A Video that Will Warm Your Heart

As mediators, we see a lot of our fellow humans’ existential struggles and disconnection. So this video sure warmed my heart and I thought I’d leave you with a smile for the weekend.

Thanks to Life 2.0 for linking to the video and making my day when I found it.

Divorce Book for Kids: We’re Having a Tuesday

If you’re a divorce mediator (or marital mediator, as they’re called here in New Hampshire), then you may be interested in this new resource for your heterosexual divorce clients.

We’re Having a Tuesday by DK Simoneau is, in her words, a “communication tool meant to help children and adults discuss the frustrations of the ongoing lifestyle change of shuffling between two homes.” It’s written and illustrated for children and I can imagine your clients might appreciate knowing about it.

It’s a sweet little book with colorful illustrations. And it has a terrific feature at the end, where there are pages for children to fill in after reading the book, presumably with some loving conversation and playful thinking with each parent.

Go have a look-see and let your fellow divorce mediators know about it, too.

Why Some Mediators Dislike Marketing…For Good Reason

Not all mediators dislike marketing. I love it, though I didn’t always. If you’re reading this, it seems possible that there are a few things about marketing that you don’t like and some marketing tasks you wouldn’t miss if they magically disappeared tomorrow.

Here are the most common reasons mediators tell me they shy away from, dislike, or downright can’t stand marketing:

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Making Mediation Your Day Job, Part 3: Reframing Your Marketing Intentions

In Part 2, you applied your mediator’s knowledge of framing to begin explaining how you help others attend to their conflicts and disputes. The exercises you completed in that section will help you launch more fully into Part 4 of the book, where you’ll actually begin to craft your marketing messages and strategies.

Before that, though, let’s get clearer on what you’re trying to accomplish with your marketing efforts. For many of you, Part 3 may be an exercise in reframing your thinking about marketing.

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Marketing ADR: Emphasize Avoiding Negatives or Aligning with Positives?

I imagine marketers everywhere regularly ponder what best changes a prospective client’s behavior from “not interested” to “buyer.” I’ve certainly attended enough ADR conferences to know that mediators are interested in a related question: What would make the public become more frequent consumers of ADR services?

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TraxTime Helps Monitor Your Billable Time

If you’re a solopreneur mediator and don’t have the benefit of the technological infrastructure of a large-scale operation firm, then you may be interested in this little program for tracking your billable time.

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Not Ready for Mediation…Oops, Waited Too Long

Ian over at Conversation Marketing shares a terrific little story that made me chuckle and rang true as can be for a lot of us in the ADR world:

A colleague of mine (Lenora Edwards) told me a great story today: A friend of hers signed her daughter up for Chinese language classes. Her daughter didn’t want to go. When asked why, she said “Because I don’t speak Chinese.”

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What If You Couldn’t Mediate?

In the last section of Making Mediation Your Day Job, Part 2, you spent some time pondering the ways you try to be helpful to people in conflict as well as the ways a few people told you they want help.

Today, we’re going to take the results of your last exercises and temporarily, at least, take them out of the context of mediation per se.

Why? Because when you’re passionate about mediation, [Read more]

Blogging Law 101: Tubetorials Help You Stay Legal

Do you have website or blog, or are thinking about creating one? Then you may want to know about Tubetorial, a terrific and free online resource with short video tutorials on a variety of web-related topics.

In particular, Tubetorial has a very good series called Blogger Law 101. Three short episodes are currently available and you can watch them right from your web browser. They won’t tell you everything you need to know, but they’ll help set your course and figure out where you may need to take additional steps, particularly if you’re in the U.S.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.

Reframing Your Offer: Finding the Overlap and Noting the Gap

In Exercise 2.2.4, you generated a list of the kinds of general conflict management or dispute resolution problems the people you contacted would want help solving.

Let’s take that list, do some initial work with it, and in the next post you’ll begin formally reframing the offer and benefits your public may most want from you.

[Read more]

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