Society Builders paves the way, to a better world, to a better day. A united approach to building a new society. Join our conversation, for social transformation Society Builders. Society Builders with your host, Duane Varan.
Welcome to another exciting episode of Society Builders. And thanks for joining the conversation for Social Transformation. Today, we continue our exploration of the science of depolarization. We have an incredibly exciting guest today, an amazing guest. It's the great Gary Friedman. Gary is a pioneer in the mediation discipline. He's published three books. He runs courses on mediation for the American Bar Association. He's taught negotiation at both Harvard and Stanford.
He works with international bodies like the World Intellectual Property Organization. He's co founder of the center for Understanding and Conflict, which has trained more than 10,000 mediators. So this is really one of the global pioneers in the mediation discipline. So, Gary... Welcome to Society Builders.
Well, thanks for that way overflowery introduction.
So Gary... Gary: I never thought of myself as great. You are great, Gary! You are great. It's been amazing. What I love about your story going back to the beginning, which I guess we can talk about, is the sense of coherence that you developed in your career. You started off as a lawyer, and at some point you really weren't happy with what the legal profession was doing. And you made this transition, back in the early 70s before it was kind of cool.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your story. How did you transition from law to mediation?
Well, I was living on the East Coast, practicing law with my family firm, my dad, my uncle, cousins, and I was in court every day for five years, and I was actually pretty good at it. But when I kind of took a step back and I took a look at what it was doing to the people, including me, I felt like there was something about this that just was not very healthy.
And particularly the kind of power that I was able to use as a trial lawyer in court felt like it was something that often made things worse between people. And even when people would win, there would be this kind of feeling afterwards, like that I had and that they had. What was the cost of that?
It must have been hard, though, making the transition to mediation.
I mean, mediation wasn't a thing back then. No, there was no transition to be made. I was out. I quit. I was on the east coast and I moved to the west coast and I was done. There was no going back. And I was not interested in anything remotely connected to the law, but I was interested and had been interested for a while in what happens inside people and understanding myself and what had happened to me in that process of becoming a trial lawyer and doing the work that I was doing.
And so I did a lot of, I would say, deep soul searching and diving. And it was the 70s, you could do that. And as part of that, I realized that while I was done with the law, the law wasn't done with me. Something there that was really important to me, and I couldn't just turn my back on it. But I didn't have any idea of what to do about that because I knew I didn't want to go back and be the kind of lawyer that I was. I met another guy, Jack Himmelstein. And together we created a partnership.
And the next thing we knew, it was the 70s. We had half a million dollars from the National Institute of Mental Health to see if we could change law professors attitudes. And in changing law professors attitudes, the idea was this could be a way to actually have an impact on the profession, to be kinder, gentler, more. We called it humanistic. It's actually called the Project for the Study and Application of Humanistic Education and Law.
Long title, but basically it was about bringing the more human aspects to the interactions in the law classroom. Second year in the evaluators came out and they said, 'looks like it's pretty good. People are really moved by it. It's changing things. But what difference is this going to make?
How is practice of law going to be any different as a result of this?' And we said, 'we don't know.' So they said, 'well, you better find out if you want to keep being funded.' And so that's when I hung out a shingle as a kind of experiment with two ideas. One was I wasn't ever going to do anything that didn't feel right to me again. And secondly, I was going to be open to trying new things, things I'd never tried before. And so one of those things was a couple of people came to see me.
I was kind of getting known as a weird lawyer. And they said, can you help us get a divorce? And I said, 'Sure. I can be on one side, the other person can negotiate for themselves.' And the wife turned to me and she said, 'you sound like all the rest of them. Why can't you just sit in the middle? Help us get through this together. We want to have a peaceful, friendly relationship afterwards. Why can't you do that?' And I thought, you know, I got to think about that. Went home, thought about it.
They came back the next week and I said, 'I think you're right. I think I should be able to do that. The only problem is I have no idea how. So if you'll bear with me, we'll see if we can create this.' And that's how it began. I didn't even call it mediation for about six months, but people just started knocking down my doors quite quickly because people were so thirsty to have more control over the lives than they felt once they were in the legal system.
They felt they were just putty in the hands of the system of the way it worked. And this was a very foreign idea for the legal industry at the time.
I understand you had a little bit of drama there as you tried to...
