Dr Mike Talbot

As from today, the UK truly parts company with its European neighbours: goodbye to free movement of people, goods, and services (and pet passports and EHIC cards) and hello again to duty-free shopping, visas, and residence permits. I am myself proudly Irish, so I remain an EU citizen with everything that entails. Given, however, that UK Mediation (as the name …

The word of the year? ‘Unprecedented’. You said it. Oh, and the phrase of the year? It has to be, ‘You’re on mute!’ But how about some of our conflict and mediation moments of the year? Here we go with our annual round-up of the stand-out conflict stories of the year! Rise in neighbour conflicts because of people working from …

This is the second of a two-part piece looking at the impact of Coronavirus lockdown on the work of a professional mediation company. In part one, UK Mediation CEO Dr Mike Talbot looked at professional standards in mediation practice. Here, Mike discusses mediation training standards. Mediation: harder than it looks? Quite a few of the 5,000 or so trainees who …

This is the first of a two-part piece looking at the impact of Coronavirus lockdown on the work of a professional mediation company. Here, UK Mediation CEO, Dr Mike Talbot, discuss mediation practice. Part two looks at professional standards in mediation training. What just happened? None of us saw this coming. A matter of weeks ago, we were running face-to-face …

Right, now that I’ve just about caught my breath after six days of re-jigging everything I do, it’s time to get some thoughts down (sitting, in shorts, at my home computer!) Suddenly, the mediation world has moved online and, if you’d have told me even a week ago that we’d be where we are now, I would have at least …

I’ve been thinking over the weekend about last week’s visit of Greta Thunberg to Bristol, where she led the ‘School Strike for Climate’ protest. Around 20,000 people joined in – and that’s despite Friday’s pouring rain! Now I’m not going to use this space to talk about climate change, the value or otherwise of direct action, whether we should have …

I wish I could be given £10 each time someone hears that I’m a mediator these days and they ask, ‘So, you gonna sort out this Brexit mess, then? Ha ha!’. (Actually, I wish I could get £28.87, but more on that later). And of course, Brexit is not the only conflict that is big in the news: there’s the …

Spending most of your working day trying to resolve people’s conflict can be quite draining. And although us mediators can learn how not to get drawn into other people’s disputes, inevitably we can find that a little bit of the hostility, persecution, and ill-feeling between people can end up staying with us. My own background is as a psychotherapist, and …

I have quite a lot to do with the National Health Service. Not only have I had to draw on its fantastic services from time to time, I also worked for it some years ago, and was married to one of its employees for 16 years. I now run the company that provides it with mediation, dispute resolution services, and …

OK, I give in. I have been resisting writing anything about Brexit for the last 32 months, but with the supposed leaving date just around the corner, with a petition to revoke Article 50 now topping more than 5.5 million signatures, and with the sight of one million people on the streets of London this past weekend, I think that …

About twenty years ago, I started practising workplace mediation. As a psychotherapist and organisational consultant, I had originally been offering stress management, soft skills training, and other services, but now some of them wanted to find a better way to resolve grievance-type issues and to head off formal processes. So off I went! My first dozen or so cases mostly …

The first in a series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of UK Mediation… Mediation can often be a confusing area to navigate for those looking to seek out its services. With so many providers populating the industry, all claiming to offer different things or be the best ones around, it can be quite the headache if you’re not entirely sure …

So first of all, what’s a ‘complaint’? Well, in most people’s terms, we mean some kind of an expression of dissatisfaction: that the goods or services that someone got didn’t meet their expectations. Either that, or the consumer feels unhappy about how they were dealt with by the provider when things started to go wrong. Most complaints, whether they arise in …

Some of the most stressful times of our lives are spent dealing with our own and our loved ones’ medical emergencies or episodes of ill-health. Whether receiving bad news, spending prolonged periods in hospital, or having to make critical choices about care, our fear and upset can make it extremely difficult to contribute positively to crucial healthcare decisions. What we …