Transcript of the Webinar
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Welcome. You could be resting or spending time with your children or doing laundry, but you’re here and I appreciate it — thank you. I’m Barry, and this is a crash course on the strategies, tactics and techniques of mediation.
We have a real mix in the room — some of you have never seen a mediation session, some are busy training, and some have done this for years. Here’s my promise: by the end you’ll have one simple framework, two ideas that genuinely change how a session goes, and a clear picture of how a real session runs, from start to finish.
What you’ll walk away with:
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First, one framework — just three words: strategy, tactic, technique. Let’s see how they fit into a mediation session.
Second, two ideas that do most of the heavy lifting in a real session: active listening — which I’ll argue is your currency as a mediator, not a soft skill — and the “domino”, the one issue under the table that quietly blocks everything else.
Third, the stages of a mediation session, using our Academy’s own cheatsheet, from the moment you start speaking all the way to the agreement.
And fourth — because so many of you asked for this when you registered — the difficult moments: people talking over each other, one side holding all the power, dealing with emotions, and how to handle an apology in a way that actually works.
To newcomers: don’t try to memorise everything. To those already practising: stay with me through the basics, and we’ll get to the good stuff.
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Strategies, tactics & techniques
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Here’s the whole concept on one slide. Three levels.
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Strategy is your gameplan — the overall direction you’re taking. Think how we use this word elsewhere: a business strategy runs over years; a war strategy involves many battles. It’s the bigger plan everything fits inside. In our example, the strategy is simple: de-escalate the conflict.
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A tactic is the specific move to advance your gameplan — what do I do right now? Tactics are immediate and situational. If I’m de-escalating, the tactic is to pause the joint session and go into side meetings — in other words, to meet with the parties one at a time.
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A technique is the practical, observable skill — the how. In the side meetings, I’m going to use active listening, acknowledge emotion, and reframe.
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Hold onto that chain — strategy is the why, tactic is the what, technique is the how. We’ll hang everything else on those three words, and by the end you’ll be able to look at any moment in a session and ask: what’s my strategy here, what’s the move, and what’s the right skill to use right now?
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Active listening: your foundation
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Before any strategy or tactic, there’s the foundation everything else stands on: active listening, and the rapport it generates. People hear “active listening” and think nodding and soft skills, and they tune out. Don’t tune out. Active listening creates rapport, and that rapport is your currency as a mediator. Here’s why.
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A party says — and you’ll hear a version of this in almost every case — “He doesn’t care about the children. He only wants them when it suits him.” If I repeat that back, I’ve thrown petrol on the fire. Instead, I’ll say: “It sounds like you’re worried about consistency for the children, and that it’s affecting them.” Look what that one sentence does: it removes the blame — I’ve taken out the abrasive parts; it names the real concern underneath, which is consistency; and it quietly points both parents back at the children, which is where the solutions live.
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Now, why is active listening currency? Every time you listen — and do nothing but listen — you make a small deposit of trust into your account with the person in front of you. Later in the session you’re going to need to make a withdrawal: you’ll need to challenge an unrealistic belief, or ask someone to give something up. You can only do that if you’ve banked the rapport first. Be careful, though: stay neutral. You’re acknowledging the emotion, not agreeing with the position — it takes practice, but if you do it consciously, you’ll get it.
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And here’s the best part: this is a skill you can get really good at without ever sitting in a mediation. So here’s the first item on your to-do list — call a friend or family member you haven’t spoken to in a while, and just: (1) listen, (2) reflect, (3) empathise.
That’s it. That’s the whole skill. Get good at it, and when you need it, it’ll be there.
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Dominoes: the hidden issue
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Not every issue in a session is equal. Some can be talked through logically — the weekend schedule, or the rands and cents. But others sit underneath the surface and block all progress. These are the dominoes.
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Picture this: a divorce that’s supposedly about care and contact, maintenance, and the house — but the real obstacle in the room is the affair, and the cloud of anger, shame and humiliation that comes with it. Until that emotional domino is dealt with, those two people are stuck, and they’re not thinking like good parents.
