Getting Wisdom From There to Here

The thing about getting to the resolution of a conflict situation is that it is a long road, from the initiation of a conflict to a resolution of a conflict.

And since it’s a long road, the bumps, the twists and the turns are what interests us as spectators. Those of us in the audience are here to witness the journey, not the outcome.

Except: When all the audience is interested in hearing about—or giving their limited attention to—is a boiled down summation of the process, with a list of steps for how to get to end and be done, then there is little about experiencing (or explaining) the moments along the road that can hold the audience’s interest.

The path of conflict requires those of us who have been along the path to provide wisdom—and not shortcuts—to encourage and inspire people to walk the same path. And to stick with walking it when the outcome seems in doubt.

The bumps along the road include opportunities to attain the following traits and skills (in alphabetical order):

Candor

Clarity

Courage

Deep competence

Emotional Intelligence

Forgiveness

Grace

Humility

Indomitable Spirit

Perseverance

Resiliency

Satisfaction (from a job well done)

Self-awareness

Self-control

Wisdom

There will always be adversity. You will always have conflicts, trials, and tribulations. Be of good cheer, and show others the path.

Because there ain’t no app, shortcut, or listicle, for getting the wisdom from walking the path.

Caring Costs

Caring costs.

It costs to be empathetic to your employees’ emotional needs.

It costs to be mindful of the non-verbal messages you’re role modeling.

It costs to be engaged all the time in the active act of actively listening.

It costs to develop connections that gain you nothing in the short-term.

It costs to care when that caring may not be “enough” for the other party when what was really desired by the other party was a transactional act, not a relational one.

Caring costs.

But what else are you going to invest your emotional energy in?

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 6 – Randy Shain

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 6 – Randy Shain, Author, 173 Pages Every College Student Must Read, Entrepreneur, Speaker, Mentor & Coach

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #6 - Randy Shain

[powerpress]

Dear 2017 Graduates of High School and College-

Congratulations, you have come to the end of a long, traditional, mostly academic journey, whose steps and path were mainly decided for you by other people.

Now, upon graduation, you are in charge of your own decisions. And, where you may wind up at the end of the path known as your life.

I have been thinking a lot about your path, future conflict, and where you might wind up as adults.

I will not lie to you: Your seeming multiplicity of choices about when, how and why to start on your path really comes down to one deeply black and white choice. No matter what you have been told by professors, faculty members, or parents, the choice really comes down to answering unequivocally and thoroughly one black and white question:

Do you want to work or not?

Your work is not your job.

Your work is also not your passion.

I am not going to write here and tell you to “follow your passion.” That is often given, facile, advice provided to you by well-meaning, but misguided, people who operate organizations that may seek to hire you post-graduation. But more likely than not, they won’t.

But more likely than not, they won’t.

When you answer the much more interesting and pivotal question about whether or not to work in your own mind and heart, and to your own satisfaction, then you can make all of the other decisions that will cascade dividends throughout your entire life.

Let me paint you a picture:

I decided after the first ten years of being in the working world after college, that I wasn’t going to work a job—any job—another day in my life.

Think about that.

Now, make no mistake, I work at my business.

I work at my corporate training gigs.

I also work when I advise clients, take them through the sales process and get profit at the end.

I work when I write blog posts, do research, create videos and even do my audio podcast.

Like the one right here I did today with Randy Shain, author of 173 Pages Every College Student Must Read. But go get it after you read the rest of this.

In the traditional understanding of “labor,” both the Marxist and the Capitalist have it wrong: Labor is something that you can do for no money. And that labor—the labor that you decide needs no compensation—will assuredly be the labor that reflects your truest passions, desires, interests and goals.

And—trust me when I write this—money soon follows.

Your job (current or future) is not your work, college and high school graduates. Your job is merely a series of tasks that you accomplish in an organization in the pursuit of someone else’s passion.

This does not excuse you from performing in said job with excellence. As a matter of fact, it is your moral and ethical duty to perform any job task that you take on in the pursuit of working another’s passion, with excellence and moral verve.

At this point, you may be thinking, “This guy is crazy. First, he tells me that he’s not going to tell me to pursue my passion. Then he tells me something that sounds remarkably similar to that advice that I hear very often.”

