If you are thinking about training as a mediator, and wish to tackle disputes in the workplace, community or within intergenerational conflict then this is the course for you.  Accredited through the Open College Network and recognised by the Law Society, this level four course equips you with the skills and knowledge to practice as a mediator.

With our London courses filling up fast don’t delay in contacting us to find out more information and to book a place on the February course.

The next course that we have scheduled at this venue is running from Monday 20th – Thursday 23rd February 2012, and it is our flagship mediation training programme. The Interpersonal Mediation Practitioner’s Certificate is the standard for those wishing to practise as mediators. Holders of this certificate are qualified to work with a variety of interpersonal disputes including; workplace, conflict within families (where you are trying to keep a family together), complaints handling, and any dispute that has arisen between individuals. People that have previously attended this course have been: individuals looking to start a career as a freelance mediator, HR professionals, Complaints Managers and solicitors, amongst many others.

Please feel free to contact us if you were thinking of beginning a career as a mediator, or adding this skill to your professional armoury.

Facts about Nottingham:
- Nottingham Forest Football Club has won back-to-back European Cups (1979 and 1980).
- Nottingham obtained worldwide recognition during the Industrial Revolution for its lace-making and bicycle industries.
- Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is said to be the oldest inn in England.

Alongside some prestigious guest speakers in the HR field, we will be delivering a Skill Shop presentation entitled “How to support people to change their response to conflict.” This will aim to explore people’s responses to conflict, and outline how individuals can tackle disputes in a constructive and informal manner. If you are at the event, this presentation will be held on Tuesday 8^th November at 12:45pm, so please do come along.    

If you would like to attend the CIPD ACE exhibition, please visit: http://www.cipd.co.uk/cande/annual/exhibition/preregister to register.

Commercial mediation is used for disputes where an amount of money or supply of goods/services is in dispute. Mediation is fast, confidential, without prejudice, inexpensive, and able to generate outcomes that would not usually be achievable by going to court. If you wanted to gather some further information about commercial mediation, why not join us for a FREE online webinar: Mediation in Business – taking the cost out of conflict. 

The webinar will cover:
• A definition of commercial mediation
• The types of dispute that typically require commercial mediation
• The benefits and costs that can be saved when using commercial mediation

The webinar will last for 50 minutes, and is followed by 10 minutes for questions at the end.

To book a place on this popular webinar, please contact us.

Mediation may be able to help: it provides a low-cost, fast, and private way to resolve a wide range of disputes within the construction industry. It simply gives you and the other side a chance to work out a commercial settlement that you can both live with, and if mediation does not work, you can still proceed to arbitration or litigation if you need to.

With mediation you can:
- avoid having to have a court hearing
- settle around 80% of disputes in a single day
- keep your dispute completely private 
- agree settlement terms that both sides can live with

…and the figures add up:

- mediation is quick to set up and conclude: you can soon get back to running your business
- if you are using a legal advisor, your legal bill will be much lower
- a mediated settlement will often leave you and the other side on good terms: you won’t need to go looking for a new contractor, customer, or supplier

Don’t take our word for it. Come along and hear more about how mediation is catching on fast in the construction industry:

FREE mediation seminar: European Inn, Derby, Nov 25^th 2011 , 2.00 – 3.30

You‘ll also get a voucher for 25% off your first mediation case with us.

Places are limited, so sign up without delay. Can’t get there? No problem. Just get in touch  and we’ll send one of our mediators to come and tell you more.

This course is specialised for counsellors and psychotherapists, as we recognise that many of the basic skills required for mediation will already have been learnt by professionals in these fields. Run by our managing director, Mike Talbot, a UKCP-registered gestalt psychotherapist, this course will equip you to competently run mediation sessions, and consider the similarities between mediation and the counselling and psychotherapy professions.

Book now to secure your place on a popular course that will stretch your skill-base and provide you with an extra source of income.