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And it’s not just divorce. In a parenting dispute the domino might be a new step-parent and the fear of being replaced. In a maintenance fight it’s shame and the fear of not coping financially. In an inheritance dispute it’s almost never the money — it’s old sibling wounds and the need to finally be recognised. As adults, we tend to recreate childhood patterns; I think we do it because we want a second bite at the cherry — to go back and fix something we haven’t figured out yet.
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A critical caveat: check whether a domino is actually present. Sometimes there’s been an affair and it’s genuinely not blocking anything — they’ve both moved on and just want the finances sorted. Don’t manufacture drama that isn’t there. Your job is to notice the thing preventing real discussion, deal with it safely, and get back to the questions and the listening.
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Start training your eye today: next time you watch an argument — even your own — ask yourself, what’s the real thing nobody is actually saying? That’s the second item on your to-do list.
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Spotting and handling a domino
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So how do you spot a domino? You try to move forward, but the parties keep circling back to the same issue. One topic seems to poison every other one — you try to talk about the division of the estate and somehow they’re back to the affair. The resistance is bigger than it should be. You can almost feel the shame, or the fear, just beneath the surface. One or both parties need to be acknowledged before they’ll negotiate like adults. Or — and this is the big one — they’re using a practical issue to carry emotional pain.
Trust me: they are not really fighting about the furniture.
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So how do you handle it? Two rules: (1) gently, and (2) privately.
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Privately first — take it into a side meeting. If you’re alone with someone, they’ll tell you what they won’t say in front of their ex. So the moment you sense the domino, that’s usually your cue to split them up. Then gently identify the domino without forcing it. You might ask, “What’s the one thing that matters most to you?” to get them talking; or, when they’re ready, “What do you need to have acknowledged before you can move forward?” Open the door without kicking it down.
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The mediation process, stage by stage
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Framework done, dominoes done — now let’s see what a session can look like, straight off the cheatsheet. The stages are colour-coded; next to the name of each stage are the deliverables, then examples, then tips, and so on.
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Stage 0 — Preparation: being in the right frame of mind.
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Stages 1 & 2 — Introduction and agenda: you set the tone, and turn opening statements into a clean, neutral list.
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Stages 3, 4 & 5 — The fluid middle: explore, generate options, reality-test. If option generation passes reality-testing and evaluation, you move on.
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Stage 6 — Negotiation and consensus: you work out the details and record them.
A quick word on preparation: study whatever inputs your clients have provided, well before your first joint session. And you’ll want to be in the right state of mind to deal with whatever curveballs come. If you’ve ever practised presence, you’ll recognise the value of being in a relaxed, alert state. The mediator doesn’t need to put on a show — just be present and receptive. Now let’s see how the framework and the domino actually move through these stages.
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Worked example — introduction and agenda (Mary & Katlego)
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Let’s make all of this concrete with one example, and follow it right through the session. Mary and Katlego are separated, and they’re fighting over a parenting plan. Two children, nine and six. The dispute, on paper, is contact: Mary has been withholding the children on Katlego’s weekends.
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Stages 1 & 2: introduction and agenda.
My strategy here is simple — structure the session, take the temperature down, and start banking rapport as they speak by using active listening. My tactic is a short, warm introduction — not a speech — then I ask for opening statements and turn them into an agenda. The techniques I use in these first two stages are (1) active listening, (2) neutralising the language, and (3) summarising back.
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Watch the neutralising. Mary says, “He doesn’t deserve to see the children every second weekend.” I don’t argue, and I don’t take a side. I write down “contact arrangements.” I take the heat out of it and turn it into a workable agenda point. I’m not going to start exploring yet, because we’re still setting the agenda.
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Worked example — exploration and option generation
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Stages 3 & 4: exploration and option generation — the yellow band on the cheatsheet.
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Tactically, I start by finding the status quo in the joint session: who’s living where, how often the children see each parent, and how often maintenance is being paid. And there it is — Katlego is two payments behind. When Mary refuses contact, I split them into caucus, because that’s where the real issue comes out. In the side meeting with Mary, she says, “Why should he get weekends with the children when he’s not supporting them?”
There’s the domino: the issue with contact was never really about the schedule — it’s about the maintenance, and the resentment and financial insecurity sitting under it.
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Then I speak to Katlego, privately. In the side meeting he tells me what’s happening: he was retrenched, and he’s started a new job at a lower income, but it’s only been three weeks, so he hasn’t received his first paycheque yet.
