Perceptions.
The elephants in the mediation room.
It’s a big day for the Mediator In the Making! Yesterday, I had my first glimpse into small claims mediation. I can’t wait to go back.
I’ve got pages and pages of notes I’d love to share with you all. Instead of publishing my first ebook, I’ll let it all simmer and explore one thing at a time. (No need to thank me. I realize you might have lives away from my blog.)
Perceptions. A heavily weighted word, and quite rightly so.
It seems to me that each mediator is constantly performing an amazing balancing act. We have our own perceptions of the process, the parties, our performance, our co-mediators. Within each of those, we’re building perceptions of appearances, body language, eye contact, tone of voice, and of course the words we’re hearing. We’re gauging - and maybe hearing - our parties’ perceptions of us, the process, and our co-mediator. And we’re hearing and gauging that of our co-mediator.
Just steps away from perceptions, we will find assumptions. Sometimes baby steps. So then we balance ourselves on the cusp of allowing our perceptions to give way to assumptions, which then would have us leading rather than facilitating or following the parties.
My, my, my! We would all make great circus acts, wouldn’t we? Balancing atop that tight rope, music playing, crowd gasping, and any number of additional distractions.
It was exciting to get to practice the process of recognizing and utilizing my perceptions, acknowledging and setting aside any assumptions which I might give way to in weak moments when I allow myself to not be fully present. To acknowledge and brush off, rather than suppress, any assumptions which could then give way to judgments, and allow myself to proceed with a clear mind and neutral perspective.
There’s another amazing characteristic of perceptions in the mediation room. Others’ perceptions might surprise me, or even directly conflict with my own. Yet there they are. And so I must acknowledge and respond to them. Management and customer service conventional wisdom tell us something similar, and useful here. It doesn’t matter if the customer’s perception seems to be reality from where we sit, or fits with what we mean to have them think. Because it is there, we must acknowledge and respond to it. Allow them to know that they have been heard (notice I do not say “feel heard”). In the mediation room, I guess this could be described as incorporating perceptions into the process.
Of course these are all my very early perceptions of this process. They are my foundational building blocks and I can’t wait to get back in there to continue my learning!
