Personal Narrative: Interest-Based Approach

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Background
The conflict I chose to analyze was with my sister and also involved my brother. Basically, every Tuesday and Thursday morning my sister has class at 8 am and her and I share a car so we leave at 7 am. My brother leaves for high school at around 7:10 am. For the whole semester my sister and I have been getting late almost every Tuesday and Thursday and last week we made a plan that my sister wakes up the earliest, my brother at 6am, and I wake up at 6:30 am. However, every time, my brother failed to wake up so my sister woke him up at 6:20 am which made me late because I had to wait for him to get out of the shower. Onset of Conflict
On Thursday again the same thing happened and my sister in the morning right before we left
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I wanted to use an interest based approach and basically I planned to aim towards trying to have a mutual gain rather than focusing on who is right or who is more powerful. If I had attempted to use power based approach, then it would have caused more problems and more disputes on top of anger, distrust, and a desire for revenge. Most of the time, I use a rights based approach with my sister and I am the kind of person who always feels the need to be right and that really strains my relationship with my sister because her needs never get addressed in those scenarios. We have never gotten closer because of the way I used to try to resolve disputes. So this time, I really wanted to start resolving our disputes using an interest based approach so we can have a mutual satisfaction as well as a closer relationship. Also I knew focusing on interests can uncover and resolve hidden problems underlying the dispute more effectively than rights or power based approach can (Brett, Goldberg, Ury, 1988: …show more content…
I could tell that she was satisfied with that because usually after all our conflicts she stays really mad at me and refuses to talk (or calls me a bitch). This time she did not do that. I believe that I indirectly taught her this strategy because she now can use this kind of conflict resolution to solve future problems with me. This strategy over time will condition her to use interests based approach instead of putting each other at blame or trying to find out who 's right. We concluded that I would go home and talk to my brother about this and try to make him realize that what he is doing is causing issues between me and my sister and causing us to be

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