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Hey everyone, it's Kwame Christian, host of Negotiate Anything asking you to please do not skip forward because this is not a commercial.
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What do I want to do?
And I was asked like, you know, what kind of job do you want?
And I said, I don't know, but I know that I really love mediating.
I enjoy it. And my friend said, why don't you become a mediator?
And I said, don't you need to be a lawyer?
And this is a very common misconception.
Like a lot of even lawyers ask me, how are you a mediator?
Like you're not a lawyer.
And I just wanted to dispel that myth for everyone that's listening right now that you do not need to be a lawyer to be a mediator.
So I went and got certified and the teacher who certified me also said, you know what, Alice?
Of course, he was probably selling me, but it worked.
He said, you should come and take my arbitration certification training.
So I did both of those around the same time.
So I'm a certified mediator and a certified arbitrator.
And I have done like a few arbitrations.
Wow. And I've been called your honor.
Which is kind of a cool, but majority of the time I am mediating.
And so that's kind of how I circuitously got to mediation.
And I feel like I use a lot of the skills that I learned as an actress in my mediations because I can like pull out like what's really happening underneath.
And in acting in theater, we call that subtext.
And so we're always having to read subtext.
And when you're opening a script and you're seeing the words of whatever the characters are saying as an actor, part of the work is to try to understand under these lines, what is the other character's subtext?
Always, always. And so when I'm mediating, it's the same thing.
It's trying to understand like, what's happening?
Like what's really going on underneath the words?
And here's the scenario, but the scenario that's really in front of you is not the real scenario.
It's usually some other scenario that's like hidden.
What's the background agenda?
So like, really, I like in both in negotiation and mediation is to uncover that secret.
Yes. Oh, that's good.
There's so much to delve into, but I want to focus on, let's go deeper.
When somebody wants to fix, let's say it might be somebody who has a negotiation background, whatever it happens to be, they want to fix.
What is it within themselves that they need to change in order to adopt a better mindset to be a better mediator?
Oh, I love that question.
I think it comes down to being able to let go, right?
That, I mean, it's that maximum.
It's not your conflict, therefore it's not your solution.
And sometimes it's one of those moments in training where you're just waiting for something to click.
And I see this training professional coaches as well.
And I think for me, it comes down to the intention behind the action.
Are you doing it for you or are you doing it for them?
Also this idea that if, I mean, let's take it from a practical standpoint.
If you are the negotiator who's now working in a mediation capacity and you see the solution, you feel the solution and then you give the solution, yeah, again, it might make you feel good, right?
And it gives you that, you know, don't mean hitting all of that stuff.
And it might work, it might work in the short term, but I guarantee you this, if you go back in the long term, you've removed ownership over that solution, right?
And it's not your solution, which might work on paper, but how much real emotional investment do those individuals have who've been in that room with you?
And particularly then if you're dealing with different park constructs, right?
People will say yes if they know that, you know, their boss needs them to say yes, for example, right?
Or in a community setting, there may be other pressures there, for example.
So who are you doing it for and are you sure?
Okay, so I love the fact that we, you're asking that grounding question, are you doing it for you or doing it for them?
Because I know there've been times in my life where I realized, why am I pushing so hard?
What is this? Oh, this is about me.
Because I, as a negotiator, sometimes we have that deal -making bias and then we make it about ourselves by saying, listen, if I'm a good negotiator, I can get this done.
And it becomes very problematic, especially in your personal life because now you're removing somebody's autonomy and agency and they feel like you're forcing them.
And it reminds me of one of the things saying, somebody brought up in one of the trainings and I told her, I'm like, listen, I'm gonna put this in every training going forward.
Collaboration builds commitment.
Collaboration builds commitment.
If they feel as though they can look at the deal and see some of themselves in the deal, they can look back and remember the process and see that they contributed to it.
Now they're bought in, cause it's not your deal, it's my deal and I want this to succeed.
And so we have to be able to remove ourselves, not just by recognizing, hey, my ego is now getting in the way.
But also we realize that even if I let my ego get in the way and I do get a deal done, it's good for me, but it's not good for them because the deal, what we want are lasting deals where people are bought in.
That's really, really important.
Absolutely, and I think, the ways that we can help negate that are having good professional supervision as a mediator, for example, can help that, having that sounding board outside of the system and the process that you're currently working on, and it's the same as having coaches as well, having someone
to work that through.
You know? Absolutely, it's critical, it's critical.
When you are seeing people going through this process, because you've trained a countless amount of mediators at this point, what would you say are the elements that separate the good mediators from the great mediators?
I think a few things, one curiosity, the ability to take that step back, you know, emotional maturity sometimes, and the ability to realize that you're not always right and there's always more to learn, I think.
And, you know, when you do get those individuals on programs who are clearly, you know, coming from a, maybe his previous experience or maybe naturally, you know, inclined towards this work, the idea of going, actually, I do need to do some stuff on myself, that somebody said to me really years ago
that really defined it really well, a good friend of mine who works for UCAN in Canada, you know, it's about you knowing your stuff, you know, your own stuff.
And I mean that in a non -patronizing sense, you know?
Realizing that, you know, you've got to know your own conflict resolution skill, is, you know, style, sorry.
You know, are you more inclined to avoid?
Are you, and again, somebody said to me, a mentor from years ago, Mariefin Stoff said to me, you know, some people who work in this field, and I mean that as negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution in general.
Sometimes some of us tend to be naturally attracted to conflict and we got to be careful with that, you know?
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Hey, I'm Jessi Hempel, the host of Hello Monday.
Actor Anna Kendrick joins me for our next episode.
She'll talk about everything from taking feedback, to managing imposter syndrome, and her career pivot to directing.
