PFI

It’s easy to see the warts and mistakes of others on collaborative teams, but much harder to see our own shortcomings clearly.

As mediation and collaborative practice become more mainstream, we are handling  more high conflict,  challenging personalities and  intractable legal/financial issues.  In order to handle these  complex files , we are working in teams of advocates and neutrals and encountering the possibilities and the challenges  of neutrality and advocacy. In this workshop, we explore:
● the importance of each role and how we can capitalize on their strengths without stepping on one another’s toes

“Exceptional Communication” begins where typical communications-skills training leaves off. Pushing participants to claim their personal power in a way that engenders confidence and safety in the client(s) changes the isolation of fear into the safety of connection. Practicing the concepts of pacing and leading cultivates relationship building. Deepening listening skills will include hearing the facts, utilizing heart wisdom, interpreting gut knowing. By pulling these three listening levels together you’ll more fully understand the client’s dilemmas, needs, and interests.

We are excited to bring Practice Group Leaders together to share critical knowledge, skills and resources, to promote successful leadership and to facilitate the growth of strong Practice Groups around the world.

If you are a collaborative trainer, join us for a workshop that will enhance your ability to deliver engaging and impactful training programs to collaborative professionals. Our interdisciplinary training team will share their best training approaches to meeting participants’ adult learner needs, balancing theory and practice, teaching the paradigm shift, managing the personal styles within a team dynamic, working with curious questions and feedback, balancing the voices of the lawyer, financial specialist and mental health professional and modeling collaborative practice in action.

Deepening our understanding of the personalities behind the people we interact with, greatly impacts the collaborative divorce process and its outcome.
The Enneagram model is a typology that defines nine major personality types . By using the Enneagram, we will deepen our understanding about the different personality based worldviews, perspectives, features and behaviors, advantages and limitations that characterize the different personality patterns of each type.

The Collaborative Practice community is primarily white practitioners serving primarily white clients.  What is needed to change this to a more inclusive professional community serving a broad and diverse clientele?  This Pre-Conference Institute will look at this question from the inside out.  We will first look at what each of us needs to do on the inside to be more aware of how our own race, culture, and history affect our beliefs, thoughts, reactions, and behaviors as well as impediments to talking about race and culture.  We will then examine how the functioning of

We are trained to identify interests that underpin positions. We use this knowledge in order to help build resolutions that meet the interests and needs of both parties. Because non-material needs cannot be quantitatively and legally measured, we too often fail to acknowledge these.  We have all found that ignoring our client's non-material needs sometimes leads us to impasse.  In this workshop we will go deeper and explore the importance of non-material needs and interests.

This PFI presents a systematic process for finalizing Collaborative cases (including complex cases) in an average of two negotiation meetings. After almost a decade, MELCA has developed a sophisticated 5 step-process based on: engaging both clients from the beginning, integrating an interdisciplinary team from the first moment of client engagement, a comprehensive interdisciplinary intake to assess the supports, personnel and resources needed for success,

The purpose of this workshop to help provide Practice Group Leaders with the knowledge, skills and resources to assist their successful leadership and facilitation of Practice Group growth. We know that Practice Groups all over the world deal with the same struggles related to successes and failures. They deal with organizational issues, membership issues, leadership issues and the dynamics of providing a service to their membership while at the same time offering the public a resource for Collaborative Practice Professionals.