
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

Crying in conflict
Emotional crying (as opposed to tears that form when we have a foreign object in our eye) is a uniquely human phenomenon. Babies and young children cry a lot, but as we get older we tend to cry less frequently. This is partly because we have learned different ways to communicate to get our needs met (for

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

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

Pre-mediation coaching
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

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