[Advice] 4 Locus of Control Questions

Confirmation bias occurs when a person believes that the situations and experiences they continually run into, reaffirm their persepctive on their place in the world, and their preconceived beliefs or practices.

Case in point: When a person looks at the amount in their paycheck every week and mutters “ Well, I guess we’ll always be middle class.”

Or, when a person tells another before a difficult decision, or contlict, “Well, you had to know that Bob was going to react that way.”

Confirmation bias occurs because we want reassurance that the stories we tell ourselves are the only way reality could possibly be organized. This is why we emotionally, psychologically and somtimes even physically, resist when we are confronted by a different outcome someone else has experienced in the same situation. The fact of the matter is, we are in charge of our own stories—and the stories that we tell ourselves—but we often don’t believe it.

This dovetails with locus of control.

Based in studies and research from the 1950’s, locus of control says that some people believe they are in control of their lives, and other people believe outside forces determine the direction of their lives and their decision making processes.

People with a high internal locus of control believe the world is something they control.

People with a high external locus of control, believes the world controls them.

Confirmation bias reinforces the stories of both personality types: If I believe that I’m in charge of my destiny, then I will continually tell myself the ” I’m In Charge Story.” But if I believe that destiny is in charge of me, then I will continually tell myself the “I’m Not In Charge Story.”

Most often, when things are going well, confirmation bias and locus of control concerns become secondary to a good time. But in a difficulty, confrontation or a conflict around things that matter, confirmation bias and locus of control (both internal and external) can serve as drivers that both intitiate and continue the conflict spiral.

Perceptions, stories and triggers are the fuel in the car of conflict situations, and the only person who can alter the fuel successfully is you. Here are four challenge questions for determining your conflict story:

What did I learn about difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict from my family?

Family is the world’s first organizational structure. And many of us learned the wrong lessons from those in charge. But the real issue is that we keep confirming the same lessons repeatedly with others.

What did I learn about control over my environment when I left the home?

Formal schooling in (at least in the United States) begins at around 4 or 5. This is when true confusion sets in, and when uncomfortable questions get asked about “reality”—and sometimes hushed up.

What messages have I had reinforced through my friends, associates and even the media I chose to consume?

There is a reason that many individuals with high internal locuses of control, refuse to watch the news, choose their friends carefully and are elitist about companies to whom they decide to give their money, time and talent.

What messages am I sending out to the world that are reinforcing difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict stories that are no longer relevant to my experience?

If you have succeeded in overcoming a poor story, or have moved the needle on your locus of control, revisiting old stories that are no longer relevant is the surest way to experience the same things over again.

-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] Changing Our Approach to Distribution

Content distribution is hard.

Really hard.

Here’s why: It’s really difficult to research content, write content and edit content without a commensurate plan to “get it out there.”

Here at HSCT, we looked at the distribution part of creating content as secondary to the problem of generating enough content to actually be of value in the virtual space that we occupy.

As we have learned more and more about the process of writing, we have had to learn more and more about distribution systems. In our estimation, for the conflict consultant, seeking to make a dent in the conflict space, there are a few distribution mechanisms for getting attention (and eyeballs) on their content:

Social media—Everyone knows that social media is a place of content curation and content creation, but many people (not B2B/B2C brands) don’t think about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Pinterest as being 2^nd party distribution mechanisms.

Email—Everyone knows that email isn’t “sexy,” but it keeps right on moving along. Email as a method for B2B content distribution drives around 4% of all traffic to the HSCT blog, with over 75% of that traffic being new visitors.

Curation Options—Many peace builders (and other content creators) don’t focus on curation tools such as Flipboard and StumbledUpon, as well as Quora. There are also secondary content creation options out there from Medium.com and LinkedIn publishing.

The “dark” Web—Sharing of articles, reposting and republishing of articles into private newsgroups (yes those are still around) and chat rooms (yes, those are still around as well) can be powerful connection drivers for the development of a peace builders’ content. We have found this is a growing area for our content, our approach and connecting people to our philosophy and business model.

