Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life

An award-winning conflict consultant offers a new path to take when agreement and collaboration seem impossible, and teaches us that when conflict resolution fails, we can achieve freedom instead—even without others' cooperation.

Where can you turn when your attempts to resolve conflict fail? Most approaches emphasize collaboration. You are supposed to sit down, calmly talk through your differences, and find a solution. But what if nothing seems to work, no matter what you do?

When situations resist resolution, the Optimal Outcomes Method teaches us conflict freedom.

Based on her popular course at Columbia University, Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler reveals eight groundbreaking practices proven to help people everywhere free themselves from conflict.

Optimal Outcomes uses a transformative process that can break stubborn patterns in an instant. With inspiring stories from clients, students, and Dr. Goldman-Wetzler's own life lighting the way, you'll learn to achieve Optimal Outcomes by pausing to observe complex situations with clarity, listening to your emotions, reconciling your ideal values (things you say you care about) with your shadow values (things you really care about but have been unwilling to admit), predicting the unintended consequences of your own behavior, and taking bold, simple, surprising action.

Drawing on the author's training at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, two decades of consulting to CEOs and senior teams, grassroots work with Middle East leaders, and her US government-funded research on terrorism, Optimal Outcomes will help you become your own conflict-whisperer.

Optimal Outcomes blends mindfulness, Jungian psychology, and practical, step-by-step advice to free anyone from seemingly impossible conflict. Once you learn and apply these practices, you'll reach your Optimal Outcome—which may be vastly different from what you originally imagined, but more satisfying than you ever dreamed possible.