Let me be even clearer: Many people, from James Altucher to Tim Ferriss talk a lot about “choosing yourself.” This is the idea that no one—not a boss, a parent, an authority figure in government or anybody else—can truly provide your life with security and meaning anymore. The rules, the safety net, and the promises of the Industrial Revolution are dead and gone. They represented a brief, flashpoint in world history and humanity is gradually and fundamentally, moving away from those promises, all the way from cradle to grave. What this means is you have to pick yourself and do the hard work of actually building yourself up. You have to research and employ the tools that are laying around everywhere for free on the Internet—but that you haven’t been fully integrated into for the last 22 or so years—to develop yourself and your truly meaningful work.

This is the work of your life that you have to choose to do. Or not

Yes, answering, truly answering, the question about whether or not you really want to work, means that you will have to commit to doing two—or more—things at once. You will have to delay gratification, show grit and persistence in the face of rejection, and preserve empathy and remain courageous, in the face of dismissal, passivity, and societal apathy.

School didn’t teach you how to deal with this.

Work—in the way that people traditionally think about it—won’t teach how to deal with this either.

The church and your volunteer civic life may have gotten close to teaching you these lessons.

These fine line distinctions that come from committing to one choice and doggedly sticking to it. But I can guarantee you that the rich, meaningful life for which you are searching, will become available to you if you answer this one question firmly, unequivocally and then act on it in the same fashion.

Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about all of those banks and student loan debt that you’ve piled up while dutifully learning and regurgitating the meaningless lessons of a dead, industrialized system. There are plenty of smart people out here who are tap dancing as fast as they can to undo the banking system, which is the second to the last edifice of the old Industrial system.

That is their passion.

Their true work.

If you really want to do something about your debt, go get a job working at one of these organizations.

They are growing, they are hungry and no one sees them coming.

So.

Do you want to work or not?

Connect with Randy in all the ways that you can below and click on the player above to listen to his thoughts on all of this:

Randy Shain on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randy.shain.7

Randy Shain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-shain-68b03010/

One on One Mentors Website: http://www.oneononementors.com/about/

One on One Mentors Blog: https://www.facebook.com/oneononecollegementors

One on One Mentors on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oneononementors

An Academic Question

The question that academics should be asking (and answering) is this one: “What value do I add to a college students’ experience in a world where information is just a Google search away?”

The answer to this question requires academics to admit, out loud, that research may not be the best way to add value to a students’ experience in the wider world.

The answer to this question requires academics to admit, out loud, that the systemized expansion of the administrative class in colleges and universities may be a value subtraction rather than a value-add for students.

The answer to this question requires academics to adopt a posture that ensures that acquiring tenure is not about research that no one reads, publishing in a few august journals that can’t be accessed via Google, and then maybe teaching some classes.

The answer to this question requires academics to position themselves as true advocates of student learning, rather than giving lip service to the thought.

The answer to this question reduces class sizes, increases educational quality (higher education, that is…there are other questions to answer for K-12) and reduces the impact of the administrative class—and renders opaque the ‘black box’ of administrative decisions.

The answer to this question allows real, lifetime, impactful learning to occur inside of the institutions that we all know and love. Learning that becomes less about lecturing and information transfer (that’s what Google and Youtube are for) and becomes more about coaching, encouraging and watering minds.

There are a few academics who are asking—and answering—this question, but not nearly enough, not nearly loud enough, not nearly often enough, to bring the genuine change that students—both now and in the future—will need to meet the challenges of an ever more confusing 21^st century.

What’s on Offer

The thing that’s on offer—the thing that’s being negotiated—is rarely the thing that we are fighting over.

Our conflicts rarely get close to the core truth of the issues needing to be resolved, which is why management of a recurring conflict situation is a better posture toward conflict than one of trying to persist in getting to a resolution.

The thing that we are fighting over—the thing that should be on offer—must be sold, managed, persuaded, and packaged for other people’s consumption in the way that they want it to be addressed.

Not the way you want it to be addressed.

This core truth is what unites marketing and conflict management. Human beings like being persuaded, marketed to, and talked to, in very specific ways, and if you violate conventions in the pursuit of getting to a deeper truth, you run several risks, but the biggest ones are as follows:

Human beings like being persuaded, marketed to, and talked to, in very specific ways. And if you violate stated (and unstated) social, moral, ethical, and philosophical conventions in the pursuit of getting to a deeper truth, you run several risks, but the biggest ones are as follows:

Being unheard.

Being ignored.

Being unfairly (or fairly) maligned.

Being marginalized when another more persuasive party comes along.

The answer to the question of “What’s on offer?” is the equally compelling question “What’s the truth of what we are fighting over?”

