I’ve been sitting with my finger poised over the “publish” button for 30 minutes. If you’re reading this, I finally decided to press it.

I’m not in the habit of going on rants here at Making Mediation Your Day Job, but the time has come to call out some of you whose sense of entitlement to my time and know-how goes way beyond the pale. Shrugging some of you off isn’t working anymore and your numbers seem to be increasing.

Not usually a fan of taking time for the 5% of readers who can be aggravating when 95% of you are completely fabulous, I’m driven to distraction today by the 7th – 7th! – message that went something like this (I’ve copied this one verbatim and in its entirety):

I read your blog and need some more information from you about marketing my mediation practice, which I started 18 months ago and isn’t making me enough money yet.

• Should I blog? Everyone says I should blog and get on Facebook.
• What should I blog about?
• Do you think a target market of supply chain businesses is a good idea (my background is in supply chain management)?
• What is the maximum you think I can get away with per hour?
• I also need some more training. Where can I get good training in [city]?

How to approach a blogger or author with your questions and requests

Most of us had mothers who taught us the following. For the few of you who didn’t but want to succeed in business, here’s a primer:

1. Begin your message (phone or email or contact form) with a greeting. “Dear Tammy,” “Hi, Tammy, and even “Hey there, Tammy” all work quite well and take you exactly 4 more seconds to type.
2. Somewhere near the beginning of your message use the word “please.”
3. Near the end of the message use the words, “thank you.”
4. When you receive a reply, which was done as a favor and courtesy, write back with a brief note of thanks. Silence in response to another person spending time helping you gratis just isn’t remotely acceptable.
5. If you’re asking for a reply that will take more than 2 minutes of the other person’s time, add something akin to, “I know I’m asking for information/feedback/help that will likely require more than a quick response. I want to be sensitive to the many demands on your time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s something I can do in return for the generosity of your time.” Just leave the attitude of entitlement completely out of your message.

For the 95% of you with great manners, I hope you’ll continue to contact me with your questions and I’ll do my best to help you find answers. I love that you’re there. For the other 5% of you, I’ll send a copy of this post in reply to your message.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow. — Swedish proverb

Several months ago I put up an informal poll here to inquire what gets most in your way of success in the ADR business. The overwhelmingly most frequent response was “fear of failure.”

I’ve been reading about fear and worry since I saw those responses and today have a post which I hope will be a good resource for those of you who find it’s getting in the way of your practice-building.

What’s is worry’s relation to fear? “Worry is a special form of fear,” says Edward Hallowell in a Psychology Today article. “It is what humans do with simple fear once it reaches the part of their brain called the cerebral cortex. We make fear complex, adding anticipation, memory, imagination, and emotion.”

Why we fear and worry

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is one that spoke to me in some way because of my doctoral work in human behavior change, my studies of the neuroscience of conflict behavior, and my interest in your responses:

• Our biology: Our brains are wired to fear first and reflect second. “We’re biologically programmed to do this, to protect ourselves. And when you don’t have all the facts you will over- or underreact to a risk, based on your instincts” says David Ropeik of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
• Interest in greater sureness: According to Robert Leahy, PhD and author of The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You, “Worriers hope to gain a feeling of sureness. They want to avoid disappointment or staunch a problem before it gets out of control.”
• Low self esteem: “Rather than attribute their successes to their lovableness, competence or skills, worriers may say, ‘Well, I was lucky that time.’ Or ‘It’s only because I worked 10 times harder than anyone else.’ That kind of thinking leaves you feeling inadequate, whatever you accomplish,” says Alexander Rich, a consultant at the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the University of South Florida.
• Mistaken belief we control more of our life than we do. Says Leahy, “If you always think, What did I do wrong? you’re probably giving yourself too much credit.”
• Our brains get stuck. Notes Hallowell, “Why does the worrier go on worrying? His mind has, in effect, gone into a spasm, a grip that can’t relax and accept good news. He is suffering a kind of ‘brain burn,’ because his system is continually pumping out a huge bolus of adrenaline under high pressure.” He goes on to compare worrying to gnawing on old bones, unable to stop asking what if…?
• Risk of status loss. Status is associated with where we and others see ourselves positioned with respect to those around us. Says David Rock in Psychology Today, “Your brain maintains complex maps for the ‘pecking order’ of the people surrounding you…The threat response from a perceived drop in status can take on a life of its own, lasting for years.” Rock thinks self-esteem is best understood through the lens of status.