Here at HSCT, we are using all of these methods. Our strategy is simple: Keep learning and researching, keep writing our articles, keep distributing our perspective and keep growing through distribution.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Committing to Persisting

Persistence is tough.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this, because she has dealt with clients who would rather give up and return to the comfort of their past dysfunction, rather than attempt to go through the hard work of pushing through to create something new.

Persistence requires energy.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because she is drained at the end of a coaching session, a mediation session, a workshop session, or after writing a blog post about her work.

Persistence is formidable.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because, she realizes that having the will to do what another consultant won’t (as long as that thing is moral, ethical, legal and not fattening) is the difference between success and failure for her project, her clients, and for the niche she serves.

The savvy peacebuilder commits to persist, even when it’s not sexy, interesting or engaging, because she knows that one less peacebuilding project in the world turns out one more candle in the dark.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Business Mentors II

Business mentors are not the most important parts of your business, but they are definitely an integral portion of the game.

Good business mentors can provide three things:

Sound, positive feedback that is both constructive and developmental
The space to know when to let you fail, and when to push you to succeed
Emotional distance from your “next great idea”

They can’t prevent you form making the next big mistake, nor can they really help you launch and iterate. But they can form the basis of a potential Board of Directors, and sometimes, they may take on a role that’s even more important for the savvy peace builder:

Fans.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Building Better Work Relationships

Relationships at work are third level relationships.

First level relationships are familial ones, all the way from the family in your house that you grew up with to your cousin Wanda in Oklahoma. Second level relationships are close friends and associates, schoolmates, neighbors, etc.

But the people that we work with are not ones that we would have chosen. Even in an era of choosing yourself, or four-hour work weeks, the vast majority of us still work under conditions that resemble the ones that our grandparents worked under, albeit with less pollution and physical effort.

And, for the foreseeable future, since human beings are going to continue to build organizations, establish and maintain hierarchies, and engage with mechanisms of active and passive social control, there will always be workplaces.

Always.

With that being said, the question becomes, how does a person build better work relationships? With everything that we now know about neuroscience, psychology, the genetic code and even the world of software and computers, developing the resources to build better workplaces should be easy. But it’s not. And what’s even more distressing is that the most common solution proposed, with access to all that knowledge and data, is to replace humans with software programs and/or mechanical objects.

Robots are fun and AI is coming, but we are a long, long way from building something—well—more human than human. So, here are the top five ways to build better relationships, one human to another:

Empathy is huge—and we don’t mean in the “touchy feely” way that empathy is often thought of. In a workplace culture, empathy begins with Wheaton’s Law and ends at actively listening to someone else. Even if you disagree with them.
Do emotional labor—we wrote about this last week, but it bears repeating: in the economy that we all work in—no matter if we are co-working with others or on a distributed team—doing the hard work of caring, listening and acting out of self-interested selflessness is the only way forward.
Remove the fear—acting out of fear: of getting fired, of irritating a boss, or of confronting a co-worker, has to be jettisoned. Fear is a common reaction when things that matter to us (i.e. our values, our needs our emotions, etc.) are threatened. But, the brain only knows what we tell it. So tell it good, factual self-talk, rather than allowing biases and false ideas to fill the brain space.
Lead on doing the hard things—this is the 2nd hardest thing to do in building better work relationships, because there are so many things that we would rather avoid. But doing the hard things that are also the right things, is the only way that an organization can survive. Which leads into the last thing…
Leave if it doesn’t fit—most of the pushback that we get around the five things comes down to this statement “If I do all of these things that you suggest and nothing changes, not even the place I work, then what do I do?” This statement reveals a common workplace false parallel: A person’s value is not determined by their work. There are other positions, cultures and value systems represented in other workplaces out there. And if you’ve already done the hard work of building better work relationships, do you think that this work will make you less employable in the future, or more employable in the future?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 3.31.2015

What do you do when you’ve been asking the right questions in the wrong way?

And you’ve been doing it for two years.

I’ve been thinking about this project, Human Services Consulting and Training that I’m building. I have been thinking deeply about marketing, branding, connecting, publishing and—ultimately—scaling.

Continuing to do what got me here, isn’t going to get me any further than I already am. And when the right questions have been asked in the wrong way, two years is long enough for that kind of self-involved navel gazing.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve laid the foundations for the beginning of something else. Something great. Something enterprise-level, C-suite level and above. But to get there, it’s time to pivot.