Yeah. Lawyers were not happy that I was doing this. The bar association was not happy. They started an investigation, and they said 'we think what you're doing is unethical.' And I said, 'I invite your investigation, because if you do it, I'm going to make it public, because I think this is too obviously good a thing for people, and the self interest of lawyers in the Bar Association should not be more important than what's best for people.
And so, please, let's make this public.' I didn't hear from them again for a few years when they came back, and they said, 'would you come and talk to us about what you're doing?'
What a great story, Gary What a great story. So, over the course of these past, I don't know, 40, 50 years, you've developed this very particular model of mediation, which you call, you know, the understanding based model of mediation. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be and what it is and what differentiates it from other approaches?
Yeah, the idea of the understanding based model is we're so used to, when people are in conflict, feeling like the way conflict gets resolved is you turn up the heat and you apply the coercion threats, wheel whatever you can do to get people to move toward each other. And that's typically how lawyers negotiate. That often has a kind of blowback afterwards. Maybe people reach the deal, but there's often a kind of regret afterwards. And certainly it doesn't do a lot to help people.
As a matter of fact, lawyers often would say the test of a good agreement, whether both sides are equally dissatisfied.
So funny, you're right. We hear that all the time.
Yeah. So we thought we could do better. And if we use this other power, this underutilized power, power of understanding and if people can really understand what they care about and what the other person cares about and the situation and use the power of that that out of that, we might be able to find results that people feel like respond to their individual needs and what they think is important in their lives, rather than what other people think should be important to them.
And that that could bring a whole different quality of relationship and understanding and feeling about the result. The trick is, as lawyers, we often feel like it's not easy to just say, okay, give away the power to the people to decide. What we often like to do is we like to tell people what to do, and people like to be told what to do.
The problem with that is that it underestimates the potential wisdom that can come from people actually finding out what they really care about and finding their solution rather than somebody else's idea of what they should be doing with their lives. And so we think that comes out of understanding and working with people in a different kind of way, where it's not coercive and where the people really are at the center of the process and the mediator supports them and helped guide them through.
Yeah, this speaks to this whole idea in your model around letting parties own the conflict, empowering people to solve their own problems.
Yeah, it's really radical because many lawyers feel like when they take on a case, it's on them. They feel a responsibility weighed very heavily on them. They have nightmares, they carry it around all the time. And so this idea really flips that on its head. And what it puts in its place is saying, what if the people who created the problem, who understand their own lives better than anybody from the outside ever could and are going to have to live with a result?
What about if we put them at the center, the process and have them make the decisions? And we just supported that. And so that, of course, puts a lot of people in a position of saying, well, then what am I supposed to do? Am I just chopped liver?
So, Gary, we were talking about the need to empower the parties to give them ownership. And of course, that changes fundamentally the role of the mediator, as we've been discussing. But what is the role of the mediator in that new landscape?
Well, you have to bring understanding to every bit of the process and understanding people and being able to show them you understand them. There's a technique we call the loop of understanding, where we reflect back to people what we understand them to be saying, and then we check it out. Did I get that right? And they say, no, you didn't get it right. And then we say great. Tell us what we missed.
And then we go until they're satisfied we've demonstrated our understanding of them to their satisfaction.
Yeah, let's talk about looping. I understand that's one of the key constructs in this model, this idea not just of getting people to listen, but the idea, as you were expressing it, of making sure that what people think they're hearing is actually what the other person is kind of like intending to communicate.
Yeah. I'm so impressed with how you've done your homework here.
Your work is great. You're doing amazing work, Gary. You really are.
I'm thrilled to have you understand it so well. Yes, that's really the idea is to really not stop until the person really confirms that you've got it. And what this means, especially for lawyers, but other people as well, therapists, other people, the field is wide open, doesn't have to be the employers. But the idea is we follow them rather than lead them. So that means when we follow them, that's much harder to do because actually you can't follow them.
You can't loop unless you listen, and you can't listen unless you've turned your attention to now what's happening before you in this moment. And many times, people are two steps ahead. Somebody comes into a lawyer's office and the lawyer might say, in five minutes, oh, I know where this case goes. This is case number 42. And so I won't tell them that yet. I'll sit here and humor them and we'll go through it. But I know I've done this before, I've seen this case before. Reality. You haven't?
You've never seen this case before? This case has never happened before in the history of the world. And these people are people that are now they're unique, and we have to find out who they are and support them. And that means we really have to work hard to understand and realize they're not our picture of who we think they are.
