I was talking with a fellow mediator and trainer the other day when the conversation moved to our experience training new mediators. We shared the joys of seeing people use the skills and abilities that they had already developed prior to starting to become a mediator. We also talked about some of the obstacles that new folks have when they begin.
When I came home I began thinking about the multiple tasks that new mediators have to learn to master. In some ways, everything is new.
One of the hardest challenges for new mediators, I believe, is the “Candy Store” phenomenon. Understandably, we want to know and try every tool and technique we see and so we run through the candy store looking right and left grabbing things and putting them in our basket. We also look for those goodies that are familiar and favorite, helping us feel both satisfied and secure. The problem is that those goodies, which may serve us well at a later point, are empty calories to the neophyte mediator. The candy store is not our friend right now.
We have to go back to the beginning and relearn to listen, retool our reflection skills, and reset our “helpfulness” monitor. When we rely on too-familiar ways of doing things or when we look to the more exotic or flashy, we circumvent our own learning processes. “Slow down,” our teachers tell us, “and focus.” We have to work at the most fundamental skills until we have refined them into elegance and they are part of our being.
The candy store will still be there later if we need and want it. More likely, we will learn to select sweet morsels one at a time and savor them.
Last 5 posts by Susanne Terry
- Practice Doesn't Make Perfect - May 21st, 2007
- A Civil Invocation for Town Meeting - April 19th, 2007
- Mediators and the Sweet Shoppe - February 11th, 2007
- An Interview with Mary Parker Follett, Part 2 - December 8th, 2006
- An Interview with Mary Parker Follett, Part 1 - December 6th, 2006
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