lawyer, mediator, collaborative practitioner, facilitator and coach
I’ve been a lawyer for over four decades. In that time I’ve transitioned from being a head-kicking adversarial gun for hire, towards the more human approach of helping people understand why conflict is in their lives and what it is there to teach them.
Of course, everyone wants conflict to never arrive or when it does, to disappear. So traditional lawyers can make the symptoms go away – time, money and emotions are all it costs. I can do that with my hands tied behind my back! I’m more interested though in helping people understand why they’re in conflict in the first place. That way, you and I get to displace ongoing discord with congruency and authenticity. How different are you when your head, heart and belly are aligned? On your soul path?
I’m interested in healing and peacemaking: resolutions, not least-worst-outcome settlements!
A peacemaker doesn’t come to another person or another place to make or create peace. My job is to create a safe place where peace can be achieved. It’s not my peace I am imposing on anybody, I get to experience other people’s peace and what it means to them…and help you to know what that is within yourself.
That’s what Collaborative Practice can do – catch that moment of discord and uncover what lies below and is needing to find expression. And then having it said and out in the world so that truth lands….and your mind, feelings and instincts align. When you are congruent you also align yourself in flow.
I’ve also been involved in personal growth and particularly, men’s work for decades. I’m the immediate past chair of the not-for-profit ManKind Project Australia Ltd; a charity which runs adult male rite of passage programs to assist men to become authentic and be the men they were always born to be. (see mankindproject.org.au)
Holding space for my clients, men and women, is a sacred calling and one I take to heart.
What really interests me
I’ve been in practice more than 40 years! I know that inevitably, people have issues which they perceive have legal consequences. So they go to a lawyer for a solution.
Solutions are simple: they only take time; money and emotions. Then they’re done!
What the legal solutions often don’t address is why the issue arose in the first place.
When I’m conflict-averse; when I can’t see the shadows in my personality (the parts of me I hide, repress and deny); when my way of being in this world calls in conflict rather than abundance, ease, grace and flow; problems will show up. And each has a lesson intrinsic to me embedded in it. And when I “solve” the problem and ignore the lesson, it’ll return in the next one which is always bigger and more profound and more time-consuming and money and emotionally expensive to sort.
The Universe has a way of keeping on like this until I’ve learnt the lesson in it for me. And then the next problem will arrive, with totally more challenging and different lessons in it for me as I’ve progressed.
So what interests me particularly, are clients who are alive to themselves: who are self-reflective enough to hear or at least be open to the enquiry of “what’s this really all about?”.
I get joy, peace and harmony from helping clients heal themselves; get past their childhood or other traumas and grow in maturity towards fulfilling their life’s purpose here on this planet. (It’s said that the two most important days of your life are when you are born and when you discover why!).