The most significant thing for me was learning how to ask for more information rather than trying to persuade a person to think differently. I also learned helpful dialogue tips, which are more effective during difficult conversations. If I encounter a difficult dialogue with any of my residents, I plan on using the techniques I learned in this workshop to facilitate those talks.

While mediators are taught to find common ground and commonalities, Essential Partners teaches how to engage differences constructively instead of trying to homogenize. Knowing how to approach people who are different than you and understand their complexities is a really useful tool.

One of the things that we talked about was the ability to hear another person’s point of view, even if our minds aren’t changed. We have to remember that any sort of movement is movement. If we don’t acknowledge small movement, then we just stay on two different sides, and it’s all black and white, and we don’t hear each other.