As practitioners, we want to feel competent and helpful. We want to do our best for the participants. Most of us believe that through experience we will gain the resources, knowledge and tools to be skillful and effective.

People believe practice makes perfect, but it doesn't. If you're making a tremendous amount of mistakes, all you're doing is deeply ingraining the same mistakes. (Jillian Michaels)

This practical session will address:

• What is Reflective Practice and why might it be important for me?
• How do I know I am doing the best I can?
• Using reflective practice groups to learn from difficult or unsettling practice experiences, or from surprising successes.
• The powerful effect of a non-judgmental process (Reflective Debrief) for learning from practice situations.

Laurie Amaya

Laurie is a family law mediator, consulting, and Collaborative attorney.  She is an APFM Certified Advanced Practitioner, APFM Senior Mediator, and a Mediate.com Certified Senior Mediator.

Laurie began training in Reflective Practice with Michael Lang in 2018 and is an associate of the Reflective Practice Institute.  Her experience includes participation in the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM) Reflective Practice Group as well as facilitation and co-facilitation of monthly Reflective Practice groups in British Columbia, Southern California, and an international group sponsored by the ABA.

She is the author of the article “Mediators Can Greatly Improve Your Skills Using Reflective Practice Groups”, published in Theories of Change for the Dispute Resolution Movement, Edited by John Lande.  Laurie received her B.A. from U.C. Santa Cruz, her JD from Southwestern University is licensed to practice law in California and Arizona. Her practice is in the Pasadena area of Los Angeles, CA.

Michael Lang

For more than 40 years Michael has mediated family, workplace, and organizational disputes.

Michael created and was the founding director of one of the first graduate programs in conflict resolution in the US at Antioch University in 1992 and served in a similar role at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC.

In the area of reflective practice, he has authored The Practitioners Guide to Reflective Practice in Conflict Resolution (2019) and co-authored The Making of a Mediator: Developing Artistry in Practice, (2000).  Michael facilitates or co-leads a number of reflective practice groups with participants from the US, Canada, Ireland, Nigeria, South Africa, and the UK