I Teach This. I Still Missed It.

Awareness is not immunity.

Yesterday I came across a post from fellow LinkedIn contributor Stu Van Rij where he called himself out for not following his own advice: talk less and listen more.

What made it especially interesting was that he had just delivered a masterclass teaching that very concept.

I agreed with him immediately, on two different levels.

First, in mediation, like in negotiation, timing matters.

A question can be insightful, strategic, even brilliant, and still fail because it arrived too early.

Sometimes the room is not ready yet.

Silence is not absence.

Silence is often information gathering, emotional processing, resistance surfacing, or people thinking their way toward clarity.

One of the hardest disciplines in mediation is resisting the urge to intervene simply because the room feels uncomfortable.

But the second part of his reflection stayed with me even more.

When we fall into the very patterns we teach others to avoid, it stings differently. Because you know better.

I remember delivering what I thought was a really strong training on hidden bias and unconscious assumptions.

The very next day, I walked into a negotiation room and instinctively addressed the male attorney because I assumed he was the lead negotiator.

I still think about that moment.

Not only because I made the mistake, but because I understand the impact. I know what it feels like to be unseen, misread, or structurally discounted in a room.

Despite being highly trained and highly self-aware, I still slipped into automatic assumption.

It wasn’t maliciousness. It was cognitive automation.

My brain saw:

• male attorney

• negotiation room

• likely lead

  
  

System 1 doing exactly what System 1 does: using familiar patterns to make fast judgments with minimal cognitive effort.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

Awareness helps. Training matters. Experience matters. But none of those things create immunity.

They simply help us recognize and interrupt the pattern faster.

Most harmful dynamics in negotiation rooms are not created by cartoon villains. They are often created by intelligent, decent, well-intentioned people operating under speed, stress, hierarchy, habit, cognitive overload, or unconscious conditioning.

That’s why process matters so much.

Process is not there because humans are evil.

Process is there because humans are human.

Including mediators.