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