What to do, what to do

The key is in action, says Dr. Ellen Weber, CEO of the MITA International Brain Based Center (and my Twitter friend).

Here, drawn from the resources suggested to me and in some cases written by Stephanie West-Allen, Ellen F. Weber, and Robyn McMaster (my gratitude to the three of you!), are concrete actions to help you past your fear of failure in your mediation work and practice-building:

1. Retrain your brain. Hallowell recommends monitoring the automatic thoughts associated with your worry or fear, examine them for their error in logic, and consciously choose a more useful thought. I can speak personally about the benefits of retraining one’s surprisingly flexible brain, as that’s part of the year-long marriage experiment my husband and I have been up to and which I’ve been writing about in The Year 20 Reboot.
2. In smaller and ever-increasing doses, do the thing you fear. If you’ve ever seen the hilarious film What About Bob?, you’ll appreciate the idea of baby steps that gradually give you courage to take bigger steps. In mediation marketing and practice-building, this translates into taking one small action daily. I do first in the morning the thing I’m least excited by, then reward myself with all the other things I love doing in my work.
3. Replace your brain’s catastrophizing with the answer to this important question I first saw posed by Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek: If you chase your dreams and fall flat on your face, worst-case scenario, how long will it take you to recover? Ferriss proposes that you do more than casually answer the question and draft a recovery roadmap for yourself, tucked away for anytime you need it. I did a version of this when I left my college VP job in 1997. I gave myself two years (about how long I calculated my savings would comfortably allow me no income at all) and knew that if I failed, no university president in the world would look askance at me doing conflict resolution work for two years should I need a higher ed job again!
4. Find a single doable solution to whatever business-building problem is heightening your fear. Doable, as in something you can and will do to address it. Says Weber, “People who live in stress do so when there is loss of control accompanied by anxiety for the future. Fears often trigger stress for people who focus more on past mistakes than on future opportunities…where infinite potential becomes more a state of mind. Suggest just one doable solution to one problem you face, for instance, and you literally rewire parts of your brain for the next winning solution.”
5. Find your special status niche. Rock suggests, “You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter / funnier / healthier / richer / more righteous / more organized / fitter / stronger or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a ‘niche’ where you feel you are ‘above’ others.” Now there’s about as good a reason to narrow your market niche as one I’ve ever seen!
6. Play against yourself. Rock also says, “You can harness the power of the thrill of ‘beating the other guy’ by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process. To play against yourself gives you the chance to feel ever-increasing status, without threatening others.” One practice-building translation of that approach: Play against yourself by writing better quality blog posts. Attend networking gatherings with a really clear goal and walk away having connected better with others than ever before. You get the idea.
7. Do your homework. Ropeik says there are many examples where people are more or less fearful than the facts suggest they ought to be. ‘When people are over- or under-afraid, based on what the statistics suggest they ought to be of any given risk, they make bad choices.” How real is the the likelihood of failure in the ADR business world? At first blush, it looks incredibly high – the road is littered, after all, with the remains of failed mediation practices and we’ve all heard the failure stories again and again. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think they’re legitimate failures to measure yourself against because most of the mediators I know who’ve failed never really gave it a full shot to begin with. I don’t think the road is paved with the bodies of failed mediators. I think the road is paved with the bodies of mediators who kind-of-sort-of-hoped-to-maybe-someday-get-serious about being business owners.

Ok, your turn: What ways have you overcome fears and worries of potential failure?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

The Association for Conflict Resolution has announced a new career center for ADR jobs. The job board draws postings from employers who are specifically reaching out to dispute resolution practitioners, as well as from sources around the web. Candidates and employers can post and read resumes online.

If you’re hunting or hiring, you can get an account and view the job board here (no account needed to view jobs available): ACR Career Center

Mediate.com also, of course, has a job board (need an account). Know of others? Leave a comment and I’ll create a list.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

I receive certain questions regularly via email, so thought I’d post answers here to save some of you the time inquiring. If you have questions I haven’t addressed here, please do leave a comment at the foot of this post and I’ll do what I can to answer them there!

What was your career path?
How can I get into the mediation field?
Can someone with my background become a mediator?
How do I know if I’d be a good mediator?
What mediation certificate and grad programs do you recommend?
What mediation trainers do you recommend?
How do I get certified?
How much should I charge / how much do you charge?
I read your book and have some questions. Can we talk?

What was your career path?

