In the last section of Making Mediation Your Day Job, Part 2, you spent some time pondering the ways you try to be helpful to people in conflict as well as the ways a few people told you they want help.
Today, we’re going to take the results of your last exercises and temporarily, at least, take them out of the context of mediation per se.
Why? Because when you’re passionate about mediation, it can blind you to the ways you’re really being helpful and deafen you to the ways people want help. Because when you’re passionate about mediation, you risk seeing it as The One and Only Path. Because when you’re passionate about mediation, you may become so familiar with insider jargon that it’s hard for outsiders to understand your passion.
So, for just today, I’m going to ask you to forget that you’re passionate about mediation in the narrow sense (as in being a big “M” mediator).
Imagine waking up, turning on your favorite morning news, and learning that as of today, all people are outlawed from labeling their work. Instead, when asked “what do you do?” people everywhere on the planet may only describe how they serve others. There are no more doctors, no more mediators, no more lawyers, no more dog trainers, no more computer salespeople. Instead, there are now only people who help people stay mentally and physically healthy, heal from medical trauma, handle dogs who are burning their energy in problematic ways, or help people select the right computer technology for their individual needs.
Exercise 2.2.7: What If You Couldn’t Mediate?
If, as of today, you were not permitted to call yourself a Mediator, you would have to reframe your thinking from “what you are” to “what you offer.”
Using the responses you generated in Exercises 2.2.5 and 2.2.6, write a list of up to 10 ways you can answer “How do you help people in conflict?” without labeling yourself or describing the mediation process. You may have more than 10, but limit your final list to up to 10 of the most important ways you help people in conflict. Avoid jargon and be sure you pull information from both sets of prior responses.
You will be setting this list aside for now for use again in a later section of the book. I encourage you not to set the activity aside until then, though, so that you can wrap up the reflection stream you’ve been building so far through this chapter’s journey.
In the next post, we’ll turn our attention to a different kind of reframing.
