Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying “[i]n order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.” My chance to learn to hear truth came as I tried to wrap my “think like a lawyer” brain around the concepts of interest-based mediation during a 5 day, 10 hours per day course on family mediation. There is a leap of faith one has to make when transitioning between being “lawyer” and being “neutral” and, after years of legal training it is not an easy leap to make.
The mediation crowd calls it “letting the process work”. It took me 3 days to stop calling it “a quick way to get into trouble.” The hardest part in leaving the advocate behind is abandoning the lawyer’s laser focus on issues, facts, and law for simply hearing truth – not the law’s truth, but the parties’ truth – and realizing that in that moment of silent hearing meaningful solutions are generated without your involvement. (more…)
Its official, last year is finally put to bed, taxes are done, accounts reconciled, bills collected, and the books are closed, so now there’s time to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good – Mac’s, CrashPlan, Grasshopper, personallized pens, and getting an accountant
The bad – Iomega REV, Retrospect, phonebook ads, “door” law, and conservative business cards.
The ugly – the high cost of tuition when taking graduate courses at Reality U. (more…)
Well, I knew that one day I would lose a disk, but I really didn’t need it to happen today, I really didn’t need to lose the disk with my database on it, and I certainly did not expect a 2 month old disk to pack up and go south. The cool thing is that I was down for less than 90 minutes and half of that was spent running to the local big box computer store to get a new drive.
It took all of 3 mouse clicks and less than 45 minutes for CrashPlan to do a complete restore from my on-site backup. Had I not wanted instant gratification, I could have restored from my off-site personal cloud in little over 2 hours. Had I ever wondered about justifying the cost of having a highly redundant back up system, today put all my doubts to rest. Rather than spending countless hours rebuilding my contact list, document database, forms, etc. I went to lunch while my hardware and software did their thing.
Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying “[i]n order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.” My chance to learn to hear truth came as I tried to wrap my “think like a lawyer” brain around the concepts of interest-based mediation during a 5 day, 10 hours per day course on family mediation. There is a leap of faith one has to make when transitioning between being “lawyer” and being “neutral” and, after years of legal training it is not an easy leap to make.