I began mediating when I was a dean of students and faculty member at a private women’s college, as a necessary part of my work. I’d earned an undergrad degree in world literature (Middlebury College) and master’s and doctoral degrees in higher ed leadership (The University of Vermont). My dissertation work focused on human behavior change.

As I started to get more requests for help from other sectors of the campus and the president, then from other institutions, I realized I had a knack for conflict resolution and decided to take a course in mediation. That basic mediation course ultimately led to me resigning what was by then a vice presidency, enrolling full-time in a year-long, 500-hour post-bac certificate in mediation and conflict management, and using that year also to begin building my private practice.

I launched my full-time private practice in 1997 and later became a core faculty member and curriculum designer in Woodbury College’s nationally recognized graduate program in Mediation & Applied Conflict Studies. I have guest-lectured on mediation, negotiation, conflict resolution and mediation marketing at other institutions, including UMass Boston’s doctoral program in higher education, a non-credit course for UConn, and, in spring 2010, Lipscomb University.

How can I get into the mediation field?

• Get really good training. Skip the trainers that primarily teach via lecture and demo — mediation isn’t a spectator sport. When you see a good mediator at work it looks simple. That’s because they’re good. It’s an entirely different story to have something useful come out of your own mouth in the heat of the moment. Choose trainers who have been and remain successful practitioners, and who teach with roleplays and real engagement. If you have to travel a bit to get better training, go as far as you need to and your wallet will allow. Poorly prepared mediators drag the entire field down.
• Get more than 40 hours. A lot more. I’m unapologetic in my belief that really good mediators need more than a workweek of instruction. I’ve taught and trained mediators from every imaginable background for over a decade and few can mediate their way out of a cardboard box in 40 hours or less. That includes you, too, attorneys. They don’t call it basic mediation for nothing.
• Stop relying on panels and rosters to build a practice. I wrote a lot more about this in my book, so I’ll leave it this way here: Rosters pay pathetically and don’t have nearly the number of cases needed to sustain all the mediators who want a piece of the pie. Rosters are a lazy marketer’s crutch (gee, I must have been in a particularly snarky mood when I wrote this section).
• Start thinking of yourself as a businessperson as well as a mediator. You’ll need to be both to make a living at it unless you’re a trust fund baby.
• Look for under-served markets and places where there’s demand for people with good human relations, conflict engagement and problem-solving skills. Stop selling a single process and start unbundling and rebundling your skills in new ways. I say much more about this in the book, too.

Can someone with my background become a mediator?

Yes. How do I know this globally, without knowing your particular background? Because I’ve trained thousands of mediators at the basic, advanced and master’s level and I’ve seen terrific mediators who started professional life as horse trainers, realtors, anesthesiologists, builders, teachers and moms. I’ve seen terrific mediators whose profession of origin was counselor and attorney; I’ve seen some truly awful mediators who hail from those two professions, too.

While the flooding of attorneys into the mediation field is signaling to the public that the most common or acceptable background for a mediator is a legal degree, neither of those is true. It’s not about what you did before and in some cases, what you did before will blind you to what you don’t know or don’t do well yet.

How do I know if I’d be a good mediator?

Sometimes co-workers, family and friends will help wake you to your potential skill as conflict resolutionary. I think the best way is to take a basic mediation course, particularly the kind I describe below, and then ask your instructor for honest feedback. If you’re taking a course from a credible instructor, and not one whose primary drive is to get you to enroll in more trainings, then this will be helpful, objective feedback. If you’ve got good potential, happy day! If you stink at it, yes, that’ll be painful to hear, but less painful than investing thousands of dollars and three years of your life to find out others aren’t captivated by your skill.

Mediators, like people in other fields, come in all temperaments and with myriad different talents.

What mediation certificate and grad programs do you recommend?

I can comment on two programs with which I am familiar. I am sure there are other fine programs out there but I’ll restrict my opinions to those with which I have direct experience as a professor or guest. Both offer both certificates and master’s programs.

• Champlain College’s Woodbury Institute (formerly Woodbury College)
• Lipscomb University’s Institute for Conflict Management.

For a list of some other program out there, check out Mediate.com’s Academic Program list.

What mediation trainers do you recommend?

You mean other than the trainings I offer periodically? If you’d like to know each time I announce a training, I recommend you subscribe to my blog. If you want a basic mediation training and don’t want to wait ’til I offer one, either tell me you want one now, dammit or head to Woodbury’s Basic Mediation Workshop — they do a top-notch one and I occasionally still co-teach it.

How do I get certified?

Here’s a post I wrote on mediator certification. I was feeling particularly New York blunt that day.

