Loving Conflict: Creating Collaboration Where Others See Division shows readers how to transform conflict into an opportunity for deeper understanding, stronger relationships, and lasting collaboration through five practical principles drawn from decades of international leadership and cross-cultural experience. Author Anna Lecat talks to Book Glow about the book.

Your book reframes conflict from something to avoid into something to embrace. What was the pivotal moment in your life that led you to this perspective?

I was eleven years old, growing up in Soviet Ukraine. There was a boy in my class named Sasha. Small, shy, brilliant. He got bullied almost every day by a group of boys, and I did nothing. I stood there, silent, terrified of becoming the next target.

One day they beat him so badly he bled on the schoolyard floor. And watching that, something in me broke. I was done being afraid. But I was eleven, I was not about to get into a fistfight. So instead I got curious. I started spending time with the boys who were hurting him. I asked if they needed help with homework. I went to their homes, met their families, ate with them.

What I found was that they were scared, hungry, some of them beaten at home. That did not excuse what they did to Sasha, but it completely changed how I understood them. And as we became friends, they started seeing Sasha differently too. The bullying stopped.

I did not understand it at the time. But looking back, everything I do now started on that schoolyard. Stepping toward someone instead of away. I have spent the next thirty-eight years testing that idea in boardrooms, in couples I work with, across cultural divides, and it keeps proving true.

You’ve lived and worked across Ukraine, China, the U.S., and France. How have different cultural approaches to conflict shaped your understanding of collaboration?

What living across four countries taught me is that most of the conflict between people isn’t actually about the thing they think they’re fighting about. It is about assumptions nobody has said out loud.

I saw this so clearly when I was running a business in China. I had American and Chinese executives on a joint project, and they were miserable together. The Americans thought the Chinese were being evasive. The Chinese thought the Americans were rude. Both sides were ready to give up on the collaboration entirely. So instead of trying to fix their communication, I asked them to get curious about it. What does directness mean where you come from? What does harmony mean? How did your parents handle disagreement?

By the end of that session, they were not arguing anymore. They were fascinated by each other. A year later their team leader told me they had their most successful product launch in company history, and he believed it was because they stopped treating their differences as problems and started treating them as information.

Now I use three questions constantly, whether I am working with a couple in Paris or a leadership team in Asia: How was this handled in your world? In mine? And what do we build together? I am always surprised how far those three questions can take a conversation.

In Loving Conflict, you describe five practical principles for transforming conflict into connection. Could you share one principle that readers can start applying immediately?

Assume Nothing. I chose that one because it is the principle I have to practice the most. We all build portraits of people within minutes of meeting them, and those portraits are almost always incomplete.

In 2006 my team and I went to meet a potential business partner in China, a man named Mr. Zhou. Son of a poor farmer, no client base, no references, no employees. He picked us up from the train station in a beat-up minivan that would not start for almost an hour in the heat. When it finally started, he told us the air conditioning could not run while the engine was on. So there we were, bumping along for 45 minutes, sweating, faces red, listening to this man describe his grand plans for becoming a leader in the packaging industry.

My entire team wanted to walk away. “Anna, he doesn’t even have air conditioning in his car.”

But something about him, his hunger, the way he talked about his values, made me push back. I asked the team to look past what he did not have.

We gave him the project. Today Mr. Zhou runs Star Packaging, a multi-billion-dollar business, over 1,000 employees, 8 factories, 89 patents, sales in 35 countries. He also has a very nice car now.

Anyone can start practicing this today. The next time you form a quick opinion about someone, catch yourself and ask: what am I not seeing?

Tango is central to your approach to listening and connection. How does dance inform your methods for navigating difficult conversations?

People always ask me this expecting a metaphor. But tango is not a metaphor for me. It is where I learned how connection works, physically, before I could put any of it into words.

The first thing you learn in tango is that you need your own axis, your own center of gravity, before you can connect with anyone. If you are off-balance, you become a weight for your partner to carry. I watch people do this in difficult conversations all the time. They walk in already leaning, leaning into a defense or leaning away from the discomfort, and then they wonder why the whole thing feels so heavy.

I had an experience at a milonga, a social tango gathering, north of Paris that I write about in the book. A man gripped my back so hard it hurt. I asked him to loosen up. He said, “This is connection. If you don’t like it, we stop.” I sat down feeling terrible, like maybe I was the problem. An older woman next to me said five words I still carry with me: “Connection never means suffering.”

I bring these ideas into my workshops even when nobody dances. I ask leadership teams: who here is always leading? Who has never learned how to follow? In Düsseldorf, a CEO looked at me and said, “I either take over completely or I check out completely.” She had never once considered that following could be a skill worth developing. Her team started working differently after that conversation, not because I taught them a technique, but because she finally saw her own pattern.

Many of us feel exhausted just thinking about conflict. How can someone begin to “love” conflict without feeling overwhelmed or unsafe?

I want to say something first: after twenty-five years of doing this work, my heart still races before a difficult conversation. My mouth goes dry. I used to think that would go away with practice. It hasn’t. And honestly, I think the day it stops, I should worry.

