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Samantha Hardy

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Dignity by Donna Hicks (Author) and Desmond Tutu (Foreword)

Dr Donna Hicks is part of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has been involved in many large-scale international conflicts, working alongside people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Elders. In this book, she introduces her work on the role dignity plays in healing and reconciling relationships in conflict. She explains […]

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Staying with Conflict by Bernard S. Mayer

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

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Self-Determination in Mediation by Dan Simon and Tara West

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

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: An Emotional Dictionary by Susie Dent

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

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: The Upside of Uncertainty by Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr

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

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Reflecting back emotions – questioning some assumptions

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

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: The Power of Regret by Daniel H. Pink

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

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