Recently, a friend of mine challenged me to write a blog about how to survive Thanksgiving dinner considering our recent election. Some will be happy while others will be distraught at the results; yet we will all be sitting around the same table (virtually?) breaking bread together. She then told [Read More]
Well, it happened again; another mediation in which one side was not prepared. And… as you might surmise, the mediation did not last long. (This is a topic I have often addressed in my blogs.) It involved a used automobile. The plaintiff claimed that the used car dealer breached both [Read More]
On days that I had a mediation prior to Covid 19, I would dress the part. I would wear a pantsuit with very comfortable shoes for all the walking that I would end up doing by going back and forth between the different conference rooms. Now, during the pandemic, all [Read More]
It has been said that body language makes up about 55% of our communication while our tone of voice comprises 38% and our actual verbal words comprise 7%. ( The 7% Rule). With everyone using Zoom these days, I would suspect that facial expressions are becoming more and more important. [Read More]
Thanks to the pandemic, it seems that everyone is engaging in a lot more asynchronous communication than ever before. Or, is it simply that those older than the millennials are catching up to what the millennials have been doing all along: texting their way through the day? A recent blog [Read More]
No, I am not talking about sailing, but about a cognitive bias known as anchoring. “Cognitive bias” is defined as “…a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.” (https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963) “Anchoring“ [Read More]
Some of us are in a conflict; we “…are motivated more by a desire to appear moral than to actually be moral.”(“Six Common Ways People Justify Unethical Behavior” by Juliana Breines, Ph.D. (posted August 31, 2020, Psychology Today). Consequently, we will engage in some questionable or ambiguous ethical tactics or [Read More]
The high holy holiday of Yom Kippur was celebrated recently. The bad news is that no one could attend services in person. The good news is that services were on Zoom which enabled me (for the first time in decades) to attend services in my hometown-2700 miles away. There, the [Read More]
