When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams: Turning Your Critical Internal Voices into Collaborative Allies

As a mediator and trainer, Ike Lasater coaches individuals and organizations to foster successful collaboration through learning skills to effectively handle difficult conversations, improve productivity, give and receive meaningful and productive feedback, and reduce interpersonal conflict and stress. These skills help teams to thrive in an environment that encourages individual risk-taking, where members listen to each other's ideas, no matter the cultural differences within the team or perceived differences in power. A former civil trial attorney, Ike founded a twenty-person law firm, litigating complex, multi-party commercial and environmental cases for twenty years in the state and federal courts of California. As he trained extensively with psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD, founder of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), for over a decade, he grew to see that conflict can be an opportunity for connection, and shifted his focus from law to training. NVC's approach was congruent with his values, developed through long-term practices of Zen meditation, yoga (he cofounded The Yoga Journal in 1975), and aikido. Ike has served on the boards of the Center for Nonviolent Communication and the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California, and on the mediation panel for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. He has facilitated workshops in twenty countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia. You can find Ike online at www.ikelasater.com