Communication Coaching and Mediation Can Help Both to Improve Your Communication Process and to Develop a Mutually Agreeable, Practical Vision for the Future
Day in day out, we spend our lives navigating and negotiating a wide variety of relationships. The work of being a good steward of our own welfare while also being a creative collaborator skilled in sharing life with others is a huge part of what life is about for social beings like ourselves.
This work is hugely rewarding, but can also be hugely challenging. And nowhere are the rewards and challenges greater than in the intimate partnership we share with our spouse or significant other.
Challenges come in all kinds, too. Some are unique events that require hard work, a clear sense of priorities, mutually devoted commitment, and some big decisions. Other challenges come in the form of ongoing relationship patterns that leave both parties feeling that there must be a better way to relate to each other. Still other challenges are a combination of stresses, unproductive communication reflexes, frustration and exhaustion that together threaten the admiration, passion, and joy shared between two lovers.
Conflict Coaching for Individuals: The Initiative of a Single Person Can Make the Difference!
Are you looking for a way to better handle conflict with your spouse, a close friend or a colleague at work? Do you have an issue with your spouse that you would like to mediate, but your spouse refuses to participate? Would you simply like to strengthen your ability to stand up for yourself while still respecting and caring for others?
If so, Family Tree Mediation’s conflict coaching service may be right for you. While it is always a great opportunity when two parties in conflict are willing to work on improving the way they communicate, especially with the assistance of a mediator, a relationship can be greatly improved on the initiative of just one person.
In the past four decades, a great deal has been learned about the nature of conflict, the communication patterns that help individuals navigate such conflict, and those that don’t. We have greatly increased our awareness of the way that culture, emotion, information, past experience, worldviews, and communication models complicate our participation in conflict. In the heat of the moment, however, we rarely have the capacity to make effective use of this understanding, if we are fortunate enough to have obtained it. We find ourselves reacting according to the models for dealing with conflict we learned long ago and now apply unconsciously.
Premarital Counseling: Honoring Your Love with Sophisticated Partnership
Years of experience mediating both marriage and divorce conflicts of all kinds, has resulted in an understanding of what leads to marital happiness and fulfillment and what leads to marital dysfunction and divorce. In every case, in our experience, the quality of the marriage experience depends on the sophistication with which the lovers approach the project of life-partnership. That phrase, "life-partnership", points to an important understanding. For those entering into marriage, there is nothing you will do in your life that will have a larger impact on you than forming this partnership. In marrying, you leave behind all the other lives you might live and place yourself under the center of gravity of another person. The couple marrying thus becomes a double-star dance, each orbiting around the other, creating between them a third center of gravity, that of their partnership. Together you pursue what we call your Best Happiness in this double-star dance.
When the letter came on the last day of February, I had a foreboding. I’d noticed a certain energy around the building where Family Tree Mediation has had its office for the past six years, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. To begin with, the owner had put in a putting green in a little...
I recently came across a video of the 1999 induction celebration of Mr. Rogers’ into the television hall of fame. I stand in awe of Mr. Rogers because like no other human being I can recall, he achieved an outlier level of greatness – a game changing achievement – through absolute gentleness. When we...
Alexandra Petri, the author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, wrote a funny opinion piece in the Washington Post this week entitled “Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them in a meeting.” The piece uses humor to make the point that our communication styles demonstrate just how...
Hank Edson, J.D.
Proprietor of Family Tree Mediation Serving Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos and the wider Peninsula & San Francisco Bay Area.
Hank Edson, J.D.