The Book

Becoming Conflict Constructive

A practical and personal guide to making your conflicts more comfortable and productive.

Forthcoming
Becoming Conflict Constructive Michelle Arbid MSc, PCC

About the Book

Not a book about managing conflict.
A book about using it.

Most books about conflict teach you how to manage it. This is not that book.

Becoming Conflict Constructive starts from a different premise: that conflict is not a problem to be managed but a signal to be understood. That the patterns showing up in your leadership, your relationships, and your organization didn't originate there. And that the most important skill you can develop — as a leader, a partner, a human being — is not the ability to resolve conflict, but the capacity to use it.

Drawing on fifteen years of work — from the Lebanese prison system to FEMA disaster operations and into the leadership teams of federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies including Boeing, Amazon, and Gilead — Michelle Arbid offers a framework for making conflict the most productive and transformative force in your life.

Chapter Zero

What if conflict
was never the problem?

Most people spend their lives treating conflict as something to survive — to manage, minimize, or get through as quickly as possible. Chapter Zero is written for people who are ready to consider a different premise.

The reason conflict feels so intimidating — in your leadership, your relationships, your organization — isn't because conflict is inherently bad.

Chapter Zero is the intellectual and personal foundation behind everything in Becoming Conflict Constructive. What comes next will change how you show up to every hard conversation you have.

"The presence of conflict isn't the problem. Your relationship to it is."

About the Author

Michelle Arbid

Michelle Arbid MSc, PCC

I have spent my life inside conflict — first as a child of Lebanon, a country shaped at its core by it, then as a therapist in its prison system, then as an advisor to FEMA during federally declared disasters, and eventually as a consultant to some of the world's largest organizations. What I found everywhere I went was the same thing: people who were smart, capable, and completely untrained in the one skill that was costing them the most.

This book is the distillation of everything I've learned about what conflict actually is, and what it takes to transform it from an anxiety-inducing nuisance into a positive force in your life. Part practical guide, part mirror — it will give you the skills to navigate conflict differently, and the self-awareness to understand why you haven't been able to until now.