I really don't want you to miss this, so here's a sneak preview of Anna on what it felt like to take a big risk.
It was that feeling that you're, when you're gonna vomit, where it was like, oh God, it's coming up, I'm gonna say I wanna pitch myself to direct the movie, and I kept trying to stuff it back down, because it was so scary.
And then a day later or something, I was pitching myself and it was the weirdest, most ambivalent pitch, probably, in the history of cinema, because I was pitching myself, but going, guys, if this isn't the right thing for the movie, or you don't think that I'm ready, I shouldn't do it.
Because I really wanted to do what was best for the movie.
I loathe false confidence.
I wanna be honest, and I wanna work with people who can make room for that honesty.
So I was really delighted that almost all the producers were on board, even with my very ambivalent pitch.
Confidence, I've always thought of a bit of a misnomer, confidence is what you say after the fact when you look back at something that's happened.
Before, you just have to find someone to push you into the void of something new.
It's funny that you say the void, because I had, I was like lying in bed, before I'd said it out loud to anybody.
It was like I had the image of me behind me, pushing me off of a cliff and going like, you're gonna figure out how to fly on the way down.
To hear my whole conversation with actor Anna Kendrick, make sure you're following Hello Monday with Jesse Hempel wherever you get your podcasts.
The shooting at the secret war in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and I really want to shine a light on these incredible mediators who work in confidentiality without publicity, but have really helped this country in really challenging times.
Definitely, this is great.
And thank you for writing the book and thank you for your service to the country and in what you're doing, it's incredibly important.
And then I think for this presentation, well, this podcast, I think the two things that I want to focus on today are first how mediation has helped over the course of American history, again in ways that we probably haven't even recognized.
And then also for people who want to be involved in community remediation or see opportunities for racial reconciliation or community building through mediation.
Let's talk about some best practices there.
So when it comes to mediation in history, where should we even start?
Yeah, so I'll start with this.
The Community Relations Service, it was really pushed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
It weren't for him, it wouldn't have existed.
And if we may remember, I'll just start, what led to the creation was the Birmingham Boycott in 1963.
We remember the photos of Bull Connor and of the dogs and with the young African Americans there.
What we don't quite always remember about that, it was really a boycott about a black business boycott, basically saying, we're not going to serve segregated businesses unless you desegregate Birmingham.
And the Civil Rights Assistant Attorney General at that point, Burke Marshall, spent a lot of time mediating between the civil rights protestors in that situation and the mayor at that time.
And so going forward, when we were thinking about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there was a concern of all this desegregation happening and how that would take up too many lawyers to go out there and they wanted mediators to be helpful.
Burke Marshall said, oh, this is too hard.
I'm a civil rights attorney.
I need other people to go out and mediate because this is too hard.
It takes up too much time.
So that's how it gets created.
So that's the, it starts from successful mediation, but the recognition of how hard it was to do this.
I'll start with this one situation in Selma.
We remember when John Lewis, the former congressman who passed away recently, the great John Lewis and Bloody Sunday, where a numerous amount of protestors, civil rights protestors, blacks were beaten up by the Alabama state troopers.
LBJ was concerned that there was going to be more violence, sent this agency, the community relations service out there.
And the first director of that agency was a man named Leroy Collins, a white governor from Florida, former governor from Florida.
And he worked hard, especially with Andrew Young, who later became a congressman and a mayor and a United Nations ambassador to work with them.
If what we often remember is the movie in Selma, and certainly for those who know the history where Martin Luther King leads his congregation and leads the people across the Pettus Bridge in Selma.
And at that point, there's a fear of facing the Alabama state troopers.
Leroy Collins and other mediators worked out a resolution to keep it safe.
And that was part of the story that then it helps keep them safe, but it also then helps move it toward, that was a voting rights situation to the important legislation, the 1965 voting rights legislation that then gets passed because of the protests that happened in Selma over voting rights.
And of course, voting rights are still a huge issue today for blacks and for many other people as we face it in the election in six days.
So that's another example.
So then from there, there are many situations where the CRS has gone to wounded knee when the American Indian movement took over there to the alien Gonzales case.
Ultimately, that was a situation where he was taken from his Florida family.
But what really helped was there was a serious attempt by CRS mediators, including a man named Thomas Battles, who works also with the divided community project today to reduce the possibility of violence.
There was a lot of tension in Florida at that time, and there was a really valiant effort in that situation.
Fast forward to when I was director in Sanford, Florida, after Trayvon Martin was killed, as we remember, as he was going home after going from 7 -11 and was accosted by a wannabe neighborhood watch guy named George Zimmerman.
And there were protests in Sanford.
Community Relations Center has made a huge difference in helping the protesters protest safely and making their protests against the Stand Your Ground law, which was a big deal in that situation, and working with the protest groups, working with Al Sharpton and the National Action Network, working with Jesse
Jackson, and working with the mayor, the city manager to keep it safe, working with black and white pastors to reduce rumors and to help them heal as well.
And to this day, the mayor and many others credit CRS with keeping the protests safe, allowing them to express their First Amendment free speech right.
But it was a situation where there were many, I think over 80 protests, but not a single bottle was thrown and not a single arrest was made, partly because different from some of the other situations, the protesters worked well, I should say they worked with the city to allow peaceful protests to happen.
So that's a lot, Kwame, but that gives you just a sense of the breadth and the scope over time.
It is, I think what we forget, and what's important to know is that mediators can help what social justice is about, that there is a moral arc and that it does bend toward justice.
And the purpose of here in the mediators is created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it's to accomplish those goals.
It's to help move it in a way that we believe is right for our country.
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