a round-up of our media adventures.

Mediation is still not the household word it ought to be, and we’re doing our best to get the word out. Here’s a round-up of our appearances on the TV, radio, print media, and information superhighway.

The New York Times interviewed us in their Real Estate section about neighbor problems. And then they did it again. And yet again!

We were featured in the Wall Street Journal!  Read the article here.

Check us out on Univision TV, featuring our Case Manager Jeff and cameos by a bunch of us.

…and here’s a short segment on News 12, briefly featuring one of our heroic clients.

And here’s a short spot with Brad on Real Estate Today, the nation’s largest real estate radio show.

Our very own Case Manager, Aura Sotomayor and Mediator Olga Perez were featured on Telemundo. Watch here!

The edgy website ANIMALnewyork wrote about us: “Meet the People Who Keep New Yorkers from Ripping Each Others Heads Off.” 

Listen to an interview with CEO Brad Heckman on the Earbud University Podcast.

Brad was also interviewed on NASH Radio, by Country Music Award winner Kelley Ford (we have a country music station…in NYC!)

Read “The Art of Mediation: Local Lessons for International Peacemakers,” an article in the Global Observatory.

Here’s our very own Carol Lieb Himes Special Education mediation, here and here. With animation!

We talked about our Restorative Justice work on the Rebbe Radical Rev Show. Listen here.

Elle Magazine’s September fashion issue features a great article about our mediation training, and how it helped the writer’s marriage.

Brad wrote “On Bob Dylan and Reverse International Development” for the Nebraska Mediation Association.

The Conflict Specialists Show podcast interviewed Brad, as did Voice America Radio .

Watch Brad’s TEDx Talk, “Mediation and Mindfully Getting in the Middle”

Dickinson Magazine profiled Brad, who went to college there.

The New York Daily News published a piece on landlord-tenant issues, featuring a link to our blog on communication tips.

TimeOut New York’s roommate issue featured an interview with Brad and our friend Sheila Sproule about coping with cohabitation conflicts.

The Cooperator, the largest online publication about coop and condo living, published a short piece about mediation, featuring us alongside the wonderful National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM).

Brick Underground, a popular NYC housing blog, includes us in their panel of experts. Read about how to deal with noisy, nude, smoking neighbors.

Texas conflict guru Pattie Porter interviewed Brad for her podcast, in a segment called “Fugghetaboutit….and move forward: Mediation, New York-Style.”

We’re profiled in the online publication Peace Is Sexy (which is actually quite G-rated, so you can click on whilst at work).

We’ve even been featured it the astrology blog of the fabulous Kiki T – Tyra Banks’ on-air stargazer, among other things.

See y’all in the funny pages!

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Check us out on Univision TV!

We were delighted to be featured on Univision, the huge Spanish-language network.   Kudos to our Case Manager Jeff for representing en español!  Have a look!

And thanks to journalist Berenice Gartner for spending time with us, and taking a moment to draw and color.

 

Freud not.

When I lived in Poland in 1989, I took a trip to Prague — now a major tourist destination, then a hauntingly desolate (yet beautiful) place. I got chicken pox there, which the doctor mistranslated as smallpox. And then we figured it out and we laughed and laughed because I wasn’t going to take the dirt nap.

Speaking of mistranslations. Polish and Czech and other Slavic languages are pretty similar, so while exploring Prague, I figured I’d get around by speaking my middling Polish and just Czeching it up a bit.  For the most part it worked. Except for this: the Polish word for “to look for” is szukać. This is an important word when you’re a tourist looking for stuff.  But the Czech version — šukat — means the f word (the one that autocorrects to duck.) 

This is known as a linguistic faux amis (French for “false friend”!) — two words in different languages that sound that same and really ought to mean the same thing, but don’t. My favorite one is the Spanish word embarazada which means pregnant instead of embarrassed, which I reckon has resulted in a lot of embarrassing pregnant pauses.

So I basically went around Prague saying things like “Excuse me sir, I am f***ing the Cathedral.” and “How might I f*** your Town Hall?” and “I’m f**ing your famous Clock Tower”.  You get the picture. I guess I had that chicken pox coming to me.

Just like languages from similar groups overlap, mediation and other fields have a lot in common….and some things that can trip us up. Some mediation trainees express discomfort going toward the emotional heat and focusing on emotions, because “it feels like therapy.” Meanwhile, therapeutic professionals who take our trainings sometimes think that our techniques are old hat — and indeed, much of what we do (validating feelings, asking open-ended questions, inquiring about parties’ ideal vision, etc.) are therapists’ stock in trade. So, we talk about some of the differences between therapeutic interventions and mediation, to avoid mediation-therapy faux amis (and faux pas). Mediation can certainly be therapeutic, but it’s not therapy, and here area few reasons why:

–Mediators don’t diagnose. In the same way that we don’t judge, we don’t our label our clients with this or that mental or cognitive issue. This can be really tricky for counseling professionals who do that for a living.

— Mediation is a largely forward looking process. Sure, we gather information on what happened in the past, but our real focus is on where do we go from here. Of course, therapists look at the past, present and future. But mediators don’t get into the analyzing the childhood origins of clients’ behavior and Oedipal Complexes and such.

— Mediators, in our model, don’t give advice. A lot of therapists do. We also don’t prescribe drugs, though we usually have some hard candy setting around.

— Mediation is typically more time-bound than therapy. Some mediations may have multiple sessions, but often a few hours and a couple of meetings does the trick. Therapy can go on for months, years, or be a life-long journey. On the other hand, an individual mediation session may last several hours or a whole day or more, vs. the standard 50-minutes therapy sesh.

Okay, our time is up.

(Oh, my drawing above is supposed to be Sigmund Freud, and my own mnemonic reminder to not therapize while mediating. I can’t quite put my finger on what the cigar means.)

authorized vandalism at new york peace institute.

….’cause a neutral third party don’t JUDGE.

graffiti in our Brooklyn Center courtesy of our Restorative Justice Manager Glen, probably.

i am NOT endorsing soviet-style communism in this post but…

Following the brutal ouster of Russian Tsar Nicholas in 1917, a bunch of revolutionaries debated about what Russia needed most in the wake of the revolution. Various intellectuals gave long-winded spiels with many fancy words. As legend has it, Vladimir Lenin, soon to be the first leader of the Soviet Union, got up and gave this 3-word speech (which I illustrated above):

Land. Bread. Peace.

(In my mind this was followed by “Lenin out” and a mic drop).

Again, I’m not endorsing Leninism, or any other -ism here. But there is a useful take-away from this story for mediators. In the din of confusion, chaos, and conflict, it’s not so easy for parties to understand what really matters. Mediators aren’t there to impose their ideas, interpretations, or assumptions about parties’ needs. But what we can do is frame what we’ve heard in broad, balanced, and neutral language that resonates with the disputants, in order to help frame a constructive conversation.

Like unto the myriad issues facing post-revolutionary Russia (don’t get me started on the whole Bolshevik vs. Menshevik thing), even the most complex conflicts can be distilled into a few key issues — things like respect, communication, the kids, the financial situation, etc.  This is interest-based negotiation in a nutshell.

Once a mediator helps parties excavate the key issues — and checks in with them to ensure that they got it right– parties are more likely to hear each other and perhaps work toward a common understanding.  And even if they don’t agree on how to move forward, they’ve at least agreed on what’s really important.

Da zvedanya, comrades.