[Advice]The 3-Fold Path to Self-Awareness

The more work we do through training others to get in touch with themselves, the more and more surprised we are by how few people in organizations are in touch with themselves.

There are three pieces to self-awareness:

The ability to be vulnerable—which is typically translated as “the ability to be wrong,” but that’s a misnomer and faulty definition. Being vulnerable means knowing when to show your heart…and when to keep it hidden.
The ability to be authentic—which is usually confused with being vulnerable, but that’s a surface understanding. Being authentic means being able to let down your emotional guards enough to “make a fool of” yourself, and to be able to accept the consequences of what that means.
The ability to be transparent—which is usually transposed into the question asked most often in our trainings: “Do I really have to tell my [insert name of group I’d rather not be transparent with here] everything that I do?” No. But in order to become self-aware, the first step toward being emotionally literate, a person has to be comfortable with honesty and beyond the crippling effects of shame.

Without attaining those three pieces of self-awareness–vulnerability, authenticity, and transparency–getting to emotional literacy will be impossible for any individual.

And in the organization of today—and the future—emotional literacy, spearheaded with self-awareness, will be the trait of leadership that separates organizations which thrive from those that merely survive.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Hard Thing About Now Its Too Late

The savvy peace builder is either all in—or not.

But, at a certain point, financial realities take over and the rent must be paid, or the electric bill, and the savvy peace builder must make the choice to make making peace a side hustle.

Now, typically the word hustle comes with negative connotations, but mostly it should be associated with little sleep and much success.

But, when the main work (the 40 hour grind) takes over more and more time and energy from the hustle that matters (the peacemaking pursuit) the savvy peace builder will sometimes kill the side hustle by dividing time away from it even further.

This is how many entrepreneurial ventures end, dissected and subdivided under the scalpel of the 40 to 60 hour work week and the “sure” thing that brings security, a steady paycheck and fewer uncomfortable conversations with spouses and children.

The tough decision—the hard thing about this hard thing—is that diversification of focus and talents leads to more work not less; but making the decision to keep it to one-and-a-half hustles makes all the difference between “man I’m glad I lost sleep to build this project” and “man, I wish I’d taken the time when I had it to build this project. But now it’s too late.”

Now, it’s too late.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Percieved Urgency of the Actual Urgency of Mindfulness

There’s actual urgency and perceived urgency.

Actual urgency is a chemical spill on the shop floor. Or a heart attack that a midlevel manager has on a Friday afternoon.

Perceived urgency is everything else.

One of the main struggles that people have with time management is balancing perceived urgency versus actual urgency and a big part of the issue focuses around being here. Now.

Thinks about that.

Being here now is the essence of mindfulness.

Deeply integrated and linked to meditation, mindfulness requires individuals in an organization to really balance the priorities of someone else’s actual perceived urgency, with the demands of the moment.

And the next moment.

And the next.

Mindfulness seems like a new wave thing, in all of the business journels and on LinkedIn, but it has long been the purview of people of a spiritual bent.

But, to be realistic, we must admit that if an individual works forty to eighty hours a week with other people, there better be a way to decompress and unbundle actual urgency versus perceived urgency.

-Peace Be With You All-

Seduced by the ZMOT

There is a zero moment of truth.

Google researched this a few years ago, and the upshot of the idea is, that, due to the amount of content we are consuming on a daily basis, the modern Western consumer has so many more options to try and research before they buy.

There are other elements that tie into this, including the brand being what customers says that it is and advice to brands on how to avoid interruptive advertising, but the idea remains relevant for us in the conflict fields.

For practitioners and participants in the process of conflict, the nature of change and attaining the skills to be successful at managing conflict and change, there is a zero moment of truth as well.

We talked a little bit about that in this post here, but it remains indicative of our modern day that the zero moment of truth—the moment at which we decide to pre-shop our notions, read and get advice from others, watch a conflict video on line, or ask questions of other individuals—for conflict practitioners, is a moment of great impact.

But for participants in conflict, there seems to be a dearth of materials and resources, leading to the ultimate moment of truth, where conflict participants attempt resolution themselves, and may succeed, fail or just surrender.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 02.17.2015

Making a mistake is not that hard.

