Family law lawyer and mediator, Meysa Maleki, has recently launched The Conflict Resolution Grail: Awareness, Compassion and a Negotiator’s Toolbox, where she draws on her extensive experience as a family law lawyer and accredited mediator to introduce the everyday person to the elements of conflict, the sub-conversations and the skills that are required to resolve conflict effectively.
Maleki’s solution to addressing human conflict goes beyond just the latest conflict resolution theory, negotiation techniques, and the interpersonal skills of a mediator. She draws on the strengths of human beings, their capacity for compassion and their immense potential to change their subconscious programming through awareness.
Maleki’s book weaves together research from human genetics, evolution, communications theory, neuroscience, world history, psychology and sociology to reframe our understanding of conflict. It provides the everyday person as well as the professionals who devote their careers to working with conflict situations with an integrated approach to conflict resolution, one that draws from eastern wisdom and western conflict resolution and negotiation theory.
Everyone is faced with negotiation, persuasion, and conflict resolution on a daily basis, whether with our children, our spouse, friend, co-worker, boss, children’s school teacher, the store clerk or the berating stranger who subjects us to his wrath, without having the requisite authority to do so for what he perceives to be our reckless driving. Conflict is everyone. Adopting what Maleki calls “high leverage” conflict resolution behaviours is essential to our sense of power, well-being, and success in the world.
Beyond that, conflict resolution is now imperative to humanity’s fate as a species. It is Maleki‘s aspiration to raise awareness about our own role in conflict and to create a cultural shift and a new framework for understanding and responding to conflict.
Meysa Maleki practices as a family law lawyer and mediator at Maleki Barristers, in Toronto, Canada. Her strong interest in the complexities of interpersonal relationships and human dynamics led to a career of fighting for justice in the area of family law. She is a regular contributor to Thrive Global.