All About Mediation Training

Title: Listening Skills Training
by Lisa Downs
Publisher: ASTD Press; ISBN: 1562865021

From the Publisher

Most adults have poor listening skills. In fact, with attention spans of less than eight minutes is it any wonder business and personal communications are rife with misunderstanding and needless conflict?

Listening Skills Training is a complete resource designed to develop vital listening skills and includes a step-by-step training guide, sample half-, full-, and two-day agendas, classroom handouts, tools, assessments, and ready-to-use PowerPoint(TM) slides. A CD-ROM is included.

Title: I Hear What You Say, But What Are You Telling Me? — The Strategic Use of Nonverbal Communication in Mediation
by Barbara G. Madonik
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787957097

From the Publisher

It has been estimated that less than twenty percent of all human communication is express through words. This means that in order to get to the heart of what people are really saying we must have the ability to read the subtext of nonverbal communication. Yet mediators often lack the skills they need to analyze and utilize the reach meaning that is found in nonverbal communication.

I Hear What You Say, But What Are You Telling Me? is a fascinating, original, and invaluable tool kit filled with practical information and techniques for mediators who want to use nonverbal communication to their strategic advantage. Employing a proven process, Barbara Madonik – communication expert, mediator, and international consultant – reveals that it takes to understand, analyze, and utilize nonverbal communication to greatly enhance the mediation process.

This step-by-step handbook teaches you to tune all your senses into what is happening with parties and counsel during mediation and thereby increase your ability to prepare for and facilitate the overall process.
In this important resource, Madonik outlines her tested seven-step process that reveals how to:

• Prepare yourself and set up your working environment to increase your effectiveness as a mediator
• Maximize your initial telephone contact
• Manage the mediation environment so you can control it
• Assess the parties and create a useful profile of each person
• Engage each party to create powerful rapport and guide all parties to communicate with each other
• Trigger action that puts derailments back on track and builds momentum toward resolution
• Employ a variety of techniques to bring closure to the parties and the process

This practical guide will uncover the hidden meaning of conscious and other-than-conscious communication – body language, breathing, dress, speech patterns, and more – to help achieve a deeper understanding of a wide variety of conflicts, including employment, labor, commercial, consumer, family, community, and government disputes.

Title: People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts
by Robert Bolton
Publisher: Touchstone; ISBN: 067162248X

From the Publisher

People Skills is a communication-skills handbook that can help you eliminate most communication problems. Author Robert Bolton describes twelve most common communication barriers, showing how these “roadblocks” damage relationships by increasing defensiveness, aggressiveness, or dependency.

He explains how to acquire the ability to listen, assert yourself, resolve conflicts, and work out problems with others. These are skills that will help you communicate calmly, even in stressful, emotionally charged situations.

People Skills will show you:

• How to get your needs met using simple assertion techniques
• How body language often speaks louder than words
• How to use silence as a valuable communication tool
• How to de-escalate family disputes, lovers’ quarrels, and other heated arguments

Both thought–provoking and practical, People Skills is filled with workable ideas that you can use to improve your communication in meaningful ways, every day.

Title: Don’t Be So Defensive : Taking the War Out of Our Words With Powerful Non-Defensive Communication
by Sharon Ellison
Publisher: Andrews Mcmeel Pub; ISBN: 0836235940

From the Publisher

When people communicate, they are at war. That’s what therapist and communications expert Sharon Ellison concluded after thirty years of studying how people interact.

 For centuries, verbal communication has been based on a “war model,” with the same rules we use in physical combat – gain power over others and defend ourselves at all costs. We create needless conflict, and find ourselves drawn into power struggles even with the people we love most.

Don’t Be So Defensive takes the war out of our words by offering an alternative system that disarms our instincts for reacting defensively and helps us become more confident and competent. Ellison’s model shows readers how to use the basic communication tools nondefensively, and then offers easy-to-follow techniques for practicing them. Examples cover a wide variety of situations from intimate relationships to parent-child relationships to professionals relationships.

This detailed system that Ellison has been teaching for years offers the freedom to communicate effectively without being dependent on the other person’s cooperation. It allows people to be well protected while being direct and vulnerable, clear and compassionate.

Equally important, this is truly a process that can be adapted to individual personalities. Ellison also shows us how to use communication as a potent tool for social change.