words that work

I received an email recently from Jan Blum, a mediator and facilitator who has done John Kinyon’s and my trainings. She now leads a weekly telecircle, and here is an excerpt of what she sent:

“As a result of our telecircle, I am beginning to see and accept that conflict pops up everywhere and looks like it’s an unavoidable part of individuation…. Conflict even happens, ongoingly, inside of each of us.  Rather than seeking to prevent or avoid conflict, I’m now beginning to see conflict as a delicious opportunity for connection, for getting in touch with what really matters to me and to the other person.  Like, bring it on!!!

“…What stimulated my consciousness about this is that I just received an email from a dear friend who was saying how much he longs to stay out of conflict and how determined he is to never fight with anyone.  I noticed how sad I felt about this, worried about the price he is paying by the various strategies he’s using to prevent disagreements…and then I began to laugh.  How I have changed!!  How glad I am that conflict no longer scares me, and that I am starting to feel joy and happy anticipation when someone begins to express their pain…welcoming the aliveness…. And, our weekly practice is the stimulus for the transformation.”

I really like what Jan has to say about how conflict pops up everywhere in our lives; it’s why we have begun using the phrase “Mediate Your Life” for our trainings. She speaks eloquently to the change that is possible in how we hold conflict, from avoiding it or finding it frightening to “joy and happy anticipation” and seeing it as an opportunity to connect with ourselves and others. This shift is available to everyone, and Jan also points to the key to creating the shift: practice.

If you have already been introduced to NVC mediation and would like another practice opportunity, I encourage you to contact Jan to find out more about her telecircle and other offerings. Her email address is LearningGiraffe@yahoo.com.

In my last two blog posts, I talked more personally about how to work with bullying on an internal level. In this post, I wanted to take a broader perspective and show how to weave together the four contexts of mediation that we train to in dealing with a single issue.

The four contexts, as many of you know, are internal (within your own head), interpersonal (when you are in a conflict with another person), informal (when you stick your nose in other people’s business without being asked), and formal (when you are asked formally to mediate). With complex issues that we are personally involved in, all four contexts can easily come into play.

It is often good to start with internal mediation, as it helps you communicate more clearly through all the other contexts. Internal mediation also weaves through all of them, as you can constantly be checking in with yourself and connecting to your feelings and needs. Whether you are a student being bullied or witnessing your peers being bullied, a parent concerned about your child, or work in a school and care about the children, doing your internal work first can be very powerful. Use internal mediation and the enemy image process to get clear about what you want to do and how you want to support the people you care about. Besides the tools in the last posts, you can also enlist a support team to help you get connected with your feelings and needs and decide how you want to proceed.

If you witness someone being bullied and, after connecting with yourself, decide you want to say something to the bully, you are in the realm of interpersonal mediation, where you are a party and thus playing two roles simultaneously—mediator as well as participant in the conversation. Similarly, any conversation where you are making a request of someone to intervene can also be seen as an interpersonal mediation. For example, if you are a parent concerned about your child being picked on at school, you might want to have a conversation with the teacher or an administrator at the school and request their help with the issue. You can approach this as an interpersonal mediation, which in essence means that you go back and forth between empathizing with the other person and expressing your own needs, until together you find a strategy that meets both of your needs.

Informal mediation, or, as Marshall Rosenberg calls it, “sticking your nose in other people’s business without being asked” might come about if you intervene in a bullying situation, or if you are not part of a discussion between others about the issue but you step in to lend your skills. This context generally requires that you be more expressive about your reasons for intervening, trying to connect people with the needs you are trying to meet by doing so.

If you were asked to mediate or facilitate a conversation, you would be in the context of formal mediation. Perhaps a parent group, the administration of a school, or a student council wants to have a discussion about the issue and would like a facilitator to make sure the conversation stays on track. In formal mediation, you actually draw from all the other contexts at the same time. As mediator, you stay present with your own feelings and needs throughout the conversation, you engage with each party individually as you would in interpersonal mediation, and if things get heated you might intervene in the same way you would informally.

As a concerned person wanting to make a difference in your community, you can use your understanding of these four contexts to navigate your way through all the conversations necessary to make the difference you want to make. Each conversation is a mediation, whether it’s with someone who is bullying or being bullied, with their parents, with the teachers and administrators at the school, or in efforts to get community involvement. For each conversation, you can do internal work to prepare yourself and make sure you have no enemy images of the others involved, and then enter into the conversation ready to connect and care about others and their point of view.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

It’s easy to demonize the bully; that kid or adult who bashes another person because they are gay or straight, poor or rich, white or black or brown, Christian or Muslim or Jewish. When we do so, however, we disconnect not only from that person, reducing the likelihood that we can intervene in a way that will make a difference, but also disconnect from ourselves, from the part of us who is the bully. When we are disconnected from ourselves and others, we become more willing to treat someone as less than a person; to, in fact, act toward them in similar ways to the actions we are protesting from them. One way to re-connect is through using the Enemy Image Process. Using this process to get in touch with our own feelings and needs can help us become clear about what we would like to do in the situation and act in accordance with our values.