Away from end-users and toward buyers
Away from social engagement and toward deeper relationships
Away from frivolity and toward more focus

And, if you’ve been paying attention, day-in and day-out, for the last couple of years, you will note that my approach has become sharper and narrower, even as my options have increased to do work that really matters in the space that I am building.

Conflict resolution doesn’t scale, but engagement, relationships and products do.

It’s time to start asking the right questions in the right way….

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Trust is not Scalable

Conflict resolution is not scalable, because trust is not scalable.

Make no mistake though, the products of trust are scalable. And the results of trusting an organization, a brand or even another person are scalable.

But trust is not scalable.

And the reason that it’s not is nuerologically and psychologically complicated, but basically, trust wanes the further removed my relationship is from another person. Not a brand, and organization or a system, but a person.

Conflict resolution in organizations, thus becomes unscalable, because the trust at the core of resolving conflicts doesn’t exist in the first place, because the parties involved are far too separated by the barriers of organization, values, culture, mindsets, behaviors, beliefs, etc.

This is the reason mediation works so well for neighborhood disputes, but not so well for sexual harassment lawsuits. When conflict resolution processes become a strategy, rather than part of an overall organizational culture, they fail miserably. Mediation, conflict resolution and other forms of ADR, should be at the core of a culture’s development as an organization grows, so that the products of trust—increased revenue and productivity to mention just a couple—become expected.

And so that, when disputes arise—and they will—the trust is already there and litigation (and even more untrustworthy, unscalable process) becomes unthinkable.

-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: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Values as a Service

Even in a high tech, money saturated, hard charging culture, values, just like symbols, still matter.

Think of values in terms of the following metaphor: If values were the cloud, the story that we tell ourselves and others through our behaviors, language choices, and other means, would be the apps in the cloud.

The Ellen Pao case, the issues in Indiana, the arguments and disagreements over healthcare, how the government should spend money (guns vs. butter) and even the arguments and disagreements in your organization, all come down to values.

Culture comes about when people come together to form a community and abide with each other. Those people typically agree—either tacitly or openly—on the shared values their culture will demonstrate to the wider world. And what values will be reinforced with each other. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then what does the Ellen Pao verdict say about the culture of the American judicial system, the culture of litigation in this country, and the culture of Silicon Valley VC’s?

Well, we here at HSCT believe that the verdict says three things:

The culture of Silicon Valley is functioning exactly as it was meant to. Which means that it is going to have to fundamentally be broken and reshaped to mirror where the business culture of America is going: Silicon Valley VC culture is not alone here. All over America this is happening, in corporate boardrooms and splashed across websites. And no, public shaming of “guilty” VC’s, a la, Brendan Eich isn’t going to change anything significantly, either.
The culture of litigation is overdone, overblown and over relied upon to “resolve” some of the most value driven issues in the country today: From healthcare legislation to gay rights, the courts and litigation are being relied upon to settle arguments that are about the human heart, emotions and values. But the law—which reflects and supports a dominant value system—cannot change individual hearts or values. Not even a little. Don’t believe us? Think about this: How many racists are still doing business, building companies and making money in America, post-1968?
The culture of the American judicial system has to change: Should issues be brought before the court? Yes, but don’t expect justice. People usually sue when their feelings are hurt (a heart based issue), when they feel as though they aren’t going to be treated fairly (a heart based issue) or they feel as though they won’t be heard (a heart based issue). This is the place where restorative justice circles, public conversation projects and other heart based, values based process need to be implemented at a wider cultural scale. Don’t believe me? Ok. How many personal stories from women who have been (or are being) sexually harassed, can the VCs at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (or other male dominated, hyper competitive VC firms), possibly hear in a room, before they change their minds and hearts? 200? 300? 1,000?

Tech oriented people, engineers, software developers, finance geniuses, and management leaders, like to operate in numbers, because numbers seem value neutral. After all, who can argue that 2+2 =4? But, when they have to deal with people, sometimes, they would rather not. Will VC’s in the Valley clam up, slowdown in hiring women, and become more closed, following the Ellen Pao verdict?

