Yael Finer

Conflict resolution coaching and workshops

All posts

Dec 23, 2020

A new man awaits to be born

The preparation for the 4th class of the Effective Conversations course is difficult for me. I sit in the living room with Eli and share my plans for tomorrow’s class. “I want us to learn how to see reality from other perspectives, get into their shoes,” I say. When we understand that everyone is a […]

Dec 4, 2020

Depolarization

Our world is becoming more and more polarized and I’ve been looking for ways to help bridge the gaps. I hope you find what I’ve discovered useful. Communication challenges I interviewed more than 45 people on how they think and talk about hot topics from all sides of major conflicts. I talked with anti-vaxxers and […]

Nov 24, 2020

He called me a bitch! What would you do?

How should we deal with emotional and toxic people on social media? Should we just discard the conversation? Should we engage in it and try to explain our views to those people? Should we explain to them why they are wrong? What would you have done? A lot of our communication around what’s going on […]

Nov 24, 2020

Engaging for change

Contributed by Andrea Diaz When I read Hemal’s initial tweet, my alarm bells went off. I immediately jumped into a defensive and judgemental state of mind, “who the hell does this guy think he is?”, “he’s just another angry man with opinions and a keyboard”. I felt aggravated that this random man would call my […]

Nov 3, 2020

He wins the conversation but not my heart

A conflict resolution between Trump supporter dad and his socialist daughter. Maya is twenty-eight years old and has a long history of disappointments and a “full belly”* where her dad is concerned. He is conservative, a Trump supporter, economy-oriented, and an information consumer. She is socialist and concerned with social dynamics. For years, their relationship […]

Oct 28, 2020

Lost a friend to vaccination

“What do you do?” Ken asked me. I explained to him that I research how people communicate and think about ‘hot topics’ because the polarization between groups of people in society is getting worse and so many people are losing relationships and family connections over disagreements. He said “OMG! Yael you nailed it, people are […]