Making One’s Partner Look Good

To my mind, this flows from the principle above. By accepting and building on your partner’s work, you develop a synergy that makes your partner look good. Of course, the reverse is also true, you must be prepared to let your partner make you look good.

For this to happen, one must be aware. This awareness can extend to the environment, the needs of parties/co-mediators, their non-verbals signals and their emotions. Only when one is aware can we act in a way that makes one’s partner look good. This means that a mediator must be mindful of what is happening in the moment.

Embrace Failure

In the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, one of its presuppositions is that “There is no Failure, only Feedback” it seeks to take practitioners out of the mindset of failure and to think of every response as a form of feedback with which we can then modify our actions.

I see this principle of embracing failure as trying to do the same thing. Most people don’t dare suggest an intervention or try something new because they are afraid of failing. If one embraces failure, then one leaves that fear behind. This is especially when this principle operates hand in hand with the first two principles. Put another way, if you knew that your partner was going to “Yes, and” your ideas and in the process work very hard at making you look good, then why should one be afraid of failure?

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