And I guess from what you describe, part of that path to that quest for understanding is really getting at what the real issues are, not what they appear to be at the surface, but kind of like what's really behind the surface. I think you call this going down the WHY trail.
Yes, that's right. DuaneMaybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Yes. So people fight about things. They're often money and relationships and stuff like that. And if you stay at the level at which they disagree, then you're not going to resolve the conflict. So you have to go underneath the conflict.
Einstein said that you can't solve a problem at its own level, so you have to find out what's there, what's underneath, what is it that's really at stake for you underneath this disagreement about money? What do you really care about? What's really important to you in terms your own life's priorities, looking at this problem in the context of that and see if we can find that for both people.
And the idea is, if we can find it for both people, then when we come to a resolution, hopefully we can find a resolution that takes into account what's important to both. And that's why it won't feel like the test of good agreement is that you're equally dissatisfied. It means you can both find in the result and the money and whatever else you've decided you can see reflected the things that you really care about in your life that make a difference for you. Duane: Amazing.
Easier said, then done.
Well, that's why you provide the training. I think your basic courses is 40 hours of training, is that right? Gary: Yes. What do you do in 40 hours of training?
Oh, my goodness. It's very intensive. We're all together. One of the things about our model of mediation, which makes it actually very different, this is not the typical form of mediation that's used the dominant mediation model is one that actually has a lot of hallmarks of the traditional model. There's a lot of coercion and you get people in separate rooms and you caucus with them.
And then the idea is you get each of them to move until you've made a deal, but it's you that's made the deal rather than they. So this is really different. It's harder. Everybody works harder. The mediator works harder, the parties work harder. The lawyers, if they are participating, they're supportive, but they work harder than they would if they were in a more traditional form.
So it really is a very different kind of stance that we all have to find ourselves as collaborative problem solvers, supporting the parties to be in the center of it all.
Yeah. So let's do a case study. I've read in Amanda Ripley's book High Conflict. I read this story of your interaction with the symphony. So maybe we can use the symphony orchestra example of how this all works. Maybe you can tell us that story.
Yeah, well, the story of the symphony is... they were a fabulous symphony, but they'd had terrible problems around our struggles around money and a number of other things as well. They had gone on strike, and when they called us in, they were about to have to negotiate a new contract. And they realized, both sides realized, if they did not negotiate a new contract and they went on strike, it would probably be the end of the symphony. So there's a lot at stake for them.
What we did was we actually took the players and we worked with the players and we worked with the board and we worked with management and we taught them the skills by having them do simulations that didn't have anything to do with symphonies, other kinds of labor situations. And so they learned the skills of looping, going underneath the problem, thinking, brainstorming, all kinds, a whole different way of thinking about conflict.
And by the time we finished the training of all of them, the actual mediation itself was a piece of cake because they really understood how to do it. I mean, one of the goals I have as a mediator is to put myself out of business. So if people really have learned how to work together, when future problems come up, they'll be able to do it themselves. That's the fond hope.
That's fantastic, Gary. What a noble ideal there. That's just brilliant.
Well, it certainly beats war. And that model impacts the way people think and it takes so much anonymous. And of course, we're at a point in the planet's evolution where we see the price paid every day higher and higher in more and more dangerous world we live in.
And the stakes are so high that if we continue to use that model of coercion and us against them and right and wrong as the total framework for everything, it's going to be really hard for us to pull together to be able to save this planet.
In the Baha'i advocacy that's kind of currently taking shape, one of the big ideas that is coming through is this idea that to get antagonistic groups closer together, you find a greater purpose that they can agree on and collaborate together around. Do you have any thoughts on how that might work or how that works in the context of what you've been doing?
Yeah, well, that's actually a book I'm writing now.
Fantastic.
How regular people can use this because this does not have to be highly sophisticated, well-trained people, but these are kind of basic human principles. One of the problems, and we had this with the symphony, is we had groups, and within the groups where people see things similarly, they also see things differently. So there can be conflict within a group. And so that's a problem.
For example, with the symphony, there were a number of people that played stringed instruments, they were suffering repetitive injuries, and that's because so much of the repertoire was relying on stringed instruments. So they wanted what we called string relief. And so, of course, they weren't the dominant part of the group, so the group wasn't about to get behind that in the previous negotiation.
And of course, in the previous negotiation, the reason it had failed is then the players came to the table. They're representatives of the players with management, and the management said, what are your issues? And they had 36 issues. They said, what's the order of priority? The order of priority is they're all the same. They're all of the highest priority. Well that doomed it right there. So what we had to do was work with the players for them to identify what are the priorities.
And string relief became one of the things that other people in the orchestra realized it was a good thing for them to support, even though it wasn't going to affect them directly. So by the time that we got through that, there were really four big issues, and so it was going to be much easier to solve four issues ...
In Amanda's book, again, one of the things that's very colorful is your own story with your engagement with running for office for the local council. Yeah, I mean, what I love about the story is, again, that idea of coherence how hard it is for us to practice what we believe, if you will, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about that story. What happened and what did it teach you?
Yeah, I love it that I was really worried about this story going public because it was a colossal failure on my part. And so I realized so many people were so appreciative of what I'd done and what my talents were as a mediator that they didn't see me as a human being. And so this story helped me land on Earth where I belong. And so it was a very hard fall because I got very excited about. We had problems in the community. People said, we need somebody to run the meetings.
I said, I know how to run meetings where there's conflict and they said great. So they elected me in a landslide. And then this was to the local, just our local, 250 houses right on the ocean in California. And my idea was, let's get the whole community involved. And so all the people that voted for me come to the meetings. It's your community. And of course, one of the great surprises, two
surprises neither of them should have been. One was they didn't come because they thought they'd elected me. I would do that. And secondly, the people that were against me, they came to every meeting and they just started taking potshots at me right off the bat. Well, as a mediator, I was used to really heavy conflicts. Horrible things would happen in the room, but it was never aimed at me, and this was aimed at me. And as the me, what came back into my life was the old trial lawyer.
I knew how to defend and attack, and before I knew it, I was off and running. And everything I believed in about how people should be with each other, I was contradicting from moment to moment. And it was terrible experience because I was defensive. And I wouldn't say drunk with power, but kind of I loved the idea of having power. I kind of hadn't had it. As a mediator. I give it away, so I'm happy. But this was kind of intoxicating. We can make real change.
And of course, that was seeds of destruction right there and created a WE / THEM relationship between me and the people that were against me. And so I went through a really horrible period where my wife said to me she'd come to the meetings with the dog and then leave after a while. And at one point she said to me, 'you know, I don't even recognize you. This is not the person that I've been with for the last 40 some OD years.
This is some old version of you.' And so I really took that to heart because I knew that she was right and she always is right. And so I went through a period of deep soul searching. I've had a meditation practice for decades. I thought hought this would help me. But I would just sit there and suffering and not be able to get bottom of it and living with this day and night. And of course, I wasn't getting paid a penny to do any of this. So it was like, why am I ruining my life this way?
And people in the community would look the other way when I pass them on the street. These are my neighbors, so what could be worse? And so I realized I had to do something about that. And when I got to the bottom of it, I realized I had just gotten caught up in all the stuff I help other people unhook from, and I needed to do something to change that. And so over time, I did. But first, if I had to confess what had happened, and it was really hurtful to me, and I had to feel my vulnerability.
I love the story because it brings out the challenge. None of this is easy. It's clearest when you see the contradictions in our own actions.
Often the mediators that I trained were very upset when this story came out. I said what? How could you do this? Have these conferences that they'd invite me and say, let's talk about your failure. I talk about. And they said, 'Why'd you do this? Why didn't you do that?' 'I should have. I could have. I would have. I didn't. And so I'm just like you. I'm no better than you.'
What do you think this tells us? I mean, your story and everything else that you've been talking about about kind of like the qualities and the challenge for the mediator in this process.
Yeah, the challenge is we often think we know better what people should do with their lives than they do. And people ask us what to do because they want us to tell them what to do, although they may really not. Maybe they do, because then they'll be able to blame us when things go wrong. We like to tell people what to do because then we think we're doing something valuable. And so that whole thing has got to flip. And that's really the challenge, is to really believe at the deepest level.
And it's a wisdom. Which is I don't know. There's a Buddhist saying which is not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing and greeting the world with the stance of I don't know how I can help you. I know I really want to, but I need you to be able to help me help you. That's the biggest challenge. Can we do that? Can we live that? And the more successful we are, the more important it is that we realize how little we really know.