We have an enemy image anytime we hold an image of someone else that prevents us from feeling compassion and connection with them. The Enemy Image Process (EIP) has a simple structure; empathize with yourself, empathize with the other, and requests.

Let’s take a situation where you have seen two teenage boys walking along and one of them accosts another teenage boy, and go through what the EIP might look like.

You can empathize with yourself by going through the four components of NVC as Ike did in his last post. The observation could be what you saw, for example, one boy shoving another boy, saying to him “get out of the way, faggot.” Since this is empathy for you, you might use as your observation the thoughts that you notice in your mind when you see the bullying happening or think about it afterwards, perhaps something like, “I hate seeing that, I want to shake that boy and wake him up, or have him experience that so he knows what it’s like. Why can’t he see what he’s doing? Is he really so clueless? What kind of power trip is he on anyway? I’d go over there right now but I’m afraid of what his reaction might be.”

Then, check in with your feelings, trying to name them as accurately as you can. You might feel anger, sadness, or maybe some fear, or some combination of feelings. If you are doing the process some time after seeing it happen, you might also have some disappointment if you didn’t do something at the time.

Next, find the needs that lie behind the feelings. Your needs might be for safety, compassion, caring, and understanding that underneath our differences, we are all the same. Feel into those needs, imagining what it feels like to have those needs met.

At this point you might have experienced some shift already in your physiology; perhaps you feel a little clearer or more relaxed. You can then turn your attention to empathizing for the young man who was doing the bullying, through inquiring into what needs he might be trying to meet in his actions that you are judging.

As you think about it, putting yourself in his place, you realize that he probably has little understanding or knowledge of the person he is acting toward in ways that you don’t like. He might, due to the way he was raised, have prejudice built into him such that he isn’t able to see another possibility. You realize that his actions are likely coming out of a deep fear and pain. He may be trying to protect himself or fit into a particular group that he wants to fit into by distancing himself from a group that he sees as opposed to it. As each guess of a feeling or need occurs to you, feel into how that lives within you; how the fear of otherness, the pain of separation, the needs for community, protection, safety, and understanding occur for you.

It does not matter whether these guesses are correct. What matters is that in making them and feeling them within yourself, you are transforming the prior image you had of him. You are humanizing him.

As you put yourself in the young man’s shoes, you might find yourself getting triggered again, and need to return to empathy for yourself. This back and forth, between empathy for yourself and empathy for him, can continue until you feel some peace within yourself, until you no longer have the judgmental thoughts you began with.

At this point, you can consider what requests you might have. These requests can be for yourself and others. You might have a request of yourself to have a conversation with the young man, you might ask others to support you prior to having it by role-playing the conversation, you might decide to talk to his parents or teachers and request that they have a conversation with him. The list of possibilities, once we are on the other side of our judgments, is generally much longer than it was prior to going through the process.

Whatever you decide to do, you are more likely to act in ways that are satisfying to you because they are in alignment with what you value. Going through the enemy image process helps you separate a person’s actions from their being; in doing so, you are more able to treat the bully with the compassion and care that you would like to see from him or her.

This post was written by Julie Stiles.

I was sitting in a café in Warsaw, in a work meeting, with tears streaming down my face. I had just watched the video of Ft. Worth City Councilman Joel Burns genuinely sharing from his heart about his experience, with a plea to youth who are being bullied and contemplating suicide to stick around, that life would get better. (If you have not yet seen this video, watch it here.)

Our tendency, when confronted with something that is painful, such as the suffering Mr. Burns shared, is to want to escape it, to turn away. I did not want to fall into this habitual reaction; I wanted to find the meaning that watching this video had for me. I used the basic components of Nonviolent Communication (NVC)—observation, feeling, need, and request—to connect with myself and get in touch with what was alive in me.

My observation was in part the video itself, what Joel Burns was saying and the situations he was relating—the children who tragically are no longer with us, and his own experience being in their situation. However, I also realized that much of my reaction was due to the observation of my memories.

I know now that some of my closest friends as an adolescent were gay, and I was not aware of that at the time. I’m sure I was mindlessly saying things that were painful for them to hear; I doubt they trusted me, and likely did not feel connected or safe with me. I can only imagine how hard it must have been for these people that I cared about to not feel safe enough to tell me they were gay and include me fully into their lives.

In my later years, including very recently, I have had many young friends, children of friends of mine, who have committed suicide in their teens. I have and continue to witness the devastation in their families.

