
CUC Connect Webinar Library
Welcome to the CUC Connect Webinar Library. Here you will find access to the the last twelve months of live webinar recordings offering additional information for professional development across the spectrum of conflict resolution and mediation practice.
An additional webinar will be featured each month from our catalogue. Over the course of your 12-month membership, you will have the opportunity to view a total of 24 training videos.
Make sure to watch the featured webinar during the month it is available, because it will return to our catalogue at the end the month.
Have questions about the material in a recorded webinar? Send an email to [email protected] and it will be shared with our training team who will reach out with additional information and clarification as part of your CUC Connect Membership.
Featured Webinar for January, 2023
Sometimes in negotiations, whether it’s a mediation or collaborative session or other forms of negotiation, someone gets upset or feels unappreciated or insulted. Or they can’t believe what the other person just said and they feel very strong emotions, at which point they just get up and storm out. Katherine Miller talks about what to do when the storm out happens.
It is natural to surround ourselves with like-minded people while avoiding the discomfort and tension that comes when we engage with those with beliefs and opinions contrary to ours. These days pumping gas or going to the grocery store can put us on the defensive, not to mention talking with relatives at the dinner table or co-workers around the water cooler. The problem with this avoidance is that we rob ourselves and others of increasing the richness of our lives through lost, meaningful connections.
In this webinar, we’ll explore how we can have these conversations in a constructive and meaningful way that is personally satisfying while fostering growth by deploying the principles of the Understanding-Based Model in our everyday lives. Benchmarks will help test these conversations’ value while building on our shared commitment to understanding as a way-station to intimacy.
Interest-based negotiation is at the heart of leveraging the Understanding-Based Model to help those in conflict reach a mutually beneficial outcome. However, guiding people to look beyond their positions and see what matters to them can be challenging for even the most experienced conflict resolution professional.
Being asked to go deeper and understand the root of why interests matter can be challenging to those entrenched in the emotions, history, and desired outcomes surrounding the circumstances of the conflict. To facilitate a fruitful conversation, we must help people understand their needs and motivations in a way that honors the strength of their feelings.
Join us for a stimulating and informative roundtable discussion featuring industry leader insights from three of the world’s most advanced technology firms: Intel, Roche, and SAP.
Panelists will discuss how the Understanding-Based Approach to Conflict has helped address human resource challenges while increasing Return on Investment (ROI) in people management systems through mediation programs that mediators can implement in small firms, non-profits, large corporations or other organizations.
Additional Resources:
Workplace Conflict and how Workplaces Can Harness it to Thrive (REPORT): https://img.en25.com/Web/CPP/Conflict_report.pdf
Estimating the Costs of Workplace Conflict (REPORT): https://www.acas.org.uk/costs-of-conflict
Contracting is a crucial part of the mediation process and often overlooked or poorly addressed. Inexperienced mediators worry that the parties (and their attorneys) will be so keen to rush into the content of their dispute that they will have no patience for crafting the container that will help carry them through. However, working with parties in mediation requires us to operate differently than parties usually behave in traditional approaches to conflict.
More specifically, clarifying that the parties are in charge of making decisions together to resolve their conflict shifts traditional allocation of responsibility from the professional to the parties, calls for the parties to deal directly with each other in the same room (with the help of the mediator) and opens the basis for the decisions beyond law and includes the personal dimensions of the conflict, including fairness.
One of the most challenging things that can come up in a conflict resolution process is when there are people outside the room negatively influencing the parties but not participating directly in the process. Sometimes, those influencers are the parties’ professional advisors or lawyers and that problem can often be solved by bringing them into the room. When the outside influencers are friends and family or people who can’t be brought into the room, it is a harder problem to solve. In this webinar, we address how to identify the interfering influencers outside the room and what to do about them to minimize their impact and focus on the people who matter without making anyone wrong.
When we create a container for working with parties in conflict, how can we make sure we’re designing a process that is inclusive of and accessible to people with disabilities? Join Lainey Feingold, disability rights lawyer, public speaker and author of Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, with the CUC’s Melanie Rowen for a discussion of accessibility culture and mediation. Participants will come away with a better understanding of the intersections of conflict resolution, disability inclusion, and accessibility in the digital and built environment. The 25 year track record of Structured Negotiation as a collaborative dispute resolution process to advance disability rights will also be discussed.
Everybody lies (and gets lied to), every day. As mediators, journalists, lawyers and negotiators, we encounter more lies than most. In conflict, there are countless incentives to exaggerate, embellish, omit and deceive. So what do we do? How do we know if someone is lying? And how do we deal with it, when they are?
In this webinar, mediator Gary Friedman and journalist Amanda Ripley draw on research and their own experiences to explore when and why people lie, how to reduce the odds of destructive lying in conflict—and how to respond to lies and liars once we encounter them (without making everything worse).