And I'm almost 80 now, and I realize I know a lot less than I knew 30 years ago.
So it's a certain demand for humility, would you say? Exactly. That IS the quality. I think that's the most essential quality for anybody. I mean, just think about this. Human beings with these really dark, heavy conflicts. Who do we think we are that we know how to really help them? I mean, it really takes an incredible amount of guts, but also a kind of hubris that I think we have to realize we don't know. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to do. There's lots we can do. Lots we can do.
And that's the stuff that people need to learn. I think the challenge, as you're articulating this is that the type of person who is drawn to doing this has probably a little bit of a savior complex. They want to help people, and it feels good. It feels good helping people. Right. I mean, that's a large part of what people find fulfilling. And so in that quest to be the person who's helping, it's hard to find that humility of letting people own the problem themselves.
Well, I have this conversation regularly with my wife, who's a great helper, and I accuse her, like, helping the little old lady cross the street, only the lady didn't want to cross the street. So I'm going to give you the help I think you need. It's easy to just kind of guess at what that is. But when we guess, we're often wrong because we really don't know. And not realizing how much we depend on people to be able to kind of find their own truth. And that's harder.
We have to live with their confusion, their pain, how they change their minds, how indecisive they are, how confused they are, how much suffering they experience. And our job is to be there with them in their suffering and to accompany them. That's what compassion really is.
That's beautiful, this principle of accompaniment.
Yeah. And it means we're at a horizontal relationship, not a vertical relationship. Beautiful horizontal relationship. We have to realize we're in the soup, we're trying to help.
That's fantastic. So, you know, as we've discussed briefly, Gary Baha'i communities all over the world will be working over the course of the next 25 years trying to bring antagonistic groups together. What advice would you have? This is grassroots, very grassroots. Not lawyers, not mediating professionals per se. Grassroots community organizations. What advice would you have for Baha'i communities worldwide in terms of how to best work to bring antagonistic groups closer together?
You mean for me to tell them what to do?
Touche. Gary: Right. So I wouldn't presume to tell them what to do, but I can suggest that there are a number of things that I think would be useful. I think the first thing is to realize that when you're trying to help people, to think you're doing it for altruistic reasons is self deception. There has to be something in it for you if you want to be able to help other people, that otherwise you'll burn out and you'll be very dissatisfied. So that's first.
And I think when you realize that it really is something in you, you're doing this for it's. Often we all have ways in which we've been hurt and we've suffered. And in fact, where the juice comes from to help people is that stuff that's been hanging around for 1020, 40, 60 years in us that we're trying to heal. And so feeling that helps us be in relationship to the people and realizing that every time we help somebody with their. Own wound. It's a little bit a healing of our own wounds.
And so we have this very intimate relationship with what they're going through and it's corollary and what we're going through. It's not like we talk about these things from people, but we need to feel that we need to really get our motivations and our motivations there are motivations to want to do this and they're really important and they're also motivations to not want to do this. And those are also really important and we have to listen to the motivations to not do this.
I'm in the line of good ones. And so you have to decide, is this the right time? Are these the right people? Am I in the right place in my life to want to be doing this with other people? And if there's more reasons to do it than reasons not to do it, then we can begin. But that's the whole thing. And are the people that we're working with, do they have motivations to do this? And I think every one of us deep inside has that. We may not be conscious of that, but it's there.
And it's there to be tapped. And so oftentimes, I'll think, in the face of impossibility, what's the possibility? And can we feed that little possibility and have that grow into something that's bigger and work from that place of more and more possibility until it grows and it matures and becomes something people can really work from? Groups have their own life. And one of the things I just heard this and I'm just still noodling about this. This is really an important idea.
It's either a really dumb idea or it's an important idea. People stay. It's about finding people like you that really is important to people. And of course, if that's true and the world depends on us only being with people that are like us, it's going to be very hard for us to pull anything off in terms of transformation. But there's this other way of looking at it which is do people like you?
And is there ways in which we can like people and be liked by people that are really people that we disagree? You know, my son is a filmmaker and he's just done filming of this really remarkable conference in Texas where billionaires are there who are very much, very conservative, but they really believe that we need to do something about climate change and they feel dismissed. When people know I don't believe you, they put them in that box.
