You Already Know How to Do This

You already know the most important ways to approach marketing and promoting your ADR business. Learning to mediate well taught you those skills and mindsets already.

If you’re new to mediation and still learning to master the craft, then you can cultivate your good mediator skills right alongside your good marketing skills and still get going with what you read here.

This book is organized around basic dispute resolution and mediation concepts that will be very familiar to most of you. I’ll help you extend your thinking about their application beyond the world of mediation and into the world of practice building.

Let’s start right now. Many mediators work from the assumption and belief that the parties know best what will work for them, and truly know best how to resolve the dispute that’s gotten stuck if we, the mediators, can help clear the debris out of their way.

If you’re a mediator who works from such an assumption, then you help people explore, uncover, consider and reflect. You come to them as a guide instead of as an expert who knows what they should do and exactly how they should do it. You don’t live their lives and you understand that you’re glimpsing only a tiny sliver of them during your brief time in their presence.

That’s the spirit with which I will work with you over the course of this book. Just as when I mediate, I will attempt to clear away debris, raise questions for your consideration, and help guide you in your own thinking. I won’t try to give you a recipe for success, but will instead offer you some paths, a compass, and a few navigational ideas.

And just as in effective conflict management, you’ll be asked to try ideas on for size, experiment with options, reality test ideas, and ultimately, choose what’s best for you as the expert in your own life and business.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.