Central to our approach to conflict is to maximize the potential of the power of understanding in the three dimensions of self, other and external realities. Understanding is a quite different and challenging alternative to the power of coercion. These dimensions have a potential power to transform and help guide people to agreements created by them that they feel invested in and are more likely to live up to since the solution comes from their understanding of themselves, each other, and the situation. When in conflict, people often gravitate towards the power of coercion. Coercion may produce a result but often at the cost of later boomeranging when one or both parties sit with the fallout. In this webinar, Gary Friedman will discuss how to develop understanding in coercive situations.
With so much of our work involving non-verbal cues and how it feels to be “in the room” with our clients, the pandemic fundamentally changed how we work with conflict. In this webinar, we’ll explore the challenges and opportunities presented by holding difficult conversations online and examine how mediation and conflict resolution practices have evolved in digital spaces.
You’ve taken mediation and conflict resolution trainings and have begun developing the skills you need to serve clients in conflict, but how do you make that your day job? In this webinar, Catherine Conner and Melanie Rowen will discuss concrete tips for starting your own practice that includes or is focused on alternative dispute resolution, including mediation and collaborative practice.
Forgiveness can be a powerful force for restoring harmony and wholeness. A harmed person can find their freedom in practicing forgiveness. It can also empower them to move toward an amicable solution and allow the rebuilding of a fractured relationship.
An apology is a fragile beginning without accountability or a plan that acknowledges a release from guilt and responsibility for new or altered behavior that commits to better outcomes. However, many of us have a powerful instinct that a process that does not support accountability can be problematic, unhelpful, or worse. As conflict professionals, how can we create a process that supports taking responsibility and creating space for forgiveness?
Using our inner experience in the presence of conflict and unblocking ourselves from parties can open channels of communication that help parties understand their problem at a deeper level. Recognizing internal reactions that can get in the way of connecting to a client and working with that reaction to open our connection to the client can also open the way for the parties to communicate better.
Reactions to clients and their situations are essential to our relative effectiveness with them. Stories that clients bring into the room, filled with pain, frustration, anger, hope, and desire, can cause unconscious reactions that remind mediators of their own life. These reactions favor one side over another, create judgments, and lead to positive or negative bias.
Discounted Webinars
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Webinar: 4 Things To Do When Emotions Flare
Using emotions to build a better agreement: When feelings run high and hot, some professionals’ gut reaction is to separate the parties. Katherine Miller discusses four ways lawyers and conflict […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: Why Bringing People in Conflict Together Works
Contrary to popular opinion, keeping people in conflict together usually works better than separating them. Gary Friedman and Katherine Miller discuss how the Understanding Model of mediation with no-caucus works […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: The Storm Out: What To Do When It Happens
Sometimes in negotiations, whether it’s a mediation or collaborative session or other forms of negotiation, someone gets upset or feels unappreciated or insulted. Or they can’t believe what the other […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: Inside Out: Self Reflection for Conflict Professionals
When a professional is working with parties in conflict, the turmoil and tension in the room impacts the professional as well as the clients. Accessing our inner lives connect us […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: 3 Mistakes Lawyers Make That Keep Them (And Their Clients) Stuck In Conflict
What might you be missing and what can you do differently that will enable you to help your clients solve their problems and bring you greater job satisfaction? Katherine Miller […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: Taking the Plunge: How to Bring the Understanding Based Model into Your Work
Now that you have taken some of our trainings, watched webinars, and/or read our books, you may be inspired and hoping to incorporate our model into your work. In this […]
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Webinar: What To Do When You Are Stuck
Mediators and other conflict resolution professionals often fear impasse. Impasse is just a word that means stuck. It’s no surprise that people who are in conflict reach places that are […]
$37.00 -
Webinar: 4 Things to Do When Emotions Flare
Many people are uncomfortable around emotions. When feelings run high and hot, some professional’s’ gut reaction is to keep the parties apart. This one-hour long webinar will offer tips and […]
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Webinar: Developing and Framing Interests
For decades we have known that interest-based negotiation is more effective and efficient than competitive negotiation. The challenge is in eliciting what is most important to parties and then anchoring […]
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Webinar: Why Bringing People Together in Conflict Works
In this encore presentation of the August 23, 2016 webinar on Why Bringing People Together in Conflict Works, Gary Friedman and Katherine Miller talk about why the understanding model of mediation […]
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Webinar: Positive Neutrality
A common question and concern of mediators is how they can maintain their neutrality, particularly when strong emotions are either pulling the mediator towards a party or pushing the mediator […]
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Webinar: Brainstorming and Evaluating Options
The end game of any mediation is challenging. The parties’ original positions often come roaring back with a vengeance. Brainstorming options can work wonders to broaden the perspective of parties […]
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Webinar: The 6 Underlying Concepts
The 6 underlying concepts of the Understanding-Based model can often be used to guide the mediator through difficult moments as well as help structure the conflict resolution process to minimize […]
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Webinar: Judgments and Curiosity
As conflict resolution professionals, we are often plagued with judgments that impede us in our goal to help the parties reach an agreement based on their own criteria. In this […]
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Webinar: Why to Bring in the Law and How
