It’s Never About the Snowblower

From My Mediation Table to Your Kitchen Table:
Turning Arguments into Real Conversations

If you share a roof, an office, a fence line, or a life with another human being, this book is for you.

Two brothers sit at a mediation table, fighting over eleven hundred dollars and half a snowblower. Within minutes, the machine is forgotten, and thirty winters of silence rise to the surface. The snowblower was never the point.

Lionel Legry takes you into rooms where partners, siblings, coworkers, landlords and tenants finally look past what they’re demanding to what they actually need. You’ll learn:

• The one question that gets beneath any demand
• How to find the off-ramp before a fight escalates
• How to calm down before you speak
• Words that turn blame into a request
• How to listen, and apologize without a “but”

Warm, practical and candid about the author’s own mistakes, this is a guide for anyone facing conflict at home, at work or in the neighborhood, and a companion for those learning to mediate it.

Because it was never about the snowblower. It was always about what lies buried under the snow, and the people standing on it.