I found the following quote in some papers buried in a pile on my desk. My notes say it was from Joann C. Guter in Discover but I haven’t been able to track it down (if you know more about the original source, I welcome the information!):
Practice doesn’t make perfect, nor is it supposed to. Practice is about increasing your repertoire of ways to recover from your mistakes.
I have no idea to what the original quote was referring, but I do know that it certainly applies to our work as mediators. We should never be striving for the final polished approach that is perfection itself. We are engaged in a living, breathing process with imperfect creatures (including ourselves).
Our aim should be to be more skilled at being present to our parties and responding to their needs. When a decision we make has less than satisfactory results, we want to be able to choose from a variety of ways to adapt and adjust to what is needed at the present moment.
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2 responses so far ↓
Eva Zimet // May 24th 2007 at 12:22 am
And on a further cheerful note, Winston Churchill once said “success is going from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
scoop // Jun 27th 2007 at 8:40 pm
The quote is from Jo Ann C. Gutin, in a book review published in Discover, Jan 1999. Here’s a link:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_1_20/ai_53501825
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