And so we have to find ways of not holding people to the pictures that we have of them, especially politically. And the media feeds all this. And so it makes it really, really hard to not just turn everything into good and bad and right and wrong and this is how it is and oversimplify. So we have to really enter into the complexity of a problem and feel it and live with the complexity of it and understand that and go for that and realize that from that we can create understanding.
If we're not caught in the pictures that we carry around of people just by the way they look or something they've said or some political stance that they've taken. And that's a lot more work. And it means we have to I don't know, we have to do about media, but we have to not let ourselves get sucked in to the pictures that we're fed and bombarded with every day about this is right, this is wrong, this is what's happening and resisting that. So can a group support each other to do that? Yes.
And one of the things if you're talking about, I don't know, your healing group, if you have a healing group that wants to work together, we have a thing. In my last book, we called Inside Out: How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self Reflection to Help Others. We have what we call a buddy system. And this is really the key because what's happening inside us is really important for us to be able to recognize and how that impacts how we work with people on the outside.
So understanding how we work with people on the inside is challenging because everything reinforces just look at the outside. And so looking at the inside and working with that, learning to work with that. What we have is we call a buddy system.
So if you have, I don't know how many people you're talking about, 1150, you can still have people go into pairs and teach them how to have what we call buddy conversations, where they learn the skills of looping and they also learn the skills of speaking from their hearts about what's happening inside them. And they support each other to do that, to deepen their understanding of themselves and what they're going through and sustaining that.
And that's the key, is can you sustain this over long enough a period of time to make a difference? It's easy to just kind of get excited by the beginnings. What's hard is hanging in there for when it gets tough and they hang it in there for when it gets tough. That's when you need the buddies. Also, it's important to have, I think, a self reflection practice.
So we have in the self reflection book, the Inside Out book, nine different practices that we suggest people follow to be able to strengthen the muscle of self reflection and be able to use it in action. It's not like you just do that. I remember my father was so unhappy with me when I left practicing law with him. He came out, visited me, and I took him to the local Zen center and he said, what are these people just doing sitting on pillows? Don't they know that the world is burning?
And he just didn't see that there could be any value. And then when I was asked and he thought the mediation I was doing, he said, that's all bullshit, and real lawyers are trial lawyers. So we loved each other, my father and I. So he was 80 at the time. And I said, 'I've been invited by Harvard to teach.' And he said, 'Why would Harvard ask you to come teach?' So he came to a program, a five day, 40 hours program at Harvard.
Fell asleep some of the time, went through it, but the end, he said, 'yeah, I'm a mediator now.' Of course, he wasn't. It's finding a way to have love enter our hearts and connect us, no matter what our ideological or beliefs. You talked earlier about motivation. Of course, if you're going to empower people to solve their own problems, so to speak, you kind of need a certain motivation to be at the table for that to happen.
Exactly.
But what do you do if you have a party that doesn't have that motivation?
It's a non starter. You wait. Maybe things have to get worse, but the question is, do they have it? I think almost everybody has it. It's often buried. They may not be aware of it, but giving them the choice is really important. And to be able to say, 'if you do not want to do this, I will support you to say no.' Because unless people have a no, they don't have a yes.
So if it's really a no, then you're dragging them along in a process, and that's way too hard to do, and it's kind of a violation of them. I mean, it's first principle. Respect the party's autonomy and their right to make their own decisions. And if they're saying, 'No, I'm not going to do this', then we say, 'I'm here for you if you ever reach the point where you want to.' And then you're working with people who have intention, and that's the present expression of motivations.
But sometimes the motivation is the alternative is even worse. So this is kind of horrible to think about dealing with this person, but when I see the alternative, wow, that looks like it's really bad. So maybe that's all we have, but that's enough to start, and then can we develop it as we work together?
You spoke earlier about this idea of being in the face of impossibility. What happens when you reach that point? You're in this mediation, you're working and you look at something and it just feels impossible. How do you find the possible at that moment?
Yeah. Well, first of all, I think the most important thing is you have to open your heart to the people. And so when you open your heart and you feel like there is a beating human heart that they have, and that their aspirations they have as humans. And they seem to be buried now. They seem to be not accessible, and it seems to be impossible. We know that all it takes is for them to want to change that, to be able to make some headway with changing that.
So I always feel that possibility, and as long as I hold out that possibility and invite them to find that in themselves, I've always got something to work with. So I never kick anybody out of mediation. I mean, if there's violence, that's it. Or if they're drunk or drunk or something. But assuming they're there in more or less right minds, if they're there, I assume that they're there.