As a matter of fact, we do it all the time as human beings.

But the importance of mistakes, failures, or only accomplishing part of our goals, is not always acknowledged positively because, we fear vulnerability as adults.

In the business and corporate world, we still give lip service to the idea of the importance of failing, but the majority of us still work in systems, dedicated to the process—and following it to never fail.

I fail all the time.

I am also struggling to be vulnerable and authentic in this blog, when I present and facilitate and when I work through interviews with guests on my podcast.

But I’m not there yet.

And yet, like many of you out there, I am still making mistakes.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Abstraction of Focus

Time, much like values, beliefs, emotions and even the intellect, is an abstraction. In the agricultural past, humanity measured the passage of time by the sun, the moon and the changing of the seasons.

Before industrialization commoditized time as a thing that could be measured in finite amounts, European and Asian explorers took to the seas navigating, first by the stars, then by the clock.

But in our post-industrial world, where everyone is engaged in the cult of busyness, managing the abstraction of time has become a daunting task. This leads many of us to feel inadequate, unfocused and out of balance.

Attaining focus is one of the three key elements in the battle to manage time, followed by mindfulness and managing distractions that come in the form of other people.

Focus and attention—from a psychological perspective—are getting scarcer in our post-modern world, rather than time, which remains a constant. Recognizing the fact of scarcity of focus in our world and ruthlessly pursuing the attaining of focus is worth attempting to cultivate for long-term internal and external success.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Multitasking Myth

Multitasking is a myth for many, many reasons, but the one fact that is worthy of focus, is that managing multiple tasks at the same time is exactly that–a mistaken management tecnique that nueroscience has debunked.

Task management is not multitasking. The human mind can only really focus on one thing at a time, biologically and psychologically, we are wired to be narrowly focused.

This is what got us, as a species, from the Great Plains of Africa, hunting wild game in coordinated groups, to managing customer service departments with irate customers on the phone at major corporations.

And in a world of seven second attention spans, and stimulus reward systems based in electronic tools that update with vibrations, beeps and blinking lights, believing in the efficacy of the multitasking myth is mentally and emotionally deadly.

-Peace Be With You All-

A Distinction With A Difference

The savvy conflict consultant isn’t afraid of the hardship of the “beans and rice” life that has to be lived while building their peace building project.

They aren’t afraid to bootstrap their way to success.

And we’re not talking about millionaire status here, we’re actually talking about making enough money in this economy to pay the mortgage (or rent), keep the lights on and feed themselves and their family regularly.

If the savvy peace builder is bootstrapping, that’s the true difference between them, and the peace builder who bets it all on the market with one big shot—and either takes a loan out to fund their project, or tries to develop a funding scheme involving other parties.

The thing to remember is that bootstrapping your project allows you to waste less psychic, emotional, psychological and even financial energy on the risk that doesn’t matter (the money) to focus all of your energies on the risk that do matter (building peace in a broken world).

-Peace Be With You All-

“I Don’t Believe You. This Stuff Can’t Really Work.”

…yes, it actually does.

but you have to want it to work more than you want whatever technique you are currently employing to “resolve” your situation.

And, if you like what you’re getting, then no amount of engagement, active listening, or prompting toward empathy is going to move your needle.

Other people can only take you 99% of the way. Going that last 1% (or first 1%, depending upon where you’re standing) is up to you.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

(D) x (V) x (F) > R…

….where, of course, the R (Resistance) is a constant.

When was the last time that dissatisfaction, a vision for change and quantifiable first steps were greater than R in your organization?

Conflict as a process is change.

But people in organizations become so comfortable with the outcomes of the conflict process—that is disputes—and their outcomes—that is dysfunction—that R remains a constant.

Think back to your immediate family.

How long has R been around about conflicts that matter?

Now, in an organization, where familial ties do not bind, how much stronger—and constant—is R when it comes to real, meaningful innovation?

You know, the kind that involves people, not software…

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
About.me: http://about.me/Jesan_Sorrells
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/
Website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com