hot buttons that influence our behavior in conflicts. Learn about how our thoughts about the other can trigger our emotions about the situation and lead to impulsive, destructive responses. Learn to ask ourselves questions to uncover our assumptions about the other’s motives, reframe the situation, shorten the refractory period, and enact constructive conflict behaviors.

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