Conflict Management Humor: The 10 Best Ways to Win an Argument
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1. Call them names. Particularly those that start with A, B, C and F. This approach gives you a sense of moral superiority and will help guarantee that they start acting badly in their outrage.2. Point out their deficits. Maybe it’s their lack of intelligence, always a winning choice. Or their unattractiveness. Or whatever deficit you just know will most aggravate or hurt them. After all, this is a person you say you love. Isn’t all fair in love and war?
3. Blame them for the argument. They started it, after all, by doing X, Y or Z. Or by being born. Things like this are never your fault. You are simply an innocent victim of their problem and it’s important that they know that. Again.
4. Gloat. Whenever you score a point with your winning tactics, be sure to point it out to them and demonstrate your glee. Your goal here is to continue making yourself feel superior and make them feel as awful as possible.
5. Scream, yell, weep loudly, or go deadly silent. Whatever way you show anger, just be sure to do it thoroughly and with great drama. What better way to get their attention, scare them, or steal the show. The more histrionics, the better.
6. Use terms like always and never. You’re always trying to control me. You never help with the workload around here. This tactic’s a good one because it guarantees the argument will get sidetracked into new, unpleasant territory as the other person tries to defend themselves against those all or nothing terms.
7. Remind them you’re right, they’re wrong. And not just 50%, but the whole darn 100%. Since you already did #2 above, it’s clear that their failures and character flaws have made them wrong yet again. You, of course, are always right, particularly when you’re angry.
8. Refuse to apologize. Tell yourself, they were awful too, so they should have to reach out to you first. Tell yourself that again. The more you tell yourself this story, the more justified you will feel in refusing to admit you contributed to the mess.
9. Repeat any of the above during the next argument. Go ahead, make an unhealthy pattern of it. Practice how not to do it so that it becomes such an ingrained behavior that one day you wake up and think, how did we get here?
10. Between arguments, make up, but only on the surface. Don’t really invest in the kind of conversation that will cause less debris in the relationship. Don’t really talk things out and get to the heart of the matter for you both. After all, you want to be ready to win again in the next argument.
Read more here: http://lenski.com/index.php/2006/08/the-10-best-ways-to-win-an-argument/
Actually, if you think about it, this is a great list of what not to do to succeed when managing conflict, negotiating, etc. If you work with someone who's guilty of a few of these, perhaps an anonymous printed copy with some highlighting left on their keyboard could get the point across? Ok, the highlighter will probably irk them - how about just posting it on your door and then referring to the numbers when someone on your team is trying to "win" with the above tactics? Better yet, keep the list going because you know we can at least get it up to 20 ways to beat someone into submission verbally - I mean, 20 ways to win an argument ;)
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