Another observation is that I have been on both sides: perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed. I grew up in rural south Texas, a place where the numbers on a football jersey could be turned into a reason to bash someone for being gay. The number 41 was queer; if by the luck of the draw, or because of the coach’s malice, coach gave you #41, you were stigmatized and ridiculed regardless of who you were. Coming from that milieu, it’s no surprise that I have been perpetrator at times, and have treated other people as less than because they differed from me in some way. At the same time, I have also been victim; in that same town, I was ruffed up, intimidated and humiliated, repeatedly, because I was white and the privileged son of a high status family.

Thus, at this level my observation is a lifetime of growing always more aware of how much pain is caused by people who try to protect themselves and fit in through attacking others over sexual orientation, religion, skin color, ethnicity, class, and so on.

After getting clear on my observations, I turn to my feelings. The primary feeling that arose in me from these observations was clear: grief. I felt deeply saddened by what I had experienced, the pain that I likely stimulated in others close to me when I was young, the pain of the youth that I have known who have committed suicide and their families, and the pain of all the people marginalized, bullied, or feeling less than human because of their treatment due to some difference, perceived or real.

My grief extends from my own personal experience and connects with the suffering of all beings, that we all do this to each other; we are all perpetrators and we are all victims. As Thich Nhat Hanh says in his poem “Call Me By My True Names:”
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

My needs that give rise to these feelings are for safety and compassion; I would like people to be safe from physical and emotional abuse brought about at the hands of others due to their differences, and I want compassion for all, both the bullies and the bullied. Another need is for inclusion; I want all people to be included in the community of humanity, for everyone to be accepted the way they are, their differences not a reason to exclude and marginalize but to welcome and embrace.

Finally, my requests; obviously, one of my requests was to request my co-writer to help write this blog entry and the ones that follow. Another request, though, was to not hurry, to be willing to stay with the sadness, to grieve, to refuse to run away. Sitting with the grief is saying yes, choosing to want love, compassion, care, and tenderness for all of us. It’s choosing life.

In a sense, my work as an NVC mediator and mediation trainer is also an ongoing request of myself that comes out of exactly this type of situation. My wish is for a way to intervene and break the cycle Mr. Burns is drawing attention to; NVC is the way that I believe holds the most hope. I’ve seen how much change this way of seeing the world and communicating with ourselves and others has brought to me and others. Simply my reaction to this video, considering where I came from, is testimony to the power of doing this work.

My hope for the work I’m doing—training people in NVC mediation, mediating, coaching—is for people to be able to be heard across gulfs of discord and cultural training and bigotry about sexual orientation, religion, culture, class, and so on. I want hope, and I want others to have hope, including the kids that Mr. Burns was speaking to, that we can deal with these issues in a way that leaves everyone clued in to the fact that we are all humans, all share the same basic needs, and all deserve the compassion and love that each of us yearn for.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

The following is an excerpt from the new book, Words That Work in Business, published by PuddleDancer Press.

We all face difficult conversations in the workplace: criticism from our boss, a conflict with a client, a co-worker we find irritating, a subordinate who submits incomplete work—these all might entail a conversation we do not look forward to having. When we anticipate that an interaction might be complicated, there are steps we can take to engage with the other person in ways that are more likely to be satisfying.

We might think about this in three stages: preparing for the conversation, having it, and then learning from it afterward. These three stages may then repeat. If you find that there is an ongoing difficulty in having the kind of connection and relationship you would like to have with a person, you might cycle through these three stages again and again, learning more each time.

The preparing stage involves making sure that you have done your enemy image work ahead of time (see Chapter 5 of Words That Word In Business). If you anticipate that the conversation will be difficult, you might well have judgments and analyses of the person based on past interactions.

Doing the enemy image process—giving yourself empathy for your judgments and doing silent empathy for the other person—can help you transform the intense emotional charge you might otherwise have going into the conversation, a charge that will tend to create exactly what you don’t want.

This is particularly true when you have thoughts that you want to make sure you don’t act on. For example, some part of you may believe that the other person is not treating you fairly. If you simply think, “Well, I don’t want to say anything about them not treating me fairly,” you have actually increased the likelihood that your judgment will leak out in some way. In doing the enemy image process, you rehumanize the person and connect with your own needs.

In preparation, you also may want to practice having the conversation with someone else in a role-play. You can tell the other person what you imagine would be difficult for you to hear from the person, and then in the role-play take the time to give yourself empathy, do silent empathy, then formulate a response. In practice this may take a few minutes, but you will still be learning in-the-moment reaction skills by slowing it down—skills that may well serve you during the actual conversation.