While watching the news I can’t help but consider the experiments conducted by psychologists over the last hundred years, which show how strong the influence of a group can be, especially if led by people who we see as authority figures.  The Stanford Prison Experiment¹ showed how quickly people can become surprisingly sadistic when influenced by their surroundings and peers.  This famous experiment found that given the right circumstances and the right influence of a strong character within a group, a group mentality can appear where people will do things that individually they may deem inappropriate and (within the context of that experiment) violent and cruel.   In a previous role when working with young people delivering anger management programmes I became very aware of the influence of group mentality.  A particular group who were supposed to be going through the programme were all young men between the age of 16 and 25.  When in the room together it didn’t take more than half an hour for a cover of macho bravado to become the way they communicated, with very little acceptance or willingness to look at their issues with managing anger and aggression.  Some of the group even began to state that it was fine to hurt someone when they were angry, as it showed who was in control.  The entire group began to agree with this view point. Together as a group they had quickly begun to walk down a road that justified their unhelpful and sometimes violent behaviour towards others.  What was fascinating to me was that individually each of these young men had approached me to ask for help with their anger, and individually had recognised that their behaviour was out of control, inappropriate and harmful.  One man was particularly concerned that he felt he couldn’t control his behaviour, and the impact this could have on his girlfriend who was pregnant.  Outside of the group their whole demeanour physically and emotionally was different, but the power of the group meant they felt they could not be honest, or face the reality of their situation.

It is with this awareness of the impact of the group, that we choose within mediation to see each person individually, even it is appears that a group share as a similar view or behaviour.  Even within families, seeing partners and family members together can cause this group mentality to emerge, where people will agree with what is considered to be the group norm, even if they individually feel and think something quite different.  The danger of seeing people together, and assuming they hold shared beliefs and views, is that it promotes the idea of group behaviours, and can be easier for people to validate their behaviour based on the principle that everyone has done it, and if enough people are behaving in a certain way maybe that behaviour is o.k.  It can also be easier for people to hold the view that the person on the other side of the conflict must be wrong, because they don’t hold the same view as the group. In mediation we don’t focus on right or wrong, but we do encourage people to become aware of the impact of their own behaviour on others, so it is important to be able to challenge people about their behaviour, and this is easier for people to cope with when they are not in a group.

It could be easy to believe that young people are more influenced by this group mentality than others, especially when we see large groups of young people on the streets.  However when you consider how conflict occurs in the workplace, communities and within families, these experiences would suggest that group mentality is not age specific, rather the influencing factors are surroundings and how we view our peers (whether we deem them with respect or some level of authority).  It is important to establish the viewpoint of the individual when dealing with a conflict, to avoid the risk of assumptions about their perspective within the group.  After all if we do not do this as a mediator, we too could be seen to be allowing the influence of a group to affect our interventions, causing us to lose our impartiality and credibility.

As a final thought, as Manchester starts to clear up after the destruction caused by the riots, many young people have turned out to help with the clean up. Perhaps this suggests that group mentality does not always have to be a negative influence, but can lead people towards positive behaviour as well.

To see more about this experiment you can visit: http://www.prisonexp.org/

Local people from Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland have been mediating with groups in certain areas in a bid to restore peace. This type of community mediation is a quick and easy way of resolving conflicts that have been hampering relations for years. Disputes over noise, high hedges and access can be resolved through communication between the disputants, which is a form of interpersonal mediation.

If you would like to train to become a mediator for these types of dispute, we have a course running in Birmingham from the 17^th – 20^th October 2011. Please feel free to contact us for further information.

Read the entire article here: http://bit.ly/rafPuz

The presentation is based on the current Becoming a Mediator event that we deliver throughout the UK. The aim of the webinar is to:
- Provide vital information upon the different types of mediation
- Outline the most appropriate training course to undertake
- See how legislation changes may affect mediation in the future

The decision to offer this online was to make it more accessible to parts of the UK where we do not offer free events. Now that this is available, anybody in the UK has access to the seminar, provided that you have a computer and access to the internet.

If you would like to book a place on the webinar, or find out a little more about it, please free to contact us.

If you are interested in either of the above, then please visit the recruitment section of our website for more details.