Last year, I attended a memorial service online. The service meant a lot to me. The telephone rang, and rather than letting it ring and go to voicemail, I picked up and very quickly said I was attending the service and said goodbye. Even though the caller (“Jane”) was aware [Read More]
This past week, I taught my last class for the semester at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law. The online course entitled Employment Dispute Mediation teaches the students how to mediate "from soup to nuts." Many of the students are Human Resource (HR) professionals, which makes my [Read More]
The Sound of Silence is a song written by and released in 1964 by Simon and Garfunkel. It was used in the movie, The Graduate. Its lyrics include the phrases: “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening.” It is the last phrase I want to dwell on: People hearing [Read More]
My husband decided to purchase windshield wiper blades at Costco for our Audi. A few days later, when we took the Audi in for repair, we asked the repair person to put on the new blades. He advised that they were the wrong ones and would order the correct ones [Read More]
A colleague of mine- Jan Frankl Shau, Esq.-recently published an article in the Los Angeles Daily Journal entitled “ A New paradigm for mediation: the role of “bearing witness” (July 28, 2023). In it, she notes that sometimes the job of the mediator is simply to “bear witness” or simply [Read More]
The Harvard PONS blog posted an interesting tale about a billionaire who bought a 53-acre parcel for $37.5 million encompassing Martin’s Beach in 2008. In “When our “Principles “Crash up Against our Negotiation Goals,” by PON staff (May 11, 2023), the author notes that as the land was subject to [Read More]
As I have previously mentioned, I am in a book club which reads and discusses books about conflict resolution. The latest is Holding the Calm: The Secret to Resolving Conflict and Defusing Tension by Hesha Abrams (Berrett-Kochler Publishers, Inc., Oakland, Ca. 2022.) The first question one asks is what is [Read More]
A few weeks ago, my husband and I attended a family social gathering seeing extended family we had not seen in quite a long time. As one typically does, I went around to say “hello” to everyone, usually greeting them with a smile and a hug. However, when I went [Read More]
