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Understanding Mediation Requirements In England In 2026 By Ruth Schocken Katz , family and divorce mediator based at Camden Therapy in NW London. If you are separating or divorcing and are considering court action relating to children or finances, you may have been told you need to attend a MIAM.  But what is a MIAM?   What Does MIAM Stand For?   MIAM stands for Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting.  It is a private meeting between you and a mediator .  It is not jo

Holding nuanced and complex thoughts and feelings is often a challenge. People seek validation externally as the discomfort of "not knowing" becomes too hard to bear. At a time when information is a few clicks away, attentions spans shrinking and gratification harder to resist, we have to choose. This creates polarisation and a tendency to see the world in black or white. Our ability to hold complexity and nuance is therefore reduced.  Things are hardly ever black or white. T

Why is it so hard to make a decision? Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you are just unable to see the right choice? What would it feel like to find a clearer way out of a dilemma? This coaching snippet shows a way of clarifying the process of decision making and finding trust in oneself so that one can move forward. Having to make a choice is often paralysing. When offered a sweet in a shop, my daughter used to get herself so tangled in indecisiveness, she would

What would it feel like to not be limited to the one version of yourself you think is true? Booksmart (2019, Dir. Olivia Wilde) is a wonderfully witty film about two friends as they embark on their final night before graduation: their last opportunity to be both good students and “party hard”. The film is what we call a “rites of passage” film, or a coming of age story, and it made me think about those two terms and what they mean. Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn D

Do you ever feel like you are not growing at work anymore? That you are treading water and not sure why you’re where you find yourself? Being in our comfort zone can be reassuring, but after a while it can begin to make us feel like we are coasting: bored, uninspired and dissatisfied. We lose the sense of our purpose and that quickly leads to all sorts of problems: brain fog, difficulty with deadlines, lack of productivity and difficult relationships to name a few. In this co

(Spoiler alert) How do we manage the tension between how we see ourselves, and how others see us? The Banshees of Inisherin is a fable about friendship taking place on a remote little (fictitious) island off the coast of Ireland in 1923. Pádraic is a dairy farmer, living with his sister in a modest cottage with a selection of animals he looks after. Pádraic is a sweetly unambitious man, happy with the simple pleasures of the company of his miniature donkey Jenny, and his dai

I often say that coaching works on aligning our inside world with our outside world. When we live with this alignment, we feel we have integrity. When we don’t, we can often feel strange, bad, fake or like a fraud. Our outside world is often influenced by lots of narratives that come from other people, and they are the ones that make us jar if somewhere deep inside we know we want a different story. Living in this alignment feels good to us. But as Bob found out in this conve

When faced with multiple action plans, clients I work with often feel they must choose the right one for themselves. They feel that if they don't choose they will be stretched too thin, that people will criticise them. Sometimes they feel it means they are lazy, or indecisive. However, usually and naturally, people are interested in more than one thing. And the debate about which one to follow is impossible to resolve, because they want to follow all of them! In this conversa

Shame is a universal human experience, yet most of us haven’t been taught how to integrate it and process it when it bubbles up inside us. Unsurprisingly, shame, in its different manifestations, is a recurring thread in my coaching practice. The three-part series, Time, is an immersive experience that reveals some of the underlying machinations of shame, as well as the many representations of men’s attempts at processing it. As such, it can offer us a removed, yet profound

Through the Coaching Lens: The Lost Daughter

We all have stories around work and how we work best. We often need external conditions to be right: our mood to be a certain way, to find peace and quiet, or create it and produce. Often, these conditions are really stories that we have been telling ourselves, that we can let go of. In this conversation I worked with a client to playfully let go of such a story, and allow her to surprise herself. Often adopting a more playful adventurous frame of mind is easier when in conve

Setting boundaries in a relationship can be tricky. On one hand, there’s a sense of togetherness, a unit, and on the other, two individuals, separately navigating this togetherness. People hold different beliefs about the extent to which a union should be manifested in everyday life. Having held on to a story of a romantic relationship being a set-up in which things are always done together, my client is finding out that dependence and independence are not mutually exclusive

Or the Pen as the Extension of the Body, and our Redeeming Sword. (Spoiler alert) In the last episode of I May Destroy You , Mikaela Coel wraps up this nuanced, free, mesmerising tale of coercion, freedom, will, and agency. Throughout the series Coel describes the victim of sexual assault in every nuanced possibility — from unaware participation, to full blown assault, through the murky doubt about one’s own role in this humiliating, life-robbing experience. That same nuanced

Seeing behaviours and actions of others, and of ourselves, as binary, is often a way to justify our feelings or thoughts, especially when we’re in conflict. One is opposite the other, and so are our actions, or how we feel about them. In conflict, we often forget to allow complexity in ourselves and whomever it is we are facing. Remembering complexity, and allowing seemingly contradicting emotions or thoughts to co-exist is allowing ourselves to be human. In this snippet, I u

We all experience situations of conflict or disagreement, where we often try hard to be accurate and clear, only to discover that we are still misunderstood and misinterpreted. We simply don’t always know how to say things or even what to say. In my work, I often see people’s tendency to communicate ‘bottom lines’ and treat words as a ‘shop window’ - a representation of ourselves. However, seeing our words as that means that they have to be polished, exact, clear, and true, w

We have all experienced disappointment or even a sense of betrayal from someone we thought we could trust. This experience is often painful, draining, and very damaging to the relationship. We tend to see trust as something we put “in” people, something we give them and want to receive in return. In this conversation, I offer a reframe of the idea of trust being something that we lose once we are betrayed. What if trust is endless, that is forever within us? What if no one ca

“Don’t believe everything you think.” (- Attributed to many) Bridging the gap between the stories we tell ourselves and reality creates an a-ha moment of awakening. This conversation illustrates the moment that a client is suddenly aware of the narrative that runs in his head, and the gap between it, and what is actually happening — aka “reality”. Becoming more aware of our tendency to tell those stories and their presence in our heads means that we can stop being controlled

INT. DAY. OFFICE DESK We are talking online and ZARA is talking about her sense of being attacked from all directions. Dealing with emotional trauma, as well as pressures around schedules, and her team members' personal stresses, she is feeling overwhelmed, and like nothing she does is construed correctly. ME What makes you think they misunderstand you? ZARA They all think I am being dramatic, and making myself the centre of it all. When actually I am trying to tread careful

INT. KITCHEN TABLE. MORNING I am sitting at my desk in front of the computer talking to JULES who is 3000 miles and 2 time zones away. Although speaking online is now a new Corona-time reality, with JULES it is our norm as she is based in NYC. She is filling me in with great detail on all that she is having to deal with, in lockdown with her family around her constantly. ME From the way you're speaking I want to ask you, what is it that you feel you need right now? JULES thin

INT. LIVING ROOM. LATE MORNING ANA and I sit in the living-room, tea cups in our hands. It's raining outside. We've been talking for about 40 minutes. Checking in on the body, and where ANA feels the tension when we talk about what she has brought in today, she takes a deep breath, and sighs. ANA I can't meditate. I can't empty my head of thoughts. ME What is the purpose of emptying your head of thoughts? ANA Isn't that what meditation for? Isn't that what meditation is? ME