Mediation

After retiring in 2021, after 16 years as a continuation high school English teacher in Fontana, and having decided that for my third professional career I wanted to be a mediator, I had to find a 40-hour training course that would launch my career. It wasn’t easy. The one in which I eventually enrolled was […]

I found the following quote in an editorial by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times recently: “Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate

I recently discovered a trailer for a 2018 documentary that looked sensational. THE PEACEMAKER follows mediator Padraig O’Malley as he moves from one troubled country to another while simultaneously dealing with the agony of his alcoholism. It is a deeply moving and revealing portrait of a man trying to promote peace among others while trying

Every day, regardless of the weather, I walk three miles through my neighborhood. While I walk I listen to audiobooks, mostly fiction, mostly excellent. I trawl through the New York Times looking for book reviews or winners of the Booker or Nobel prizes and download them. It is awesome training for a mediator. To listen

Four men grew up together and started a business because they enjoyed hanging out. Soon the product started making money and they created a crude profit share arrangement and that sufficed. Then they began creating ancillary businesses tied into the original and those started making money too. So much unexpected money that one of them

When I was a kid one of the worst things we could do to a kid who wasbothering us was to stick our tongues out at them. It was when words,not yet in existence, could not be drawn upon, leaving the onlyavailable option being a child-sized tongue bulging benignly through ascrunched-up mouth accompanied by equally

As my business as a mediator begins to take off and I start to get more paying clients, I am aware of how much I still have to learn. It was ever thus. The twenty-five years I spent as an actor in the UK was a constant learning curve wherein I was fortunate to learn

I used to be a Vistage guest speaker. Vistage is an extraordinary organization spread all over the world, which sponsors small groups of businesswomen and men, corporate executives, and CEO’s who coalesce around a theme of making themselves better. Aside from mentoring each other, advising each other, and supporting each other, Vistage sends guest speakers

In order to make a living while I am building my mediation business, I work as an adjunct professor of Acting at a local college. One of the basic but most difficult aspects of acting to be learned is the art of listening. Not just pretending to listen but actually listening tolines that you sometimes