In September I am co-hosting the Mediation Business Summit with Tammy Lenski . We are really looking forward to it. We have some great small business coaches and consultants lined up to help conflict resolution professionals take their business to the next level.

I'm not very technical...

Since we announced the telesummit we have had a lot of questions about how it will work over the three days and some questions about using the teleseminar format. So we have decided to run a free demo and Q&A session on Wednesday 4th August where you can try it out and ask questions about the event.

Tammy and I think it will be a great opportunity to connect with anyone attending and anyone thinking about attending.

So head over to the Mediation Business Summit site to register for the free teleseminar.

The latest in our “caffeinated conversations” Mediator Training and Preparation can be found at the following locations:

Mediation training and preparation podcast page

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Thanks to Diane, Tammy, Jeff and Vickie for a great conversation which could have lasted all night. I look forward to the next which will be on the gritty subject of credentials for mediators.

learning how to ...

I am seeing such a lot of theoretical mediation skills training around. Before you know it, there will be written exams with multiple choice questions added to the dominant use of voluminous PowerPoint presentations.

I thought it might be good to remind people that in mediation skills training the most important outcome is a change in behaviour.

Here is a great definition of training and learning provided by Mike Morrison which makes an important distinction very clear:

Two definitions – training and learning
Training:
Training is the conscious and planned process of transferring knowledge, skills and attitudes to others.
The concept of transfer here is critical, as is the element of planning.

Learning:
Learning is the processing and assimilation of what we hear, see or experience that alters or improves our knowledge, skills and attitudes.
The combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes is behaviour. If someone trains us, or we learn something new or different, it is our behaviour that is affected.

If our behaviour is changed, we have learnt something.

There is nothing like training new mediators to bring you out of autopilot and to bring alive the challenge we have in conveying what we practice. From the students’ point of view, they want to know exactly what is appropriate and what is not so that they can build their competence to a standard that will lead to accreditation. From the trainer’s point of view, the challenge of bringing a set of rules to a flexible process, is a very real one. So when a student asks “is is right to…? The answer is invariably  “it depends…”

Illustration: by Amanda

For people who come from a background of facts and evidence this is like catching jelly with an egg cup or trying to put handcuffs on an octopus! If you see mediation as a process and not an event and that you need to make the transition from judgment of others to judging appropriate action and interventions in yourself then it is not such a conundrum. Mediation is a process and “appropriate action (or inaction)” depends on what has gone before and where the parties want to get to. Our skills are in the moment-by-moment awareness of what will work and still keeping the big picture in mind.

Thanks to Jane Gunn for reminding me of a training course we did where one participant answered the question: “what is the most important thing you have learned on the course?” with “it depends!” It raised the roof with laughter!

An article in The Scientist today has got me thinking. It is about a new discovery about the part of the brain that operates to achieve “goal-directed” actions. It says

“Exposure to chronic stress causes alterations in brain anatomy that may compel rats to rely too much on routine, even when a change in circumstances calls for a change in behavior.”

This development really interests me because it has significant implications for our understanding the behavior of parties at mediation and for understanding why mediators may become more evaluative or “expert” when stressed. I.e. default to expertise, techniques and approaches from a previous life in order to achieve “the goal” of settlement.

People typically had been thinking about chronic stress affecting circuits in the frontal cortex and circuits in the hippocampus. To look at the striatum, which controls a lot of our moment-by-moment behavior, is a really new direction.

and

Chronic stress can also result in other behavioral symptoms, such as deficits in memory or spatial navigation. These changes are believed to be triggered by the release of corticosteroids, causing neuronal reorganization, primarily in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). When the researchers measured the volume and density of various brains structures in stressed and unstressed rats, they found several differences. Most notably, the prelimbic cortex (PL) of the mPFC and the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) — both implicated in goal-directed actions — were reduced in size in stressed rats, while the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) — necessary for habit formation — was enlarged, suggesting a neurological mechanism for how stress affected their behavior.

Have you ever forgotten what you were going to say at the end of a long mediation or lost your way to the bathroom?

The mediator adds considerable value to negotiations by encouraging and supporting the parties not to do what they might do on automatic pilot.  We can’t be stressed if we are to going to help them do something differently because we are for the most part in the moment-by-moment behavior mode managing the process appropriately for the benefit of the parties.

As far as mediators are concerned the research findings go some way to explaining why mediators can often default to language, approaches and interventions that they know better than the ones they learned on their mediator training course.

I am looking forward to hearing more about his development.

For those who would like to learn how to get out of a stressed state I can recommend emWave by HeartMath. The software and hardware allow you to see the effects of stress and provide immediate feedback so you can develop quick techniques to restore “coherence”. It is now available for Mac  as well as PC.

heart rhythm - stressed

heart rhythm - not stressed

software provides immediate feedback on techniques for developing coherence