Mistakes

  Offers in mediation are too often approached with all the coyness of gauche teenagers at a school dance (acknowledging that this metaphor may reveal too much about my own youth!). It need not be…

I am not really one for elevator pitches. But I did hear one the other day about creating impact in a very short space of time, and I was struck by its relevance to mediation. Essentially, the…

I blogged recently on the importance in mediation of not forgetting what is happening in the other room. It’s an easy mistake to make. Here’s another one that is easy to make. “Assumed motivation”…

At a certain point, when another offer was denied, one of the managers showed a real disappointment with the hard negotiation approach presented by the other party: “You know what?! I lost my…

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." - Winston Churchill Improving Habit of Thinking The popular quote attributed to the…

(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published). Thanks to Martin Svatos, for pointing out in his recent blog a number of cases where mediators or would-be…

  Despite some scepticism about the value of "roleplay" most mediation training involves asking people to run a pretend mediation session. I've tried various euphemisms to ease trainees' anxiety - …

"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar" "Traveller, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk." Antonio Machado, as quoted and translated in Daring Greatly, Brene Brown Those…

Another teaching year has ended and the last session’s review and goal setting for the future has thrown up the same questions it does every year, or indeed as does the end of every mediation…