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To generate options, I ask him: “Skip forward six months, all of this behind you. You’re spending enough time with your children, you’ve got a good co-parenting relationship with Mary, and you’re not worried about money anymore.” Then the follow-up: “Okay, Katlego — how do we get there?”
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Let Katlego come up with the solutions. You’ll be tempted to shout out the answer the moment you see it. Don’t — the parties have to come up with the solutions. Maybe he lands on doing private work over weekends, or getting a technical certification and becoming a team leader. Maybe there really are no options for growth, and we need to adjust Mary’s expectations.
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Worked example — reality-testing and a workable agreement
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Stages 5 & 6: reality-testing, then negotiation.
My strategy now is a reality-based settlement, where we build consensus one issue at a time.
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First, reality-testing — and this is where I spend the rapport I banked at the start. Katlego’s new salary means he can only pay Mary R4,000 a month instead of the R5,000 he paid before. I have to test the plan, but gently: can Mary make it work on R1,000 a month less than before? It’s a difficult scenario, but we have to work with what we have — whatever we decide, the plan has to survive contact with real life. If Mary rejects it, I ask her for solutions. Are there assets to sell? Even if there are, that’s only a temporary fix; it won’t change Katlego’s salary.
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Katlego agrees to cut some of his expenses and to pay back the R10,000 in arrears at R400 a month. Twenty-five months is a long time, but it’s workable.
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The domino falls the moment the parties commit to a workable payment plan. Mary’s reason for holding back contact is gone. We’ve mutualised it: they both want the children (1) supported and (2) seeing their dad. And when parties make concessions, my job as the mediator is to thank them for those concessions.
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Now we dot the i’s and cross the t’s: amounts, dates, times, places, names. R4,000 every month by the first (which includes the arrears); contact every second weekend plus a midweek sleepover. We confirm it, in detail, and record it.
Notice the whole arc: the strategy moved from de-escalation to settlement; the tactics from structuring to settling; the techniques from active listening to reality-testing — and the domino, the unpaid maintenance, was present from the very start, all the way to the point where it was resolved.
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Three techniques worth knowing
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There are dozens of techniques, but I’m going to unpack just three — because the three you actually use beat the forty you half-remember.
The first is active listening, which we’ve already covered: that’s our foundation. Here are the other two.
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Option generation. What we want is to move our clients from positions to interests. A position is what they say they want — for example, “I want the children every weekend.” The interest is why it matters — “I want to be involved in their lives, and I want enough time to do that.” The moment you identify the interest, the solution comes online, because there are lots of ways to have involved time that don’t mean one parent having the children every single weekend.
The discipline is to let them generate the options. You’ll want to give them the solution — don’t. The solution they come up with survives; the one you impose doesn’t. My favourite tool here is future projection: “skip forward two years, things are working — what does it look like?” — and then, “how do we get there?”
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Reality-testing. Here we spend the rapport we’ve been saving. You respectfully challenge the beliefs that won’t survive contact with real life: “What happens if she can’t comply?” “Is this affordable — will it still be working next year?” — that’s testing for sustainability. And if all else fails, you might reach for BATNA, PATNA and WATNA as a safety net: “if we don’t reach an agreement today, what’s your next best option?”
One crucial thing, though: this is not cross-examination. The second someone feels attacked, your rapport is gone. Create a space where it’s genuinely okay to be wrong, and they’ll talk themselves out of a bad idea.
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Active listening, option generation, reality-testing — master those three and you’ve got the basics.
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The wider toolkit
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Here’s the rest of the toolkit. I’m deliberately not going to explain every one — this is a list, and I want you to see how they fit together.
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Listening and rapport: active listening, reflecting, acknowledgement, labelling the emotion, normalising, strategic silence.
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Framing and language: reframing, neutralising, summarising, redirection.
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Questioning: open-ended, circular, priority, perspective-taking.
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Opening up options (unlocking the future): option generation, brainstorming, future projection, working backwards.
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Testing and risk: reality-testing, affordability, sustainability, BATNA.
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Settlement and repair: apology coaching, detail clarification, recapping the agreement, reinforcing a concession.
The three we unpacked are active listening, option generation and reality-testing. My honest advice: don’t try to memorise this.
