Making Your Mediation a Success
Below are some ideas for how to best prepare for your mediation to help make it have a successful outcome. Please review each of them carefully and reflectively.
- Step back and take a look at the BIG PICTURE and ascertain what is most important to you in this matter. What are your basic interests you most want to be met in the resolution of this matter?
- Be prepared with the facts.
- Try to ascertain the interests, needs and goals of the other party and how the other party’s interests, needs and goals can be met while meeting you own.
- Plan to LISTEN patiently and receptively to the other parties. “Why should I do that?” you may ask. Several good reasons are:
- That often parties learn new information or see old information in a new light;
- You can learn more about the basic interests and goals of the other parties; and
- Others are much more likely to listen to you if they know they are been heard-it is simply human nature.
- Keep in mind that Mediation is a COOPERATIVE process rather than an adversarial process.
- In mediation, as in negotiation, understanding what it is like to be in the other party’s shoes and empathizing (this does not mean you abandon your interests) can be useful.
- Remember that Mediation is Future oriented and not oriented towards a determination of past events.
- Consider what it will be like if this mediation fails. What are the alternatives and the costs in time and money?
“Plan to LISTEN patiently and receptively to the other parties.”