And if they've come to a meeting and that looks like it's impossible, you have to remember they've come to the meeting. There was some reason that they came to the meeting now. Maybe it was because they thought in the presence of a neutral, they could bash the other person and get their way and all of that. But there might be something else there too, and we're always looking for that. And when it works, it's beautiful. And when it doesn't work, sometimes that can be beautiful too.
To be able to say for one person to be able to say to the other, you have really done damage to me, and I do not want to work with you. I'm not going to put up a bit anymore. So, no, I don't want to work this out. And I consider that a success because it's a step forward for them in terms of their own lives.
Now, Gary, your center for Understanding and Conflict provides training for a number of different courses. Is that something that's limited to lawyers, or is it for people of all walks?
No, it started with lawyers. We used to be the Center for Mediation and Law. We changed it for the center for Understanding and Conflict because we started to see what we were really teaching was a different way of relating to conflict. So it's for anybody who feels like they want to develop skills to work with people in conflict, and it's become much broader.
And we're now interested... In this book I'm writing, I'm interested in kind of putting together the steps for people, even without a mediator, to be able to kind of follow that they can go through conflict with somebody else or have discussions where they really diverge. And we're training teachers. So how would listeners go about signing up for a course, for example? If they're interested, they just go on our website.
Understanding in conflict - all one word - dot org. Duane: Understanding in conflict.org. All one word. Fantastic. So, Gary, tell us a little bit more about this new book that you're working on. It sounds really exciting. Yeah, well, the idea is exciting. I'm still in the throes. I'm actually looking for situations where people who are in conflict are willing to have me coach one of the people, and then they will talk to the other person, record that, and then bring it back to me.
And I want to use those because books are only juicy if they've got examples and so on. These are not mediations, but it's really about the steps that you can take. Anybody can take with anybody, whether it's your in laws or your neighbors or your friends or people that you're warring with. The process is different because of the content, but it's the same in terms of these steps.
And what I'm looking for is something that's not going to be just like a formula, but that's genuine, that you can do with other people who are actually interested in doing that with you.
How does it differ? I'm assuming a lot of it is similar to what you've done so far, but how does making it in this kind of, like, more self help mode, how does it differ from what you've been doing in your mediation training?
Well, in the mediation training, we're teaching people to be mediators in this. It's many of the same tools, but it's about doing it without a mediator. And in the book, I'm going to be kind of a coach, so I will listen to what they've done, carrying it out, and then they'll bring it back, and then I'll coach them, and hopefully we'll come out of that as some stuff that people will find useful.
And I'm really kind of a little bit of a quandary, but kind of excited to try to solve this problem because so many of these kind of self help books rely on the author's reporting of the story. I had this great success. I've done that myself in my books, or failure, whatever it was. But it's our reporting of it.
So this will hopefully get more real because we'll have recorded the conversation that people had without me, and then we'll be able to kind of analyze that and figure out where do they go from here? So I'm hoping that we'll give people some guideposts that they wind up well. Duane: We can't wait. We'll have to get you back on the show once you come out with the book to tell us the story. Gary: Yes. Right. Hope it will all happen befor I'm dead.
So working at a snail's pace, but feels like I'm making progress.
Gary, you're a legend. Thank you so much for taking time to share with us today. So many great insights. Really keep up the good work.
Well, you keep up your good work. I'm so excited. Thinking about a 25 year commitment. It's no small deal. It's kind of like we're in it for the long haul, and I think it's enough of a period of time. If you're young enough, you think, well, I think I might still be around then, and I'm hoping the planet will still be around for me.
But I admire the choice to say, okay, we're going to do something about this as a collective group, because as a collective, you really have a power that individuals don't have, and that's kind of what this is all about. Isn't it?
It's so exciting. It's so exciting to imagine the possibilities of how this will all unfold and evolve over the course of that 25 year window. You're absolutely right. Well, we have learned so much today. Gary, thank you so much for joining us on Society Builders.
Well, good luck, Duane. And it was great talking.
Well, that's it for our show today. Make sure you join us again next time when I interview Rabbi Roly Matalon, who will share with us some truly, deeply moving stories about how he and his congregation tackle this whole polarization challenge. It's an interview you won't want to miss. That's. Next time on Society Builders.
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