Right before having the conversation, you might want to plan in some time to do self-empathy. Typically, there will be an upwelling of concerns and anxieties before going into a difficult situation; planning a self-empathy session around your reaction to anticipating the conversation, especially with a support person, can help you be present when you go into it. Setting an intention for the conversation ahead of time will also help. You can keep your intention fresh in your mind during the conversation by writing it on a three-by-five card, your hand, or your notepad.

You might well have planned how you want to start, and you may have role-played various versions of the conversation, but in the actual conversation, you want to be as present as possible and not rely on a script that cannot be true to the present moment. Holding your intention foremost in your mind instead of a planned script will help you maintain the kind of spontaneity and flow that the other person is likely to expect from you.

If you are able to do self-empathy during the conversation, it can help by keeping you present to your needs; however, when first learning, it may be more than enough challenge to simply be in the conversation with as much presence as you can muster.

I have found it is best to anticipate that after the conversation, there’s going to be a flood of judgmental thoughts about yourself, the other person, and the situation—try to schedule a time to do empathy.

During this time, you can celebrate and mourn the needs met and not met in thinking about what happened during the conversation, and you can guess the needs of the other person. You can then shift into figuring out and naming what you learned. In this learning, you might replay how the conversation went, either in your head or again in a role-play with someone else—but replay it as you would like it to have happened. In this way, you are creating neural networks that store the information in the brain in a way that makes it more readily available when you are next in a similar situation.

After going through this process, you then think about the next step, if there is one. As you plan for that step, if it includes another conversation, you cycle back to the first stage of preparation.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

I used to think that I had to have the answers, that as a lawyer trying to settle a case it was my job to figure out the conflict and come up with a solution that would work for everyone. My emphasis was on rational and logical thinking, and I would try to intellectually understand the conflict. I saw myself in a sort of omnipotent position—from my overview of what I thought should be motivating people, I would determine what they should be able to accept as a solution, and create a proposal for resolution accordingly.

Thus, I felt enormous pressure to be able to solve the conflict. I was the one who had to fix it.

Only after years of experiencing NVC did that view finally begin to shift. Initially, I didn’t get the whole “connection” thing; for years I heard Marshall Rosenberg saying that the focus with NVC was on connection without grokking at all what that meant. It seemed to me that he was focusing on the wrong thing: to solve a conflict, you have to focus on the solution, not on some vague concept like connection.

Even as I continued to hold onto my beliefs, however, I simultaneously began to experience what he was talking about, both in my own life and in witnessing mediations. I began to see that when people were connected, they naturally began to collaborate to resolve their dispute; they didn’t need the mediator to come up with an answer.

As my thinking continued to shift, I realized a couple of things. First, the people in the dispute clearly had the resolutions, or the means to get to the resolution, within themselves. All they needed was a little help to connect deeply with themselves and their own motivations, as well as the underlying motivations of the other party. Second, since the parties in the dispute were the ones who had to live with the results of the mediation, it only made sense for them to be the ones to arrive at a resolution. A solution imposed by a mediator, or sometimes even suggested by a mediator, would be much less likely to be satisfying to everyone and therefore to last.

Now, I trust completely in other people’s ability to resolve their own conflicts. What I offer is no longer an attempt to be omnipotent and find the solution that will fix everything; I simply offer a few skills that are likely to increase the quality of connection between the parties, which can then flow into a collaborative resolution. Not only is this a much more enjoyable (and sane) way for me to be in the mediator’s chair, I think it also contributes far more to solutions that work.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

At the core of our work lies Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which offers a simple yet powerful process for communicating in all kinds of situations. NVC was developed in the 1960′s by Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg, and has been used since then for conflict resolution and mediation around the world, as well as for personal growth and inter/intra personal healing. Today NVC is taught worldwide by Dr. Rosenberg along with a large group of NVC trainers. Based on spiritual principles of human interconnectedness and humanistic psychology, the NVC model is remarkable in its simplicity and depth.

I use NVC because it provides a frame of reference and a doable model in alignment with my purpose to contribute to compassion.

NVC basics

In NVC the awareness is fostered that all humans share the same basic generic NEEDS (e.g. shelter, sustenance, respect, meaning, connection, etc.), that all human endeavors are attempts to meet these universal needs, that each person can identify the needs that they and others are seeking to meet, and that everyone’s needs are equally valuable and important.

FEELINGS are seen as barometers for how well needs are met in each moment. For describing any situation, NVC teaches us to look for the OBSERVATION rather than an analytical understanding or judgment of it. Movement in this model comes from the principle of REQUESTS, where actions are taken out of a natural desire to enrich life for self and others.

The key to conflict resolution is to help parties connect with their own and others’ universal needs; based on this connection mutually satisfying resolutions to any situation tend to occur seemingly spontaneously.

To read more about NVC, including writings by Marshall Rosenberg and video testimonials from dedicated NVC users, or to find out if there is an NVC center near you, visit the website of the international Center for Nonviolent Communication.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

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