Mediation Girl: How hard is this?

            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 recipients. The irony is that making that happen demands an immense amount of skill.

            On a regular basis I have students and clients who talk to me about conflicts in their lives and feel hopeless and overwhelmed and like no solution is possible or ever will be. I also regularly get clients and students, once we get past the impossibility stage, who say, “Oh, this is just common sense,” implying what we do is easy and also. ‘Why did I need you?”

            So, those of us who are dedicated to empowering our students and clients and to the self-determination of parties to solve their own problems, have a conundrum. How do we do this the right way, getting out of the way of parties who need to work this through themselves when they can, and own their own problems and solutions, while making our considerable contribution visible?

            Why do that, some may ask? Isn’t humility a cardinal virtue of this work? Yep, I’m right there with you there. One of our biggest traps is arrogance. Often, especially if people have been doing this work for years they feel that they know better than the parties and wearily wait for them to wise up and see it our way. I believe that approach is inherently flawed. In my experience, when I am open and patient and listen deeply, I am inevitably educated by my students and clients in ways that show any early, glib assumptions I made were wrong or critically incomplete.

            An example that springs to mind may speak to a variety of readers. I recall a colleague professor telling me early on in my teaching career that he suspected that a suspicious number of students had dead grandparents during finals time. He was a very kind man, but held a general suspicion of the motives of his students. I worried that I was naïve after that, and as a young teacher, watched my students more carefully. However, I am also me, and I care about people and generally give them the chance to educate me and help me understand them and their situations. So, year after year, my actual experience has been the opposite.

            Sure, I have had students lie to me and try to manipulate me (usually in a half hearted way), but that is by far the exception. The vast majority of times a student has told me someone in their family died, and I ask if it was someone close to them and how their family is doing, and a surprised and grateful student tells me about their grandmother who they love and who they will miss. I also get comments in my evaluations that I genuinely care about my students as people, and experience they find uncommon.

            So, to recap. I am a fan of humility.

            OK, so how do we get recognized as skilled professionals and still hold humility? There are a variety of answers. I had a wonderful professor (Frank Blechman) who had a big sign in his office that said “I may be wrong.” After a time, encouraged by his students, he added another one that said, “I may be right”.  So, one answer is to, in ourselves, and in front of our clients, to visibly hold both of those.

            Frank also used to say, “I’ll work for free, but I won’t work for cheap.” I think this is good advice for our field and I’ve tried to take it to heart. If we work for cheap without an obvious reason, (like a sliding scale attached to income or size of organization etc.), then we devalue not just ourselves, but our field of expertise.

            Other tools we can draw on, which I use as a professor, and a trainer, and a mediator, is to debrief or report what just happened. Some people write a report, making visible all the things they did, (and, I hope, all the things their clients did), to make the shifts and successes possible. Another way to do this is to debrief in the moment. I emphasize this for my trainees in several areas, the most critical being an agreement point. Sometimes people are so caught up in their process that they actually agree on a critical point and then rush on to the next one before they even realize what happened. At that point I often stop them and say something like, “Did you realize what just happened? You said the key thing you wanted out of this process was for her to apologize. She just apologized to you. Did you notice that this big thing just happened?” Now, of course, this particular intervention helps parties see what they achieved, not what I achieved.

            I must admit that I rarely tout my own skills in the middle of an intervention, helpful thought it may be in helping parties value my services. I do, however, note them in a follow up report, especially if it is in the middle of a multi-stage process. That could look like naming and explaining processes and skills like, “We began with group norm and expectation setting to build group cohesion and reduce unnecessary conflict over norms and expectations as we go forward.”

            At this point in my career, I am pretty darn good at what I do, so often people see it themselves, astonished at how quickly I get them to the core of the issue, or help them see harmful patterns and dynamics, or skillfully help them reframe and shift their communications and understandings.

            Still, a lot of the elegance and skill can go unseen if we don’t spend time thinking about how to both, get out of the way of party self determination and empowerment, and help people understand our value and skill.

            I would love to have this blog post be a way for us to catalog some of the ways we do this so please offer your own approaches in the comments!

            Bottom line, we need to do both. I am someone who has a tendency to be very honest, and earlier in life I tended to emphasize my weaknesses and flaws. I finally had a friend (Loretta Denhardt) who told me that was a kind of dishonesty, too. I was giving people a false sense of myself by only focusing on my flaws. It was a good ah-ha for me (thanks, Loretta!) and I have tried to hold and present myself in a more balanced way. Now my challenge, and our challenge, is to do the same for our field.