Training

The Mediation Center offers customized training curriculum that expose individuals and community organizations to the tools needed for successful conflict management and resolution.  The educational process can be adjusted and modified to meet your  or your organization’s specific educational goals, learning objectives, and needed outcomes. 

One Hour Training Opportunities

Dealing with Difficult Conversations

• Difficult conversations occur every day.  They happen at work, home, with friends and neighbors.  This session will provide you with tools to help reduce your anxiety, deal more productively with difficult conversations, and engage in more creative and productive problem solving

Why Most Tough Conversations Fail Within the First Two Minutes

• Our physiologic response to threatening situations has not evolved very well beyond a fight or flight reaction.  As a result every tough, yet critical conversations crash and burn within the first few minutes.  This session will examine why this happens, how this happens, and most importantly what we can do to keep it from happening.

How to Maximize the Information Flow

• Learn the secrets of maximizing your information gathering with the seven tools for effective communication--especially in the midst of conflict or crisis.  During this fast-paced hour you will discover the value of understanding your own perceptions, how to manage your reactions, and the art of clarification. 

Half-Day Training Opportunities

Think Like a Mediator

Get your colleagues and employees working with you, not against you!  Attend this workshop and some of the most effective tools of a mediator can be your.  As leaders and supervisors, use the skills of mediation to focus energy productively on issues that may be costing you time and money.  Through discussion and simulation exercises, this session introduces the basic skills of successful mediators and helps you translate those skills to everyday situations.

• View conflict as an opportunity
• Develop and use the skill of "reframing"
• Learn to identify interests to get an enduring solution
• Develop the skill of generating creative options

Dealing with Difficult Conversations

Difficult conversations are either avoided or held badly.  They happen at work, home, and with friends and neighbors.  Learning how to deal more productively with difficult conversations will reduce your anxiety and help you to engage in more creative and productive problem solving.  This session will provide you with tools to help you move towards purpose in conversation and problem solving that seeks mutual gain.

• Getting Unstuck: how to identify when critical conversations need to be held
• Why these conversations usually fail in the first two minutes
• Creating a ring of safety
• Launch with the 3rd Story
• Negotiate with your feelings: How to constructively work feelings into the dialogue
• The Ladder of Perception: Don't climb to the top
• Think like a mediator: Get past No to Yes

Tools for Self-Mediation

Place the tools of the professional mediator in the hands of your employees with Self-Mediation techniques.  This session helps you understand some of the key concepts of what mediators do to move those in conflict toward mutual agreement and help you discover how to incorporate those concepts for yourself.

• Why is joint decision making and problem solving difficult?
• Understanding perceptions: Bias and Culture
• Setting the table for constructive dialogue
• Crafting a code of conduct: Power Plays and Walk-Aways
• Close the deal!

Full Day Training Opportunity

• Dealing with Difficult Conversations
  • Feeling stuck?  It could be there's a difficult conversation keeping you there. Learning how to deal more productively with difficult conversations will reduce your anxiety and help you to engage in more creative and productive problem solving.  Through discussion, self-reflection exercises, small group work, and simulation of real-life situations, this educational opportunity will provide you with tools to help you move toward understand how to have a constructive, tough conversation.  This curriculum includes how to use the PLAN (Prepare, Launch, Attend, Negotiate) method when attempting difficult conversations.  This approach will help you focus on what you can do to have a productive conversation regardless of the other person's strategy.  You will:
    • Discover the dynamics of difficult conversations
    • Discover your own conflict resolution style
    • Learn how to overcome genetics
    • Examine the 4 key questions involved in preparation
    • Understand the Ladder of Perception
    • Learn how to think and act like a mediator
    • Learn how to avoid communication stoppers and maximize information exchange
    • Learn the importance of gaining clarity
    • Discover how to search for common ground
    • Learn the art of generating creative options
    • Learn how to "reality test"
    • Close the deal!

Two-Day Training Opportunity

Conflict Management Skills

This training is designed to complement the unique needs of people in leadership or supervisory positions.  The content is intended to enhance individual and team effectiveness, without subordinating task accomplishment, by providing practical strategies for handling complex interpersonal dynamics.  Participants will be challenged to examine their perceptions and beliefs as they focus on the effective conflict management, negotiation, and communication strategies.  The goal of this curriculum is to assist participants in expanding their options for productive problem solving through effective collaboration.

The training is a composite of theory and skill building that emphasizes active learning and participation.  Our trainers encourage a learning community that enables self-reflection, dialogue, and inquiry.  Sessions include small group work, simulation exercises, and large group debrief.  You will learn:

• The hidden costs of conflict
• The consequences of poorly handled conflict
• Evaluate your conflict strategies
• Generate ownership for lasting solutions
• Differences in dispute resolution systems/processes
• Discover your negotiation style
• How to apply the Interest-Based Model
• How behavior, perceptions, and values create bias
• The value of understanding your own perceptions
• How assumptions create cultural baggage
• How culture can be inseparable from communication
• Skills for dealing with cross-cultural dynamics
• The 7 tools for effective communication
• Generating creative and unique options
• Problem solving and decision making strategies