With all our Conflict Leadership Group conversations about avoidance last month, I went back to this book because it has some really useful content about avoidance. Here are some of the key points about avoidance Mayer discusses in this book. People are endlessly inventive in how they avoid conflict. Sometimes avoiding conflict is wise and […]
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Staying with Conflict by Bernard S. Mayer Read More »
This latest book by two transformative mediators provides a valuable addition to the transformative mediation bookshelf, with an in-depth look into the way that transformative mediators perceive self determination in mediation, and how they support it in practice. The book includes many case studies to demonstrate how this underlying principle works in various situations, including
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Self-Determination in Mediation by Dan Simon and Tara West Read More »
How coaching can support mediation preparation and participation When people choose to explore mediation as a process for managing their conflict, the mediator (or perhaps an intake officer in some contexts) will usually speak with each party separately prior to the joint mediation. These conversations may be called intake sessions or pre-mediation meetings. There are
Pre-mediation coaching Read More »
This book is a very similar book to another book I reviewed recently, The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith. Like that book, this is a dictionary of emotions, with entries in alphabetical order, and includes all kinds of emotions terms from the distant past to the present day, and from many different
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: An Emotional Dictionary by Susie Dent Read More »
I am not exaggerating when I say that this book blew my mind! I will never look at emotions, and the impact of culture, the same way again. If you work in any cross-cultural setting, this book is essential reading. This book opened my eyes to how much of my understanding about emotions is influenced
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Between Us by Batja Mesquita Read More »
In my book Conflict Coaching Fundamentals: Working with conflict stories, I explain how one of the important shifts that people need to make in order to develop a constructive mindset towards conflict is the shift from certainty to uncertainty. The challenge is that uncertainty is an uncomfortable place to be, and certainty is comfortable, even
One of the core techniques we are taught as mediators and coaches is that when a person expresses their emotions (either directly or indirectly) we should “reflect them back”. Reflecting back a person’s emotions is supposedly helpful for showing that you understand how the person is feeling, validating the person’s emotional response, building rapport, demonstrating
Reflecting back emotions – questioning some assumptions Read More »
Regret. We’ve all experienced it. It’s not what you’d call a pleasant emotion. It also tends to promote rumination and going over and over what we wished we had done differently. This is a similar process of counterfactual thinking that is common with other emotions such as guilt and shame. For people who work in
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: The Power of Regret by Daniel H. Pink Read More »
As I was researching for our new Working With Emotions in Conflict online course, DeSteno’s name kept coming up in relation to the importance of emotions, and especially social emotions, for success. David DeSteno writes a lot on the concept of intertemporal choice (I wrote about this concept in conflict in one of my LinkedIn
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Emotional Success by David DeSteno Read More »
Many people think about hope as an emotion that is akin to faith or wishful thinking. However, hope theorists such as Snyder describe hope as a way of thinking. The best thing about approaching hope in this way, is that it becomes something that we can learn (and support others to develop). For our purposes,
Promoting hope in conflict Read More »
