words that work

With my past experience as a trial lawyer and current work with mediation, one might think that it was a simple, straightforward transition—from lawyer to mediator. In reality, when I withdrew from the practice of law at the end of 1999, mediation was not at all what I thought I might spend my time doing. Though much of my current work involves mediating disputes and teaching an NVC-based approach to mediation, the path to get here was not obvious and what I learned along the way has affected all areas of my life.

As a lawyer for 20 years, preparing and trying lawsuits in the civil courts, I had represented clients in hundreds of judge administered settlement conferences and a handful of private mediations with hired mediators. My experience in the mediations and settlement conferences was indistinguishable in that the structures and approaches were very similar. The only real difference was that the judge would stay in chambers and parties would shuttle in and out, whereas in mediation the mediator would shuttle between different caucuses. Since my experience in these sessions led me to initially discard the possibility of becoming a mediator, I’ll give an example of my general experience. In the mediation context, we would meet with the mediator and the other parties in joint session, where each attorney would advocate their view of the case. Then we would go into separate rooms and probably not see the other party until the very end of the mediation. For the duration of the mediation, the mediator would play shuttle diplomacy, going back and forth between the rooms. In a simple two-party case, if I represented the plaintiff, the mediator would come in and tell us all the problems with our case; if I represented the defendant, he or she would present worst-case scenarios from the defense perspective.

We would proceed through several rounds of monetary settlement offers and counter-offers. When a fairly narrow gap had been reached, the mediator would begin to use various ways of stimulating fear—uncertainty and the risks of not reaching settlement—to drive the parties together. Often, this was successful, and therefore useful in that regard, but I don’t ever remember the clients or myself enjoying the process. It certainly never occurred to me that there could be any kind of healing resulting from mediation.

When I withdrew from the practice of law, I saw many of my contemporaries setting themselves up as mediators. Due to my experience with mediation, however, I rejected that idea immediately; it had been such an unpleasant experience for me and I couldn’t imagine that the mediator enjoyed this process of threatening and cajoling the parties to reach settlement.

So how, one might ask, did I end up not only in the role of mediator, but on the board of a professional organization focused on mediation—the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California (ADRNC)—and devoting so much of my work life to mediation?

My involvement with NVC came first; so let me start there. While I was still practicing law, I heard someone mention a communication model that broke communication into four components: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. This sparked my interest, and after months of it being on my to-do list, I got on the mailing list of the organization. A while later I received a very low-budget flyer for a workshop that managed to capture my attention enough to sign up, even though at the time I received stacks of glossy professionally-produced materials for educational programs that I passed over.

The workshop was held in an adult mental health day care center near the zoo in San Francisco, a place I did not know existed prior to that time. It was a Friday morning. I remember the discombobulation I experienced in the contrast between my downtown San Francisco three-piece suit world and the marginally functioning people in this facility. I walked to the back of the facility to the conference room, where I found Marshall Rosenberg, the man who developed NVC, setting up a workshop circle for 25 people. I had never met him or read, seen, or heard anything about his work, other than the five minutes that sparked my initial interest. 45 minutes into the workshop, I had understood everything that had been said—the grammar and syntax—but there was clearly something going on that I didn’t grok. I was clear that I wanted to be able to do what Marshall was doing, even though I didn’t really understand what was going on. I just knew that it was incredibly life-affirming. It was what I had been looking for, way to understand and communicate what was really important between people.

Slowly at first, I began to develop the awareness and skills at the heart of NVC. What attracted me to NVC was its congruence with my values, developed through the practices of meditation, yoga, and aikido. My introductory workshop in NVC was in spring of 1996, and since then I’ve been engaged in the remedial learning process of incorporating NVC’s insights into my personal and professional life.

My evolution towards mediation started with a telephone call from Marshall Rosenberg, asking me to be on the Center for Nonviolent Communication board. I attended my first board meeting, in Paris, just four months before I stopped practicing law. While I was on this board, we met three times a year for five days each time, in a total of seven countries in the developed and developing world. In these travels, I experienced a different kind of mediation than I had experienced as a lawyer. I saw people transformed in the process. They may have entered the mediation closed in self-protection, defensive, and resistant–all signs of a being in deep pain. Nevertheless, they walked out openhearted beings, trusting that they had been seen and valued and willing to see and value their antagonists in return.

With time, I was ever more attracted to being in the presence of this kind of transformation. It has been incredibly satisfying and nurturing to me to contribute to these kinds of shifts.

Several years ago, I began to offer mediation workshops and ongoing weekly trainings with John Kinyon. John and I were first drawn together around the topic of mediation while on a trip to Pakistan in February 2002. This was just a few months after the invasion of Afghanistan, and days after the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who after we had left Pakistan we learned had been beheaded by his abductors. The culmination of our trip was to spend three days in an Afghan refugee camp 60 kilometers from the Kyber pass with 25 elders from the Pashto, Tadjik, Turkmen, and Uzbek tribes. John and I learned much from this experience, and we have continued our teaching collaboration ever since then. He and I also both have private mediation practices; as a part of my work I have also served on the mediation panel for the United States District Court.

So in six short years I have gone from not wanting to have anything to do with mediation to having it be the central focus of my life. My involvement with NVC changed the possibilities I see for how we communicate with each other and ourselves, and how this applies to mediation and the broader context of conflict resolution.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles