Commercial + insurance mediator and arbitrator, Jean Lawler, talks to Natalie Armstrong-Motin, peacemaker and marketing consultant to the resolution industry. Episode highlights include:
To connect with Jean Lawler, follow her on LinkedIn or find her at LawlerADR.com
Links to content mentioned in the show:
To read the full episode transcript, please see the Podcast Website.
Commercial + insurance mediator and arbitrator, Jean Lawler, talks to Natalie Armstrong-Motin, peacemaker and marketing consultant to the resolution industry. Episode highlights include:
To connect with Jean Lawler, follow her on LinkedIn or find her at LawlerADR.com
Links to content mentioned in the show:
To read the full episode transcript, please see the Podcast Website.
[intro music]
JEAN LAWLER: Welcome to the “Tell Me More” Project of the ROADS TO Resolution ~Closure and ~Certainty Podcast. My name is Jean Lawler, and I'm thrilled to be here with you today. As a mediator, I am honored to be invited into other people's lives for a few hours, like all of our lives, shaped by the many roads that brought us to our today, roads leading to the unexpected, and to roads leading to the promise of tomorrow. Join as my guests invite us into their lives sharing snippets from their roads traveled, leaving me to ask, “Tell Me More?”.
And so today, the woman, the person who's going to hopefully tell me more, tell you more is Natalie Armstrong-Motin. In honor of Women's History Month, I think Natalie is a perfect person to be talking to us today. She is a peacemaker extraordinaire, she has supported so many of us worldwide in the dispute resolution business. She is an American, living in France, has lived around the world, and brings a unique perspective to the world of mediation, arbitration, and peacemaking, in general. So joining me from Normandy, France, it is my pleasure and honor to welcome Natalie Armstrong-Motin today, at this episode of “Tell Me More.”
Hello, Natalie.
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Hi, Jean, thanks so much for having me. What a fun and exciting program you’ve got.
JEAN LAWLER: Well thank you, and it's so nice to have you here today. Another fun and exciting person to talk to. [LAUGHTER]
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Thanks, I’m flattered.
JEAN LAWLER: Yeah, well, earned. [LAUGHTER]
So, tell me more. So, let's see, let's start with, you know… Here it is, it’s March 10th 2022. You’re in Normandy France, you've lived around the world, you've had your whole career built on peacemaking and mediation…dispute resolution. Given all the things that are going on in the world today, what could you say, maybe, about how we have such similarities, in spite of all of our differences?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Well, I think, you know, overall I'm really optimistic. You know, I think that much like a family, our human family, our fellow humans, we go through ups and downs, in the same way that we experience those in our workplace, or in our marriage, or with our neighbors, or, you know, in any other way, shape, or form. And so, you know, I liken our situation at this particular moment to a really, rocky stage in an otherwise pretty, you know, pretty stable marriage. But I think that overall, I'm really optimistic, and I think that during Covid we did a really good job of reaching out, one to the other. We did a really good job of pivoting our practices to being online, so that we could still take care of our clients, and parties who were in distress or conflict, and I think that now with the issues that we're facing here in Europe, not too terribly far from where I'm sitting, I see a lot of people communicating, a lot of people helping. At the City Hall just across the street from my house, all of the flagpoles have Ukrainian flags flying on them, and I think that all of these things encourage communication, negotiation, mediation, peacekeeping. And I think that the biggest commonality between all of us as humans is–we just want to live our lives in peace, we just want to be left alone, to love our families and do our jobs, and go about our day to day and I’m, I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic that we'll get back to that soon.
JEAN LAWLER: And I share your hope and optimism on that, as I'm sure would anybody who's listening to this podcast.
So, how did you get into the dispute resolution field, Natalie?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Oh, well, you know, if you and I were in a therapy session, this would be the moment where I say “it’s all my parents’ fault,” [LAUGHTER] and it would be appropriate. I’m a second generation resolutionist. So, a million years ago, back in the, you know, the buggy days, my parents started the Institute for Construction Management and that morphed into the Institute for Conflict Management in West LA, and they asked me to help them market and promote those programs. It was just not a strong suit that either of them had, but they loved the resolution industry and I seconded that. I really, truly believe in our industry, and I love it. So I helped do the administration of those programs and after those, those courses were finished it was always the situation that someone from the class would come into my office and say,
“Okay, now what? Now, now what do I do? How do I, how do I put all of that training into good practice?”
And I initially said “oh you know what, come, let’s go have a coffee, I’ll tell you what you need to do” and off they would go.
But it sort of organically grew into its own thing, and pretty soon I no longer had time to administer those programs, or to do the mediating or the arbitrating that I had a master's in, and marketing other people's practices became more than a full-time job. And now I've got seven people that work for me, and this is all that I do, all day everyday, all over the world and I love it.
JEAN LAWLER: Entrepreneur…every bone, every inch of your being. Right?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Yes, and it’s all my parents’ fault. [LAUGHTER]
JEAN LAWLER: Well, your parents sound wonderful. They led you down a road that many of us are grateful for, or we might not have even met you, or been able to appreciate, or get to know what wonderful things you bring to the world of dispute resolution and the world in general.
You recently, in the last two years, started something that to me would qualify you for a Nobel Prize, but here we are, you're showing the difference that one person can make in this world. Can you tell me about “Will Work For Food: The New Possibilities Hour”?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: I would love to. Will Work For Food is a great passion of mine and it started at the beginning of Covid. And again I'm, you know, way far away from home, and I was watching through VPN some American news, watching all of my fellow Americans queue up, or not all of them, but a good number of them, queue up for assistance at food banks. And one of the things that I learned during Covid is that I had to choose not to let it make me feel more isolated or smaller or more insignificant. I had to become active, and search out intentionally connections with my people, with my mediators, my arbitrators, my peacemakers, my, my people. And so I thought, well, I can't make a difference, I can't just write a check and make it go away. There's not really anything I can do, but maybe what I could do is have a seminar about marketing and promoting your practice, but instead of asking people to pay a tuition for it, I'll give it for free and ask them to make a donation to a food bank.
And this idea was going through my mind and I called some of my, our, colleagues and said,
“What do you think about this idea?” and they said “Ooo, love it and sign me up, I’ll do one too.”
And it just became its own thing, and you know it's like the old Prell commercials, if you're old enough to remember the seventies or a portion of the seventies …You know, I tell two people, and those two people tell two people, and those two people tell two people…And now, we've recorded 106 episodes, we've raised more than a quarter million dollars in donations to food banks around the world. We have one of the most impressive list of speakers and presenters. I’ve got two amazing moderators–you, and Jeff Kichaven. We’ve made an impact that I really didn't expect that we would be making. It's just grown to be something positive and remarkable and I’m absolutely passionate about it.
So, every Thursday morning, if you’re interested, go to willworkforfood.news and 8 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Eastern Time, you can join us for a live program. Participate, donate. You know, make your world better, make somebody else's day a little bit easier.
JEAN LAWLER: And all that is so true. The programs, the breath of the programs, the diversity of the perspectives that people bring to the World on all these different things that are talked about. It's amazing. It's…There's nothing like it, I don't think. You can't go find a webinar anywhere that would give you the…Oh what would you say? You know, leave you with feeling fascinated and informed and open your mind to something you may never have thought of. In fact, you know, I use that, that little phrase when I talk to people, “feed your mind, while you're feeding the world,” and that's really what it is. Today's program was about Indian law. I learned things about the American Indian community, the history, etcetera, that I never knew. It was fascinating.
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: And every Thursday we have a program like that. Every Thursday without fail we have a speaker that comes on that, you know, teaches us something, shows us something, shares something with us, you know, provides us something insightful, intelligent. It's just been the most amazing two years worth of, of programs that I've, I've ever seen in our industry.
JEAN LAWLER: And I’d like to make sure that people know that by going to that website, the willworkforfood.news website, they can also watch videos of prior presentations and on your YouTube channel, LinkedIn, etcetera. So, if you haven't been involved yet there’s still ways to not just get involved but to watch a video that you may find interesting. And then I'll put the plug in here, Natalie, and then make a donation of what, in whatever amount, if you want, to a food bank of your choice. That would be great.
So Natalie, one last thing on the food banks. About how many meals do you think the more than $250,000 that you know about people having donated, because everybody doesn't tell you how much they donated, about how many meals do you think that has served?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Well, so when we do the research online, it isn't just your dollar that, that, you know, is being put to a meal. They put your dollar with everybody else's dollar and then the food banks use that buying power to really leverage what they can provide for the consumers in their food bank. So most often we’re told that a food bank can turn $1 into somewhere between 8 and 10 meals, right, depending on their buying power, their ability to leverage that money, which means that we've provided–that we know about–more than two million meals to people who really need this kind of assistance and that’s amazing. And so, before, you know, before we take a whole lot of credit, it's all of the people who support those food banks who deserve that credit. And we have a lot of people, Jean, who say to me, “I don't have an extra dollar, but I donated an hour.” If you don't have a dollar, that's okay, we understand. You can donate an hour. If you don't have an hour to donate, you can share these programs with your colleagues and encourage other people to watch and grow the awareness in that way. So there's always something that each of us can do.
JEAN LAWLER: Yeah, that’s for sure, and but for your brainchild and getting this started, the speakers who are so willing and wonderful to give of their time and talent, the attendees who, some of whom, who come every week without fail, all the attendees over time who’ve donated…And it's, it's just a thank you, big thank you for that. You're really making a difference in the world. So…Collectively, we should all get that Nobel Peace Prize, right?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: I was going to say this is not a one-woman show by any stretch of the imagination. This is, this is, a collective of really good humans doing really good work.
JEAN LAWLER: Absolutely. So, Natalie, let’s go back to your work, using that there as an intro to that part of it. What do you find, or how do you see a difference maybe in the mediation world today, compared to a few years ago, to what you would expect to see in the future? And I'm not just talking about the US or Europe, but just on a global basis. You know like with “Will Work For Food,” we have people that we’ve met thanks to that–calling in from Africa, Australia, you know, truly global. So, you being a very global person, what is it that you see on a global basis?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Well, I think, you know, I haven't been around that long, only about 27 years, and things have changed a little bit in some respects over this quarter century and other things remain the same. and I think that you know originally when I was in LA Superior Court in the early 90s, the old joke it was that “ADR” stood for “alarming drop in revenue.” [LAUGHTER] And, you know, I mean, it was an uphill battle to convince people that, you know, we were doing good, we were helping people, this was the right thing for lots of different cases. And in fact, for any of those cases that weren’t sort of precedent-setting it was more likely that we could help them, you know, the courts. And in courts where we were being pushed up against our filing deadlines it became imperative that we step up and provide our services.
So, that was how we sort of started out. It was…We were sort of accepted, grudgingly. Now, twenty-seven years later what I see more and more often is that not only are we being used intelligently and appropriately to help clients or parties find a durable, reasonable resolution to their conflict or dispute. But now, and I think in bigger part thanks to Covid, oddly, more and more corporations, municipalities, large entities, and individuals are using our, our skills, our verbal judo abilities to help them be proactive, to help them be preventative, to help them not hire us as the arbitrator, to help them have intelligent, appropriate conversations before things get so heated that they become a conflict or a dispute. And I think that that trend is a really, really, lovely side effect of, you know, what has otherwise been kind of a difficult two years for us. But that really has sped up the way that people use us, in a preventative and a proactive way. And I think that that trend is going to stay with us for, hopefully, ever and ever, because that’s really good use of our skills.
JEAN LAWLER: If someone was just wanting to start out as a mediator, you know, whether they're a young person and they're coming through university or law school, and maybe they're not a lawyer, maybe they are, or they’re, you know, a senior partner level person who's looking for a second career, or someone mid-career in the legal field, or the…Well just so many fields, you know, the employment area… all.. any, any field that wanted to get into mediation, for example, what words of advice would you have for them?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: The single common denominator amongst all of my most successful clients is really not difficult at all, to–when you think about it–and that is that those individuals view themselves first and foremost as an entrepreneur, as a business person. They happen to be a service provider in the resolution industry. And it's not a word game, it's a mindset. And so those individuals who do best in our industry–now, that’s if what you're looking for is to do business in our industry, if you're looking to be philanthropic and volunteer your mediation services that's an entirely other conversation–but for those folks who want to build a business, build a practice in this industry, it is imperative that you think of yourself first and foremost as a business person, as an entrepreneur. So those people are reading business and marketing books, books about entrepreneurship, they are listening to those podcasts, they are attending those seminars. They still keep up to date with what’s happening in our industry world-wide, but they are always first and foremost a savvy business person.
And if that's not you naturally, because for some of us it's just not our first language, that's okay. Those are skills that you can develop. It does take a little bit of time but you can develop those skills in the same way that we learn about any other thing. Right? And if you don't want to learn or acquire those skills, then you definitely need to outsource that to someone who can help you with it, because just sort of fumbling around attempting to, you know, to cobble together a practice takes a really, really long time. It's frustrating, it’s not fun, it's not fulfilling, and I see too many really good people just leave our industry because they didn't quite get all of those entrepreneurial foundation pieces laid appropriately.
JEAN LAWLER: Well said. I like especially how you said “it's not easy.” You know, some people think that you just step out, tell people what you're doing and, you know, the work will come in and, off you are to the races, but that is not the way…
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Yeah.
JEAN LAWLER: …anything works really, because it is a business and like any business you need to do the the legwork first, the skillset, etcetera, and then take it from there. Yeah, yeah.
Do you see any particular areas for the future of mediations, for example, for someone who wanted to get into mediation, areas where there might be more need than others?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: I think generally most of us historically have been hired once we have had a substantial career somewhere else. And so, you know, again, it’s an old joke, but for most of us we had to have gray hair or no hair to be considered a credible authority, right, to serve as a mediator or arbitrator. And that’s simply not the case any longer, especially when it comes to emerging tech or new industries. Right? And I think that in those instances, in particular, we want someone who's younger.
So for example, I went to university with an electronic, with an electric typewriter. If you’ve got a case that requires, you know, high-tech language, you probably want someone who was born with an iPhone in their hand, not an electric typewriter. Because that's just not something that I’ve been able to really get. It’s not something that my generation just had. Now lots of us can overcome that. So I know for example, you’re CIPP approved in the US, but you have to go to a lot of trainings. That takes…That’s a rigorous program to be able to get that assignation. So if you're someone my age or older you have to work really hard to get there. For the younger folks, I think it's a little more natively available to them, and so I think that for those folks that's the kind of thing that's going to be more and more appropriate.
The other kinds of cases, those will exist always and forever, but anything that’s new or emerging, that requires a different personality and a different mindset, and those things are going to be more prevalent, coming up, because we're seeing a lot of innovation happen, really quickly. So those are always good things. But specializing is, is definitely now just the way that it’s going to be. We live in a compound-complex world, and if you don't specialize you're really missing out on some of the good cases.
JEAN LAWLER: You know, this is Women’s History month, the month of March. Is there a particular woman that served as an inspiration to you? A woman in history, alive, or not alive, anyone you would want to mention?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: A lot of women deserve credit, a lot of women. I grew up in a kitchen with five generations of women laughing and telling stories and teaching lessons, so I grew up with those women feeding families and taking Christmas baskets and leaving them on front porches, you know, in the dark of night. So I grew up with some really good female role models. Women who said,
“You know Cinderella's just a character in a book, you know that, right?” [LAUGHTER] “You’re not waiting for prince charming. You go get an education. You can handle this, yourself. You can change your own tire. You can…You’ve got this. You know, you don't have to be rescued. You're not a damsel in distress.” And I really appreciated that education.
In this industry, aside from my, my parents serving a tremendous good, you know, good example for me…When I first joined the Southern California Mediation Association board it was Esther Bluel who had such a positive impact on me and my career because she never faltered to say,
“You're doing a good job. You're doing, you're doing good work. That's fine. That's a good idea, that's the right way. Keep going, keep going.”
And she was such a healthy quiet voice in the background always encouraging, always saying,
“Yeah, absolutely. Yes, that's possible. Sure you can do that. Yeah, give that a try. I bet that’ll work out really well. Keep going with that.”
To have those kinds of voices, you know, right behind you I, I think is imperative, not just for women but for all humans, but, that, yeah, Esther Bluel, she did a tremendous thing for me as a mentor.
JEAN LAWLER: Well those lessons of Esther’s we can all take. Like you say, not just for women, but for all human beings we can all take to heart and it's wonderful to be on the receiving end and then it's equally wonderful to be on the giving end of those. Yeah. Well that’s fascinating, thank you.
Your business, Natalie–Marketing Resolution. Do you want to tell us where we can find you online, or on YouTube, or LinkedIn, or wherever you are?
NATALIE ARMSTRONG-MOTIN: Sure you can always just Google my name, Natalie Armstrong-Motin. My last name is French, it's M-O-T-I-N. I have to remember how to say it in English, M-O-T-I-N, M-O-T-I-N [PRONOUNCED IN FRENCH]. You can always just Google me. You can go to my website howtomarketmymediationpractice.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on YouTube. Send me a question, I’m always happy to help, always, always happy to answer a question.
JEAN LAWLER: Well that's fantastic and then, thank you so much, Natalie. It's been a pleasure having you here today, you could “Tell Me More” for hours and I'd be fascinated, but we're coming to the end of our time, so thank you again for being here and I'll look forward to seeing you next Thursday on “Will Work For Food” and “The New Possibilities Hour” and we can take it from there.
And for everybody who's listening, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or on my website, lawleradr.com. It's a pleasure to be with you today, it’s a pleasure to host this podcast, and I'll look forward to talking with you next time. Have a great day. Bye.
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