The exhaustion people feel usually comes from avoidance, not from conflict itself. We put off a conversation for weeks, months, sometimes years, and the weight of carrying it around is what drains us. The actual conversation, when it finally happens, is almost always shorter and less terrible than what we imagined.

Start very small. Do not try to love conflict tomorrow. Try noticing what your body does when you disagree with someone. Tight chest? Shoulders up near your ears? You do not have to do anything about it yet, just pay attention. Then maybe next week, say one honest thing in a conversation where you would normally stay quiet. Something small like, “I see it differently.”

Every conversation you avoid sits somewhere in your body, and you carry it with you. Once people see that avoidance is already costing them, the motivation to try something different shows up on its own.

You work with executives, couples, and families alike. What’s a common challenge people face when trying to stay present during tense conversations, and how do you help them overcome it?

Almost everyone I work with has the same problem: they are listening to respond instead of listening to understand. They are building their rebuttal while the other person is still talking.

I use exercises in my workshops that disrupt that physically. In Munich, I had a room of German entrepreneurs do an eye-gazing exercise. One managing director whispered to his wife, “This feels too intimate. We don’t do this kind of thing.” Thirty minutes later he was in tears. He’d been paired with someone whose political views he had dismissed that morning. He told me afterward, “I saw my son in his face. My son at five years old, asking me why people were mean to him at school.” He was not prepared for that. Nobody is, when they stop performing and actually look at who is sitting across from them.

People always ask me for techniques, and I understand why, but honestly it comes down to something much less fancy than a technique. Can you get genuinely curious about the person you disagree with, not about winning the argument but about understanding who they are? When you can do that, the rest tends to follow.

Your book emphasizes curiosity and presence over agreement. Why is it more important to stay connected than to be “right”?

Because in my experience, being right has never once repaired a relationship.

I write about a workshop I facilitated in Chicago where I paired two executives from the same company who had been avoiding each other for months. One supported stricter immigration policies, the other wanted more open borders. The room was tense.

I gave them one rule: one person speaks, the other can only listen. Your job is to understand the person, not the position. The first man shared that his grandfather came to America with nothing and worked three jobs. He was afraid open immigration would devalue that sacrifice. The other man shared that his parents fled violence and almost did not survive. He was afraid restrictive policies would trap other families in the danger his own barely escaped.

Twenty minutes in, the whole energy changed. They were not debating policy anymore. They were two grandsons talking about their families. They still disagreed on every policy detail. But they went from avoiding each other in the hallway to collaborating on a project together.

If they had stayed in debate mode, they’d still be enemies. Curiosity gave them something that being right never could.

Conflict often triggers fear and avoidance. Can you share a story from your own life where staying in a difficult conversation led to unexpected collaboration or intimacy?

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I could not speak to my Russian neighbors anymore. I grew up Jewish in Soviet Ukraine, and like most people there, I grew up speaking Russian. It was the language of my childhood, my father’s jokes, my grandparents’ songs. And overnight it was the language of the country bombing my homeland.

I live in Paris with my husband Jerome and our three children, and every instinct told me to cut off every Russian person in my life. I wanted clear lines, us and them.

Instead, I reached out. I asked my Russian friends about their fears. I listened. Many of them cried and told me about their guilt and grief. And they listened to my anger and heartbreak. My Ukrainian friends told me I was betraying them. Those conversations felt vital to me, and they were the hardest thing I’ve done.

Trust grew back. And many of those Russian friends started helping Ukrainian refugees, offering jobs, homes, money. They are still helping today. None of that would have happened if I had walked away.

For readers who want to improve relationships at home or at work, what daily or weekly practices can help cultivate trust and openness?

I practice three things, all of them imperfectly.

First, what I call “Notice it, Name it, Express it.” When something is bothering me, I try to catch the physical sensation first, tightness in my chest, irritation building, then figure out what is actually driving it, and say it directly. “I’m distracted because I think you disagree with me and I’m anxious about it” is so much more useful than going quiet for three days.

Second, I changed the questions I ask. “Why did you do that?” puts people on the defensive immediately. “Help me understand what you were thinking” gets a completely different answer.

Third, and this took me years, I stopped hinting and started asking directly for what I need. When I finally did that, I got what I needed, and the other person was relieved to stop guessing. It deepened relationships I thought were already good.

Finally, if someone only takes away one key message from Loving Conflict, what would you want it to be?

Every conversation you do not have is a connection you have already lost.

We think staying quiet protects our relationships. We swallow frustrations, change the subject, tell ourselves we don’t want to ruin the evening. But when we stop bringing up the things that actually matter, we’re not protecting anything. We are building distance, one avoided conversation at a time.

Loving conflict is a practice. You learn it the way you learn anything, by doing it badly and then doing it again. I’ve been at this for twenty-five years and I still get it wrong constantly. But the relationships that survived my clumsy attempts at honesty are the strongest ones I have.

About the Book:

Loving Conflict: Creating Collaboration Where Others See Division is published by Greenleaf Book Group (March 31, 2026). Available at annalecat.com/book and on Amazon.

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