Kathleen Ruane Leedy

I think my success is because I've never said no to an opportunity, even as challenging as it might have sounded. I just said yes to everything and tried to make it a success for people's lives. I was interested and invested in their success. Then I developed a lot of what I call mediator tools, and now I teach them - listening tools, how to pay attention tools, how to challenge tools, how to capture emotional tenor tools. Once people emotionally move through all of that back brain eruption, it's just biology, not the persona. That would be something I say all the time: it's their biology, not their personality. So I don't vilify people at the mediation table because I know it's their biology, not their personality, and we just work through that emotional tenor. The back of the brain can relax, and then the front of the brain can become thinking. So I create a lot of safety for people, and when people feel safe, they can figure out life much better. These are tools that anybody can learn - just a matter of learning the tools. As I was trying to honor people's hearts and their minds at the table, I developed all these tools that other people could just learn. You can just pick up a tool and practice with it, put it down, pick up another mediator tool, practice with that, see how it feels, gain some confidence, and then gain competence and then mastery. It's the path from confidence to competence to mastery that I now teach on.

The best career advice I ever received came from two people. My friend in the UK, Andrew Miller, who was a King's Council barrister, told me one day that mediation has to move. That was one piece of advice. The other piece of advice was from Dick Calkins, who invented the mock trial when he was dean of the law school at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He's now in his 90s. He said, Kathleen, you're creating peace at your table. And I was so busy working, I didn't realize I was creating peace, and I burst into tears. Yeah, I was like, oh my god, I am. Those two statements were just pivotal for me.

Take the 40-hour basic mediation training class, and then head towards small claims court, which I call the batting cage of mediation, where you can practice and make mistakes, and no one gets hurt, because they can always return back to the magistrate to settle their case. So you have to volunteer. You need to volunteer so you can make mistakes when you're a new mediator, so you don't ruin people's lives. Fall down, pick yourself back up, get better. I didn't open up my own practice until I had an 83% settlement rate. I wanted to make sure I had a level of success - like, my grade was a B, right? 83% is a B - before I opened up my own practice. So I say that to everyone: you need to really practice your skills. A lot of people feel that they should have a job immediately, and I'm like, no, you shouldn't, you don't know what you're doing yet. You have to go practice your skills. It's a dialogical praxis, because you learn about yourself as you learn about other people. You probably shouldn't open up your own mediation practice right now, because you don't know what you're doing, you're not good at it yet. Go volunteer in court. Because as a mediator, it's a practice, it's not a profession, so we don't have an ethical bar that we can go to to protect ourselves. There's nothing, it's just reputation. So reputation is everything.

I think the biggest challenge is debriefing all the stress of people's stories out of my body. So therefore, I exercise intensely with yoga and weightlifting in the gym. I had a very high agreement rate, above 95% settlement rate, so I worked really, really hard to help people find their way out of their chaos, to reorder historical chaos, create new meaning, and then people have a settlement agreement, which is their new meaning. And so I worked very hard, because I cared about them, cared about the situation. So I had to go exercise pretty intensely. I was literally taking yoga 6 days a week back then - hot yoga. But it's what I needed.

Curiosity is really important to me, because you really never can really understand someone until you get behind what they want or what they don't want. That's what mediators do. Someone says, I want the marital home, I want that car - that's a position. And we know that's not all the real story. There's a lot more stuff underneath that tip of the iceberg, so I've learned not to judge people so quickly. Because of my mediator skills, I've learned to be more curious about why someone is yelling, why is someone crying, and not being offended by it, or intimidated by it, or not knowing what to do with it. These skills teach you to be less judgmental and more curious about people. Also, to endure someone being upset, because it's really not their personality, it's their biology. The back brain is meant to defend people. When people don't feel safe, intellectually, emotionally, physically, whatever it is, the back brain takes over and makes sure that they survive. And so there's all these really dramatic reactions, because all these chemicals are running around. I've become more patient in my personal life, but also I have the tools to cut through conflict like a hot knife through butter too. It makes your perceptions very acute when you become really good at these skills. Becoming more patient, becoming more acute at the same time, more aware at the same time - it's an interesting double-edged sword, for sure.