Jacinta Gallant

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING FOR SKILLS AND INSIGHT

Collaborative Professionals need strong skills to handle complex information, identify what matters most to our clients and help clients find creative, workable solutions to their conflicts. We also need to be able to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of the conflict. At the core is the need for insight into how conflict affects our clients and ourselves.

Jacinta is a dynamic, insightful trainer, delivering professional development programs in Collaborative Practice , Interest-based Negotiation and Mediation.

Jacinta offers customized training for groups looking to develop skills for their particular areas of practice. Check out Jacinta’s website for more information.

ADVANCED TRAINING IN COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

KEEPING INTERESTS AT THE TABLE

In Collaborative Practice, we promise an “interest-based” negotiation that will meet our clients’ needs, address their concerns and give them the best chance to achieve what they hope for. Our clients’ interests are a vital key to finding creative and workable solutions that address what is most important to the families we help.

We know this, and yet many collaborative professionals have experienced the frustration of watching the clients’ interests “fall off the table” when moving into option generation. Often, the clients - and even the professionals – return to positions and the process suddenly does not feel very collaborative. In this workshop, we will work to gain deeper insight into family conflict and learn skills to help:

• engage more effectively with our clients and address the challenges of working in an interdisciplinary team;
• identify and articulate interests in a meaningful and productive way;
• organize interests into a workable Interests Agenda; and
• work with interests in option generation to find client-centred solutions.

SHIFTING FROM JUDGMENT TO CURIOSITY IN COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

Collaborative professionals and mediators have to manage the substantive, procedural and psychological aspects of our clients’ separation. Our clients enter the conflict resolution process with feelings of hurt, anger and defensiveness. They often have a very narrow view of what is possible. Judgments and assumptions abound. Our job as collaborative professionals is to help them move through their hurt, anger and defensiveness and open themselves up to the many possibilities for the future.

Each member of the professional team brings tremendous knowledge and experience to the collaborative case. We need to be aware that we, just as much as our clients, are influenced by our own judgments and assumptions. In our professional roles, we are applauded for sound judgment and strong analytical skills. Clients ask us for advice, making it a challenge to deliver a client-centred process that focuses on the clients’ abilities to make their own decisions.

We need to shift from judgment to curiosity.

This 2-day course will help you build on your existing training and experience, and delve more deeply into how curiosity can help you be more authentic and effective in collaborative practice.

THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT! FEEDBACK SKILLS FOR MORE EFFECTIVE TEAMWORK

Effective feedback promotes understanding, helps maintain a common purpose, and fosters better working relationships. Collaborative teams cannot deliver on the promise of collaborative practice without good feedback skills. Yet, most of us have not had the opportunity to learn and practice the specific components of good feedback.

This 1-day course was developed in collaboration with Mark Weiss (Seattle Washington) for a presentation at the IACP Forum in 2015. In an interactive program, you will learn:

• Key Points about Giving and Receiving Feedback
• Checklist for Giving Feedback - a short tool you can use to help ensure that feedback you give will be most effective
• “Lead-ins” and helpful tips in delivering feedback
• Matching Your Conflict Style to Giving or Receiving Feedback – to give insights about which style works best for a particular situation.
• Listening, Curiosity and Feedback – communication skills that you’ll find useful when giving or receiving feedback.

CURIOSITY, NEUTRALITY & THE MONEY GENE

This interactive and dynamic workshop will be most valuable to advanced practitioners, as we offer our teaching from a “lessons learned” perspective! Topics include:

Neutrality:
The role of the neutral(s) in the collaborative team
Understanding client perspectives on neutrality
Bringing balance to difficult conversations

Money Styles:
Understanding and working with "money styles" and the "measuring gene
How self-reflection and acknowledgement are vital to solving the financial issues
Collaboratively managing the spousal support conversation

Advocacy:
How curiosity can help move from positions to interests
How to be more authentic and natural working with people in conflict
Keeping interests “on the table” in finding solutions

This 2-day course is delivered by our interdisciplinary training team:

Jacinta Gallant
Gaylene Stingl
Barbara Kelly

INTRODUCTORY COURSES OFFERED

INTEREST BASED NEGOTIATION FOR COLLABORATIVE PROFESSIONALS

For lawyers, mediators, mental health professionals and financial specialists, who want to learn the foundation principles and skills to work with “interests” in negotiation. This course focuses on how to:

Frame the issues that need to be solved in a way that expands the possibilities for resolution

Help the parties move from positions to interests, and keep interests the focus of option generation

Develop good communication skills to move discussion from debate to dialogue, and handle strong emotion

Work with the parties and other professionals to create workable agreements that focus on the parties’ “interests”.

This 2-day (15-hour) interactive course combines presentation, role play and opportunities for reflection so that professionals leave with practical tools they can immediately put into practice. The content and approach meets the standard for training in interest-based skills required by most Collaborative Practice Groups.

INTRODUCTION TO INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

In this interactive workshop, lawyers, mental health professionals, and financial professionals will learn the foundational principles, processes, and skills required to work in collaborative practice. We will explain the role of each professional on the collaborative team, discuss the challenges and benefits of working collaboratively, and practice the skills needed to effectively engage with clients and professional team members.

This 2-day training (15 hours) meets the IACP standards for Introductory Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice Training and is the foundation course required by most interdisciplinary practice groups. This course is taught by our interdisciplinary training team:
Jacinta Gallant
Gaylene Stingl
Barbara Kelly

INTEREST-BASED MEDIATION – INTRODUCTION TO SKILLS AND PROCESS

To work effectively as a neutral professional in conflict resolution, you need skills and insight to manage conflict and a flexible, but structured process to move the parties from conflict to resolution. This 3-day (22.5 hour) course will teach you how to act in a neutral role to help clients identify and frame the issues, explore interests and create agreements that focus on their interests. We will delve into neutrality/bias issues, communication skills, process steps and the challenges of managing complex information and strong emotion.

PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK

“Jacinta has an engaging leadership and presentation persona. This was my favorite course. It changed how I expect to practice collaborative law and I can't wait to share what I learned with my local group. I was impressed with the presentation and would gladly take another with Jacinta in the future.”
Participant, “Keeping Interests At The Table” – IACP Forum, San Antonio, Texas, 2013

“Jacinta’s teaching on interests was an inspiration. She is warm and hilarious and (then you find) incredibly experienced, principled and wise. There is joyous de-bunking of some of that slightly self-righteous or regimented practice that it is so easy for us to acquire like calcium deposits as we do this work and instead, during her trainings, we get a clean sense of the professional we wanted to be when we started out.”
James Pirrie, Family Law in Partnership, London, UK 2015

Out of all of the presentations that I attended at the Forum, yours was by far my favorite. I was so excited to share with my fellow collaborative practitioners the concept of using the interest agenda to create solutions to meet our clients’ interests. I believe that this will also help “balance” certain power struggles we encounter during the process by ensuring that even the less vocal party’s interests are put forth and considered equally as those put forth by the more vocal individual. It forces the professionals to work with clients to identify what their real interests are, going much deeper than what the clients may initially put forth as more position-oriented needs.
Participant from New York, USA – February 11, 2014

“Your presentation at Suncadia was really wonderful. It shed a higher level light to our current practice. So many times we attend a presentation and walk away thinking, “o.k., I’m doing most of that. I should or may be able to tweak this or that.” In this case, I and many of my peers were really moved by your presentation!”
Loretta Story, Collaborative Professionals of Washington 2016