Pick three or four that feel natural to you, get genuinely good at them, and add one at a time. Every one of these can be practised in everyday life — reframing a tense work email, staying silent for three seconds in your next meeting, summarising back what your partner said. That everyday practice is what turns these techniques into muscle memory.
The apology play
I want to give you one more full tactical sequence, because it’s the clearest example of strategy, tactic and technique working together — and because it’s so easy to get wrong. This is the apology play. In our example the domino was money, but sometimes the domino turns out to be acknowledgement: someone needs to hear a genuine “sorry” before they can move on anything practical.
When that’s the case, here’s the play.
The strategy over all of it is relationship repair; each step is a tactic; and it’s delivered through the technique we call apology coaching.
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Check that the apology really is the domino — a good test is whether the aggrieved party keeps digging in.
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Explore privately whether the remorse is genuine; a fake apology is worse than none. (You don’t want your client spending ten minutes explaining to their ex all the reasons the affair was someone else’s fault.)
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Invite the apology in caucus, never in a joint session.
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Rehearse the apology in private — I learnt this one the hard way.
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Decide who’s in the room and who raises the apology; it can be me, or it can be my client.
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Prepare the apologiser for apathy — the other party might not care for the apology.
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Deliver the apology in the joint session, then go back into the practical negotiation — because the apology was never the destination; it was the thing blocking the road.
And the golden rule: never ask your client whether they’d like an apology, and never pre-arrange it with them. Get this right, and if the domino really was the apology, the whole dynamic between the parties changes.
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The difficult moments
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When you registered, a lot of you asked specifically for the hard moments, so let me pull them together.
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Interruptions — because mediators see a lot of them. The instinct is to jump in and referee; you’re not a kindergarten teacher. Let the interrupter run out of steam, then wait. Two or three seconds of silence feels awkward — good, that’s how you know it’s working, and it’s how you take back control. Then redirect: “We’ll get to that — please continue.” If they go again, don’t lecture; just split them into caucus, without a speech. The correct response to anger is, almost always, silence.
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Power imbalance — it’s not only money; it can be status, or confidence. Side meetings are your main tool, because the quieter party will tell you in private what they won’t say in a joint session.
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Raw emotion and flying accusations — don’t debate accusations in the joint session. Take it to a side meeting, reframe the accusation into a real concern, then normalise the feeling without endorsing the party’s position. From there you can go back to the agenda.
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The party who won’t budge — go back to interests. Remember the gold standard: the children’s best interests (people generally do love their children). Get them talking about the life they actually want, and reality-test the options: is this doable?
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The through-line
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Let me zoom back out, because this is the heart of the whole webinar. Watch how the framework moved through Mary and Katlego’s session.
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Your strategy isn’t one fixed thing — it changes as the session moves.
Stages 1 & 2: de-escalate and structure.
Stage 3: identify whether there’s a domino, as you explore.
Stage 4: let the parties come up with options.
Stage 5: a reality-based settlement.
Stage 6: repair and consensus. So the strategy quietly moves from de-escalation, to problem-solving, to settling.
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And underneath all of it runs the domino — the unpaid maintenance. You might have spotted it at the agenda stage, identified it safely in caucus, and resolved it the moment Katlego committed to a workable payment plan. The second it’s resolved, the contact dispute falls away — because it was never really about contact.
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The tactics and the techniques change at every step — the intro, then status-quo questions, then future projection, then affordability testing, then detail clarification. But the three words — strategy, tactic, technique — are your compass.
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Beyond the session: how you keep growing
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Look at the bottom of the cheatsheet and you’ll see rows seven to ten. These aren’t stages of the session; they’re about you, the mediator, and how you keep getting better.
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Learning — stay coachable: find a mentor, become a mentor.
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Reflection — the one people skip, and the most valuable. After every session, debrief yourself honestly: What worked? Where did I lose the room? Where did I miss the domino? Five minutes of honest reflection is worth more than another textbook.
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Post-qualification readiness — keeping your skills sharp and current so you’re genuinely ready for real work.
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Presentation — showing up professionally: calm, prepared, credible.
So one to six is how you run the session; seven to ten is how you grow as the mediator running it. Both are on the page.
In closing
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That’s the crash course — thank you.
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