Mediation Wiki

Mediation

Mediation is a way of resolving disputes between two parties. A third party, the mediator is involved in order to structure the meeting and he always has to be impartial.

There are several types of conflicts such as:

• Personal conflicts: if you have for example two wishes and you can’t decide what you want to do and you’re in two minds stress occurs.

• Conflicts between two persons: e.g. 2 friends want to spend the day together and everyone wants to impose one’s will by finding the better argument.

• Conflicts between two groups: mostly it’s about different interests. Out of this tensions and later aggressions result.

• Conflicts in between one group: they often result from jealousy, revenge or rivalry.

If these disputations can’t be solved between the arguing parties a mediator is consulted, e.g. when a workers’ union goes on strike it comes to a dispute and the corporation hires a third person to intervene to settle a contract or agreement between the union and the corporation.

A mediator’s purpose is it to set a sphere where the disputants feel comfortable. He also brings up rules such as there are no interruptions while someone’s talking about how he’s seeing the problem because it’s important that his opposite understands e.g. why he got so angry at the moment the argument began.

Four-Ears-Model

Communication problems often occur because the message is misunderstood. Because of that the psychologist Friedemann Schultz von Thun developed the Four-Ear-Model. It teaches to see a message at least from four different points of view: