My other topics are fairly general and aimed at providing a broad theoretical and intellectual base for your technology design.

I also want to highlight some very specific professional skills I can teach which might be useful to you in day-to-day life.

Specifically, I have experience teaching two concrete communication skillsets, both closely related: negotiation, and conflict management.

For each of these topics, I can provide self-guided learning materials as well as taught workshops or multi-session classes, depending on demand.

Negotiation

This is exactly what it sounds like, as I would teach to MBA students. I teach negotiation the way I learned it at Kellogg School of Management. It's a fairly standard approach, taught similarly at business schools around the world. See my free online course for more information.

Negotiation includes distributive negotiation, aka price haggling. The primary goal in distributive negotiation is to claim value.

Negotiation also includes integrative negotiation, which is about making smart trade-offs that increase value for everybody at the table. This is where it gets really interesting. The standard approach is known as "interest based negotiation" because the goal is to get past people's positions (what they want) and to try to meet their underlying interest (why they want it).

Topics in negotiation include: distributive negotiation, integrative negotiation, negotiating as teams, multi-party negotiation, dispute resolution, negotiating across cultures, personality and negotiation.

Conflict Resolution

This is a skill set with two components. One component is a set of micro skills focused on how to talk to people:  active listening and open-ended questions. The other component is a process for using these skills to facilitate 2 or more people to reach agreement. Although I've picked up a few other things along the way, my practice still closely follows what I was taught by Community Mediation Maryland.  See this micro-skills resource guide and this process guide for more information.

You will not become a skilled mediator through my teaching. A full mediation training is typically a 40 hour experience, followed by hands-on practice with a mediation service provider and coached feedback.