Being right seldom brings relief

One of the hardest things to say to someone in the middle of a workplace conflict is this:

Even if you are completely right — even if your version of events is entirely accurate, your grievance entirely justified, and the other person entirely at fault — being proven right will not necessarily give you what you're looking for.

It won't restore the relationship. It won't undo the months of anxiety or sleeplessness. It won't make the office feel safe again. It won't bring back the job you loved before all of this started.

I know this because I spent nine years as a litigation lawyer watching people pursue exactly that outcome — and I saw, time and again, that winning produced relief for only a moment. What followed was often emptiness, or the realisation that the victory had cost them more than the injustice ever had.

In restorative mediation, I try to help participants make a different choice.

Not to abandon their experience of what happened. Not to pretend the harm wasn't real. But to loosen their grip on the need for vindication just enough to ask a more useful question: ‘What would it take for me to genuinely move forward from this?’

That question almost always has a different answer from ‘What would it take for me to be proven right.’

The shift from one question to the other is quiet. It happens at different moments for different people — sometimes on Day 1, sometimes overnight, sometimes not until they are sitting across from the other person on Day 2.

But when it happens, the whole room changes.

#RestorativeMediation #WorkplaceConflict #ConflictResolution #PsychologicalSafety #Leadership