What role does the law play in conflict resolution and how can mediators bring it into the rooms in such a way that it doesn’t take over the discussion? In […]
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Webinar: Conflict Through Race and Culture Lenses
People in conflict often focus on their positions, each person advocating for the solution that they believe is the right and just one. Power and coercion are used to pressure […]
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Webinar: Working in the Same Room and Dealing with a Request for Caucus
The Understanding based model is known as a “non-caucus” model and yet we often deal with both explicit and implicit requests for private meetings. In this webinar, we will discuss […]
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Webinar: Gender and Conflict
The gender of the parties and the conflict resolution professional(s) may impact the conflict resolution process and dynamics. In this webinar, Catherine Conner and Gary Friedman discuss the role of […]
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Webinar: The End Game – How Move to an Agreement
After information has been gathered, interests of the parties explored, and options developed, then what? In this webinar, Gary Friedman and Katherine Miller discuss the process of moving to an […]
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Webinar: Conflict Styles and Patterns
People in conflict often have individual and interpersonal patterns that keep them from working through the conflict successfully. In this webinar, Gary Friedman and Catherine Conner will describe the types […]
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Webinar: The Business Side of Mediation
You have taken a mediation training and want to add mediation to your existing practice or want to start a new mediation practice, but what about the business side of […]
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Webinar: Nine Practices to Change Your Awareness and Presence
One of the challenging but critical skills of a conflict professional is the ability to be fully present and aware in the midst of conflict. Do you find yourself distracted […]
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Webinar: Working with Ground Rules
Katherine Miller and Gary Friedman discuss working with ground rules during the contracting phase of mediation. Whether or not lawyers are in the room or not, ground rules help the […]
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Webinar: Culture and Conflict Engagement
All of us develop and evolve from and by cultural forces in our lives – our family of origin, religion, race, ethnicity, community/country/region, and other organizations or groups in which […]
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Webinar: Going Down the Why Trail
Parties in a conflict are often focused on their positions – what they think should be the solution. Our hope is that by understanding what is beneath their positions, we […]
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Webinar: Preparing Parties for Mediation
Many mediation parties have never been in mediation and are anxious about what to expect. Others may have attended a mediation that is quite different from your approach. In this […]
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Webinar: When Lawyers Are In The Room
When parties in a legal dispute decide to use an alternative dispute resolution process, the question of role of the law and lawyers arises. The lawyers may be in the […]
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Webinar: Risky Moves: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do
Tension is high in the room, emotions are flaring, and you feel desperate. You have tried your usual approach and tools but nothing has shifted. In this webinar, Gary Friedman […]
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Webinar: Mediator Advice: Is It Ever Appropriate?
In this webinar, Gary Friedman and Catherine Conner will investigate the question of whether mediators should ever give advice and if so, under what conditions. In our model, we emphasize […]
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Webinar: Structuring the Process
Structuring the process is how we propose starting almost all elements of the Understanding-Based mediation process. Interested in learning more? This webinar with Gary Friedman and Katherine Miller, who walk […]
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Webinar: Real Talk
In our Real Talk program, we come together in conversation to create safe, effective spaces to have a dialogue about race and build relationships in the process. During this webinar, […]
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Webinar: Endgame Questions and Issues
The endgame is often overshadowing any negotiation process from the outset. As parties in conflict approach the finish line, tentative agreements can fall apart, and emotions can flare. In this […]
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Webinar: Dealing with External Forces
Back-seat Drivers, Tribe, Adversarial Consulting Attorneys, and More In the Understanding-based model, the parties in conflict ultimately know which solution will work best, with the mediator playing a supportive role. […]
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Emotions Webinar
Many conflict professionals are compelled to present rationale arguments and strive to avoid too much emotion from permeating into the conflict resolution process. Yet, emotions are a necessary part of […]
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Webinar: The “Bully”
One of the disconcerting challenges in mediation is forceful participants and bullying behavior, which often lead to a failure in the mediation process. Sometimes individuals with active or competitive personalities […]
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Webinar: Parties Understanding Each Other
For mediators, it is a dream to get parties in conflict to appreciate each other in ways they have not done so before. When this process, particularly popular among new […]
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Webinar: Being Yourself in the Room
In this webinar we discuss why being yourself and being comfortable with that is so powerful. We also discuss some common misconceptions, misgivings and mistakes that come up for mediators […]
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Webinar: Trauma and Conflict
Trauma’s reach is visible and invisible, transitory and ever present, and powerful. Parties in a conflict may have trauma from childhood, from their current lives, and from the conflict itself. […]
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Webinar: Working with Lawyers in the Room
In this webinar we demonstrate how to work with lawyers and clients together in the same room. Themes included are contracting with lawyers about their roles, clarifying how to have […]
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Webinar: Being an Anti-Racist Conflict Professional
The lenses of race, equity and culture have opened widely in the last year. Along with many other people, conflict professionals have turned to books, podcasts, documentaries, workshops and other […]
$37.00