Small Moments

It appears that the large conflict situations in life are the ones that matter the most.

Death

Divorce

Job loss

Personal and professional disappointments

But the reality is, the small moments that appear to matter the least, are the ones that create the grit and resilience to survive the crucible of the larger moments, when the pressure is enormous.

The pressure to behave unethically.

The pressure to surrender a critical position.

The pressure to sacrifice long-held principles for short-term gains.

The pressure to avoid losses that appear insurmountable—in the emotional present.

Recognizing that managing the small moment of conflict matters more than anticipating how you’re going to manage the larger moments (should they come) is a huge advantage in a work world of shifting priorities.

Four traits to focus on growing, in the small moments:

Gaining self-awareness.

Refining your story.

Connecting with other people by growing empathy.

Giving yourself a break.

Focus on learning and absorbing the lessons from dealing with the small stuff, not to obsess over those lessons, but to allow those small interactions to prepare you for the next large conflict.

Feedback You Let In

There are two kinds of feedback: constructive and negative.

Constructive feedback serves to grow another human being. Constructive feedback serves to provide examples and metaphors that tell a story that can resonate with another party.

Negative feedback serves to limit growth, hem in development, and ensure that the status quo doesn’t change too much. Negative feedback employs snark and cynicism to score rhetorical points but not to tell a story that resonates with the person hearing the feedback.

Negative feedback takes the posture and attitude that a relationship is merely transactional and that neither party owes each other much more than maybe a good time.

Constructive feedback is always oriented toward tomorrow; oriented toward realigning minds and growth toward relationship and development.

Be careful which form of feedback you’re encouraging on your team.

And which form of feedback you’re allowing in your mind and heart.

Systems Unravel

Human beings built many (if not all) of the systems we are surrounded by every day.

Flawed, replaceable, myopic, visionary, human beings.

Language systems.

Monetary systems.

Housing systems.

Legal systems.

Travel systems.

Resource allocation systems.

Organizational systems.

Cultural systems.

Religious systems.

There’s nothing inherent in our DNA that drives us to organize into groups, create systems, and slowly, over time, glacially chip away at an issue or concern until; it is rendered irrelevant or impotent.

And since there’s nothing inherent in our DNA about any of the design or architecting of any of these systems, it should be easy for us to replace them with something else.

After all, human beings made the systems, human beings should be able to unmake them.

But individuals often get into internal conflicts with ourselves when there is friction between the systems we serve in (and have built on) and our inner desires, drives, and motivations.

And when enough individuals experience enough internal friction, all that is required to spark the change that we need to replace these seemingly irreplaceable systems, is someone bravely asserting that:

“Human beings made these systems. Human beings can unmake them.”

Belief and hope battle with the need for security and the fear of the unknown in the dark heart of man. When our systems are viewed as sacrosanct, we are unable to ask the hard questions of them, and we are unable to instigate the hard conflicts that are necessary to make the changes that need to happen.

Systems only seem Teutonic until they are unmade by the very same human hands that built them in the first place.

Adding Value

Value is a loaded term.

What do you value?
Why do you value it?
What does the person next to you value?
Why do they value what they value?

When we aren’t curious about the answers to those questions, we stymie (and in some cases, block totally) our efforts to manage conflicts effectively.

We also stymie (and in some cases, block totally) our efforts to connect with others through the process of conflict.

Both acts—the management and the connection—matter more for getting to an outcome that you want due to embarking upon the process of conflict than anything else you might do.

By the way, managing values-based conflicts is hard (think the Israelis and the Palestinians, or the IRA and the British) but it is not impossible—if you unload the term value and ask some serious questions.

And then respect, and act on, the answers.

What is the Work

Generating the courage to confront someone else’s bad behavior is tough.

But it’s not the work.

Creating a plan to confront someone’s bad behavior, rather than confronting and hoping that the act of doing so will be enough to create the change you want, is difficult.

But it’s not the work.

Confronting the person who has behaved badly, executing your plan, and then watching their reactions—and responding accordingly—is hard.

But it’s not the work.

All those actions are part of the process of getting to the goal of growing our courage to confront bad behavior.

The process is not the work.

The work is going through the process, getting to the goal (your goal, not the goal of the other party), getting knowledge from that experience, integrating that learning into what your actions, behaviors, and responses will be the next time a similar situation arises in the future, and then letting the moment go.

That’s the work.

By the way, the work is the thing that’s always on the line. Not us.