WHAT IS HARD FOR A MEDIATOR TO LEARN, PART ONE

I am in the middle of a new training program for volunteer mediators. All have been successful in their careers and want to learn the profession in order to give back to their communities by volunteering as a Small Claims Court mediator.

This week they all began to learn just how much their listening skills need to improve. For example, during role play mediations, where they were playing the parts of the disputants, they were distressed to discover how little they were heard by others who were playing the part of the mediator. At the beginning of the class they all thought they were good listeners. however, they discovered that wasn’t as true as they hoped.

In mediation it is critical for disputants to feel that the mediator has heard and understood them. But for most of us that skill doesn’t come as easily as we might assume.

There are many reasons why at times we are not good listeners. Recent research has described one major listening problem this way: Our brains can be thought of as predictive. We are constantly guessing what we will hear next and tend to reject what we might hear in favor of what we assume was said.

In a simple classroom exercise the disputant role-playing a plaintiff described how her son had been bitten by her neighbor’s dog. She described her son, the dog, the incident and the medical bills. The role-play mediator assumed that the boy had entered her neighbor’s yard. She never said that, but most people assumed that they had heard it. Where did that come from? It came from their predictive assumption of what had happened.

So how then do mediators become better listeners? Actually, it’s quite simple. A mediator learns to do frequent summaries of what they have heard. That gives the disputant the opportunity to correct the mediator’s listening mistakes.

If the mediator had said, “Let me be sure I understand. Your son Ted was playing in your backyard. He went into your neighbor’s yard and was bitten by your neighbor’s dog Fido.” The disputant could have said, “No, no. Fido came through the fence into our yard and bit Ted there. Ted never went into our neighbor’s yard.” Big difference.

Mediators must learn to be skilled listeners, and equally importantly, skilled summarizers of what they heard.