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People come to church, or mosque, or temple to find a spiritual home, to touch that of the transcendent that allows us to understand and grow beyond our material lives, to find community, to find healing, and to find hope. The challenge is that congregational communities are made up of human beings, who are always incomplete, flawed, and imperfect. Often faith leaders expect themselves to be prefect, or feel that their congregants expect them to be perfect. The de

Two people can sit in the same room, hear the same sentence, and walk away with two completely different realities. One hears disrespect. One hears efficiency. One hears care. One hears control. The sentence has not changed. The frame has. That is the surprising thing about experience. We often think we are seeing what is happening. Often, we are seeing what our values, beliefs, training, fears, identities, and social position have taught us to notice. Human perception is les

One of the challenges we face is the seeming overwhelming complexity of complexity, and the seeming commonplace simplicity, of what we do. If we do our work well, and help parties get obstacles out of the way, clear emotional and behavioral pathways, and open space for new frameworks or shift the existing ones, and then elegantly step back and let them solve their own conflicts, in fact, if we are really, really good at what we do -- it can seem effortless to the

This one goes out to mediators and conflict resolvers and conflict transformers. The core message is: we need to own our depth of knowledge. Many years ago, (and we can hope that the field has changed enough that this wouldn’t happen today), I was the head of a mediation center and was asked to visit a mediation training at a nearby law school. The training was run by an outside trainer brought in by a law school professor. So, the first question is, naturally,