How much should I charge / how much do you charge?

Here’s a post I wrote about setting your mediation fee, with a link to help you calculate your overhead costs if you’re new to private practice or haven’t yet had the chance to tally those. Here’s a link to a podcast I did on the topic of value-based mediation fees.

What I charge isn’t going to help you determine what you charge because I’ve been in the field successfully for quite a while and probably don’t have the same market you do. Sorry, telling you would just be feeding your voyeurism.

I read your book and have some questions. Can we talk?

It’s a treat to hear from folks who’ve read my book and are working to bring their passion for ADR to fruition as a business. And therein lies my dilemma, as I wish I had the time to reply in detail to each of you who contacts me with questions, ideas, and request for feedback. But I can’t offer free business consulting or I’d be doing this 40 hours a week. So, I recommend these options:

• Search this site for answers to your question. I’ve written over 400 articles and many of the questions I’m asked are things I’ve written about here. There’s a search box on this page.
• Use my weekly Quick Calls time to ask your question or connect with me.
• Check the services I offer to fellow mediators to see if one of them can assist you.

Best to you,

Interested in online dispute resolution (ODR), and its opportunities, challenges, practice and issues?

Then you may be interested in the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution’s 12th annual ODR Cyberweek taking place later this month. Here’s a copy of the announcement from ODR innovator and Center Director Ethan Katsch:

The 12th ODR Cyberweek online conference will be held from October 26 – 30, 2009. This is a free all-online set of discussions, simulations, demonstrations and other activities related to online dispute resolution.

Registration for Cyberweek is now open at http://cyberweek.umasslegal.org. The preliminary program of activities for Cybeweek can be viewed at http://cyberweek.umasslegal.org/program/. Among the special activities planned for this year’s Cyberweek are the following:

• An exercise for students concerning ethics and ODR that will be coordinated with the Committee on Ethics of the American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution.
• A demonstration of the eBay Community Court.
• Simulations involving Juripax.com and TheMediationRoom.com.
• A SmartSettle eNegotiation Competition for Law Schools.
• Demonstrations of DebateGraph and Google Wave.
• A conversation with Miriam Nisbet, the new Director of the U.S. Office of Government Information Services and the use of ODR in Freedom of Information Act disputes.
• A Spanish language panel discussion of ODR in Latin America and planning for the June 2010 International ODR Forum in Buenos Aires.
• A webcast of a presentation by Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government in the United States, at the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts.
• Discussions of ODR standards, ODR and veteran’s affairs and ODR and foreclosure mediation.
• And a lot more.

When it comes to business and competition, too many mediators default to fixed-pie thinking. And it’s getting in the way of the ADR field’s development.

Fixed-pie thinking assumes limitation – for one person to get more pie, someone else must get less. Most basic mediation training teaches approaches for expanding the pie so mediators can help parties see past the blindspots caused by fixed-pie thinking.

If mediators grok expand-the-pie thinking, why is it seemingly difficult to apply such good counsel and strategy to their own work? What is it about competition among mediators that fosters protectionism?

Consider these scenarios pulled from my business notes for this post:

• A few years ago at a board meeting of the NH Conflict Resolution Association, colleague and friend Ellen Dinerstein said, “You know, I think we should just name the elephant sitting in the middle of this room right now: Competition. Mediators don’t want to talk about the fact that we’re all competing with one another for what little work there is out there. I think we need to talk about this because it’s getting in our way.” Our eyes met across the room and I concurred. Then there was a deadly silence in the room, followed by the meeting’s chairperson moving us quickly on to a different topic.
• While chatting with a mediator at a regional conference, I mentioned blogging as one way I grow my practice. He replied quickly and emphatically: “I’ll never blog because it makes my strategy for building business too obvious to other mediators who wouldn’t hesitate to steal my ideas.”
• I was talking with a mediator who’s signed up for my Making Mediation Your Day Job course. She’s not joined in online or telephone conversations at all to date, choosing instead to be a silent presence in the self-paced online course. When I asked her why, she was frank: “I don’t want to look stupid. There’s so much I don’t know how to do.”

