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 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 like a mediator or an arbitrator. Sometimes a court process requires mediation before you even can 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, what if the other person doesn’t want to get involved? What if the other person says I’m not doing mediation?
They 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, all right. Mediation is not designed to force two people in an argument to do something they don’t agree with. 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, 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 mediator, as a third party can talk to you as a combatant in a dispute combatant in 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 about 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. 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 are 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 conflict 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 for somebody. They’re just recognizing what the hangups are to solve the case. They’re just kind of psychological mental hangups. 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 and what words to use based on what we see from the other party you can show us emails, texts, case information, whatever it is. 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 are 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 and your dignity. You can even win. So before you give up on a mediated solution, consider one-way mediation or a 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, and friends. You can 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 on to the table, but if you can’t that’s an option. Remember we’re not attorneys check your legal advice to make sure you’re doing things the right way. Don’t put your well-being in danger. You know, don’t go up against somebody who’s violent or going to fight you or going to 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.
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