Every mediator helps parties negotiate personal affiliations, which some approach as Collaborative Relationships and others as Transactional.

Transactional relationships are based on “give and take” exchanges where parties constantly evaluate the association in light of their own immediate priorities. The relationship, then, is conditional. As parties are constantly “keeping score,” there is a lack of trust, mutual support, as well as the potential for bad feelings and resentment, especially when one party abandons that connection for something better.

Advocates of Transactional Relationships contend human interactions by their very nature are transactional and that long-term, mutually beneficial relationships are simply an idealization of family ones.

Long-term mutually beneficial relationships are not a rarity, as these advocates would have you believe. Collaborative Relationships value strong ties and are willing to invest the time and energy to work cooperatively.

Transactional advocates have no meaningful, long-term relationships, and as anyone in their network knows, they will be abandoned when they no longer support the goals of the true matter at hand.

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Fred Jandt is the author of “How to Survive a Mediation,” available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.

I’ve just completed teaching another class for volunteer mediators.

As in previous cases, most who attended believed they were good listeners, but soon learned their assumptions of what they thought they heard duing the session was distorted compared to the actual messaging presented throughout the course.

This is one of the reasons mediators stress the importance of listening and don’t iagree with listening by “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.” Recent studies have found no evidence that intentionally applying this approach improved one’s ability to understand another person’s feelings. If anything, the concept may decrease accuracy while simultaneously increasing misdirected confidence in one’s judgment.

Imagining how we would understand another person’s world based on our own history and experiences, not on theirs. is a recipe for disaster.

To improve listening, we need to engage each other in conversation. This “perspective getting” to understand how the other person sees their situation is a more effective listening skill.

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Fred Jandt is the author of “How to Survive a Mediation,” available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.