Here’s what I hear in those statements:

• Fear of intellectual property theft. I’ve experienced others borrowing liberally from my words because they were too lazy to put in their own effort. Someone recently said to me, “But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” To which I replied, “No, it’s the sincerest form of slackery.”
• Fear that helping others won’t be reciprocated. I keenly remember slowing down near the end of a 10K race a decade ago to urge on someone who had stopped running. There were no heroics on my part: I was in no danger of winning so it wasn’t giving up much to pause and urge a fellow runner on. I convinced her to start running again and ran at her side toward the finish line. About 20 yards from the finish, she sprinted ahead and entered the chute with me behind her. I admit I still want to swat her upside the head for such poor sportsmanship.
• Fear of failure. When I polled readers here a while back, asking what single thing most gets in the way of building the ADR business of their dreams, the most frequent answer was “fear of failure.”

They’re real fears. Those things could happen. Those things do happen.

But the fear is feeding a state of arrested development in a field that should be worrying a whole lot less about competition and a whole lot more about why mediation, decades after formalizing in the U.S. and other countries, is still not widely adopted. In the name of fear, of competition, and of self-protection, mediators aren’t sharing what’s working, what’s yielding results and what they’re doing to yield successes. And without the pooled knowledge and ideas about success, there are many mediators recreating the same mistakes, floundering alone, unsure where to put their time, energy and resources.

Imagine what liberally shared successes could do. We could go from: More work for any good mediator means less work for me, to this: More work for any good mediator means more work for all good mediators.

What will it take, do you think, to shrug off the fixed-pie thinking that’s shrouding our field?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

I came across this video of Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York and had to share it with you.

If you’re as passionate about a successful ADR career or business as you say you are, then you’ve got to watch this video. Gary knows passion and he’s taking away your excuses.

[Can't see the video in your email? Click here to view it on the web.]

I’m doing a 60-minute teleseminar for ACR’s Conflict Coaching Committee in September. Here’s the skinny:

Making the Leap from Mediator to Conflict Coach: How to Apply Your Experience in New Ways

When: Thursday, September 24, 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern

What: The mediator toolbox and the conflict coaching toolbox are almost interchangeable. The difference is in the way the tools are applied and the circumstances in which they’re used. As professional coaching gains recognition and momentum in the marketplace, mediators who want to grow business may well find a viable option in conflict coaching.

Professional mediator and executive conflict coach Dr. Tammy Lenski will share how she uses conflict coaching, how she used it to grow her business, and how to translate what you know as a mediator into the work of conflict coaching. The teleseminar will answer these questions:

• How do I know if I’d be a good conflict coach?
• What skills do I already have as a mediator that I can use in new ways as a conflict coach?
• How do I decide whether or not it’s worthwhile to incorporate conflict coaching into my ADR practice?
• Where and how do I get experience with conflict coaching?

How: Bridge line: 605-475-6350 (not toll free) | PIN 496839

For more information: To join ACR’s Conflict Coaching Committee and for further information on this group, please contact Chair Cinnie Noble at 866.335.6466 (toll free in Canada & U.S.), 416.686.4247, or cinnie@cinergycoaching.com.

If you have questions on this subject that you’d like to hear me answer, please leave them in the comments. Thanks!

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

U.S. News and World Report has named mediation one of the best careers for 2009, commenting about its potential even in an economic downturn. And while tooting mediation’s horn, they also offer a dose of realism to go with the ranking.

Says U.S. News in Best Careers 2009: Mediator,

“The problem is that there are more mediators than there are mediation jobs. In part, this is because the barriers to entry are so low—most mediators are required only to complete a 30-to-40-hour training course.
 
The oversupply means that most mediators do not earn a middle-class income for one to five years. And even to do that, a mediator must embrace marketing by establishing a niche—disputes among postal workers, people of different races, parents and teens, or even participants in the online world “Second Life.” Until mediators develop a reputation, they must schmooze with potential referral sources, write articles or give talks on mediation, perhaps blog or create a YouTube video, and certainly find well-connected champions willing to recommend them. Ironically, success may be more likely in a slow economy as people and businesses seek lower-cost alternatives to attorneys to solve their disputes.
 
If you have the gift for establishing trust, generating creative solutions, calming angry disputants, and staying calm amid ambiguity and dissembling, and are willing and able to market yourself, mediation can be a win-win career (emphasis added) for both you and your clients.”

Hat tip to Nan Starr for forwarding me the link.

And hat tips to all of you who wondered about my silence here and checked in with me. The ice storm that devastated southern New Hampshire and left 430,000 without power or phone in sub-zero weather smacked us around, too. We’re still without power a week later and count the little daily blessings that are our neighbors, our electrician, our plumber, our friends, and our community. And a special nod to all those power line workers who left their daily lives in other states to come help us. Happy holidays to you all.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.