The Expert Podcast

So are you in a dispute with somebody or a company? Of course you are. At any given point in life everybody has some conflict or dispute with another person or a company. But what do you do about it? How do you get it resolved? Well you can escalate it all the way up from just a casual conversation to an argument to a whole full-blown court case in litigation. In any event many times it's helpful to have a third party get involved - a mediator, an arbitrator. Sometimes a court requires mediation before you go to court. Well even if you want a mediator to help get involved to keep this from escalating, to keep it from getting more expensive and getting it more farther apart in ideas, what if the other person doesn't want to get involved? What if the other person says "I'm not doing mediation"? Right? You say it takes two to have a conversation. Well maybe not.

Is there such a thing as a one-way mediation? A one-person mediation? And how can it help you? Well mediation is not designed to force two people in a argument or conflict to do something they don't agree with. A mediation is simply there to help show both parties what their common ground already is, what might be a workable solution, what are the options, and also to help dissolve some of the anxiety and some of the fighting points. What if you can't get the other person? You just did that yourself.

Many times we perform mediation for one party by themselves first and then hopefully you can bring the other party in. A mediation as a third party can talk to you as a combatant in a dispute, combatant in an argument and point out to you look here's what the other side might be doing, here's how you can protect yourself, here's maybe reading between the lines what their language is saying. Maybe that person might seem mean and angry and toxic, maybe they're just crying out for help, maybe they just need you to throw them a lifeline.

In almost every single case where there's a conflict where the other party seems like they're out for blood and they're fighting, they got their dukes up, it's really that they're just defensive. They're scared. They're scared of getting ripped off, they're scared of losing, maybe they have some kind of ego problem. Many times there's easy ways to disarm that.

Even if the other party isn't interested in getting involved with a mediation with a third party like our company, many times you can introduce the mediation elements yourself because look you have to talk to that party whether it's through your attorney, whether it's through some employment contract, whether it's just through talking to your neighbor over the fence about some problem you have. We can load you up with the things that we would say in mediation that might help you break the ice. You can say the same things a mediator can. The mediator is not doing anything magic to force somebody, they're just recognizing what the hang-ups are of both parties. Most of the time the hang-ups are immaterial, they're not really tangible to the solving the case, they're just kind of psychological mental hang-ups.

We can help you get through that language with the other party by what we call loading the lips. We can tell you what to say, what words to use based on what we see from the other party. You can show us email, text, case information, whatever it is and help you see through that. We can see through the fog of a fight to know really what's going on with that other party and help you carry them to that solution. A lot of times they look at you like an adversary and they're not going to listen to anything you say. There's very simple ways to de-escalate that.

Now part of it is you have to be willing to do it as well, which is a hard thing to do. You have to swallow your pride. But we can make that easier too. We can tell you how it's not going to be that bad, you're not going to really have to lose, you don't have to be defeated, you can maintain your pride, your dignity, you can even win if you do it the right way. It's not manipulating another person, it's showing both parties what the solution is.

So before you give up on a mediated solution, consider one-way mediation, single party mediation. If you can't get the other person in, at least start with that to see if you can move the ball forward using the same skills that a mediator would have. Look you probably already have these skills, you probably already know it. You're good at talking to people, you're good at working through resolutions, you've done it many times in your life with other people, family, friends, you solve problems. Even if you've ever been a matchmaker and put two people together in a dating relationship, in some ways that's a form of collaboration. You probably already have these skills, you probably just don't recognize what you can do with your own power to solve the problem.

So consider one-way mediation. Obviously it's better to have both parties involved so you don't want to squander that if you can get everybody to the table, but if you can't, that's an option. Remember we're not attorneys, check your legal advice, make sure you're doing things the right way, don't get yourself in a jam where your physical well-being is in danger. Don't go up against somebody who's violent or kind of fight you or kind of do damage to you, make sure that you do all that. But this is just about a hypothetical theoretical way to proceed if all the other things are safe for you or legal for you that you have that option. Good luck and let us know what you think in the comments.