Maybe. Maybe it would be better for the culture of VC firms to model the attitude they try to foster in the culture of the start-ups they fund. But the rational hearts of the people who believe in numbers rather than values, are the ones that have to shift before the culture will.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Emotional Labor

Just the other day at a workshop, after filling out a communication assessment, we heard this:

“I’m an engineer. This is all great stuff, but really hard to quantify.”

And later in the workshop, after we made another point, we responded by saying:

“You can quantify the effects of emotional mismanagement on the bottom line, in terms of lost productivity, health issues, declining quality of production and overall employee disengagement.”

The engineer nodded his head.

Emotional labor is the final frontier. It’s a space that care workers, mothers, therapists and social workers have inhabited for years. And, in an economy where manually (or technically) laboring was once seen as scarce, emotional labor didn’t matter much.

And yet…

40 hours a week, the average person goes to another location, away from their home, and interacts with people that they did not choose
26% of people report that they are disengaged at work and with work, and 13% of those people are actively disengaged at work
44% of companies are outsourcing jobs to other countries, across all sectors, with the vast majority of employers reporting that they are doing so “to control costs.”

What kind of labor matters?

Well, the kind that can’t be outsourced:

The kind that addresses people’s emotional inner lives, where we spend 99% of our time.
The kind that addresses issues of self-awareness, leadership, emotional intelligence, focus, discipline and many other emotional tasks.
The kind that builds resiliency encourages accountability and that develops people to be more than just cogs in the machine.
The kind that develops and encourages interpersonal communication, conflict engagement, and responsibility.

The challenge in this paradigm shift (for every organization), comes when 20% of the people in an organization are doing 80% of the emotional labor.

But, emotional labor, moving forward in a world where more and more will be accomplished by fewer and fewer people , is the only kind of labor that matters.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Power of Story

Stories lie at the core of the human condition.

Stories, myths, fables and legends serve a psychological need that human beings have for connection and understanding. The people in professions that understand this, from priests and pastors to marketers and con men, can weave stories so fabulous that they can sell a person anything, from a washing machine to the cannibalistic sacrifice of virgin flesh.

Psychologists and psychiatrists know the power of stories.

They spend years in the medical and mental health fields, carefully mapping the ways in which cognitive connections develop and then the ways in which those connections are externalized with the outside world. Therapy is just a refashioning of a story that you have told yourself for so long that it has become true for you.

When we talk about stories, we inevitably have to talk about fiction and fact, truth and lies. Content and Context serve an important function here, because the ways we determine what the truth is (both “for us” and “for the other”) are important. What may be truth for you in a story may be an out and out lie for me.

Mediators specialize in getting to the truth by first acknowledging that everybody tells a shaded truth: Not necessarily a lie, as in, a story told with the intent to deceive, but a truth that is bent and shaped through content and context to service a particular interest: theirs.

The third factor that influences all of this is power. Now, social justice practitioners and thought leaders talk a lot about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and who is using it to oppress or to privilege.

Power, however, is also based on content and context. This is a tough truth for true believers in social justice, and why the panacea of a socially just future will never be fully recognized.

There are too many competing stories.

When every story competes for primacy in the external realm of an open, capitalistic market, some stories win and some stories lose. The story of Coca-Cola is obviously a winner in the marketplace.

The story of all kinds of insurance—from life and health to car and home—is neither winning nor losing. The story of MySpace is definitely losing: As did the story of Pets.com, Borders and Woolworths.

When we think of the personal brands that we present online, from our social media presences to our tendency to spam and flame each other in the “below-the-fold” comments section of our favorite online articles, stories and storytelling become even more important.

Case in point:

I read an article here http://tinyurl.com/q98wp8c, which served to activate my own stories that I tell myself about writing, famous authors, the nature of public opinion, online journalism, Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, obscure Viennese writers, World War 1 intellectualism, racism, social justice, wealth inequalities and the ubiquity of online blowhards.

And that was in the first two minutes after I had finished reading the article.

A couple of hours later, I was talking to my lovely future bride and her son and relating the story of the article, further embellishing the story I was telling myself about the article that I had just read.

This is the power of a story and of storytelling. I start out reading someone else’s words and end up making my own meaning of them. Then, to make matters worse, I influence others in how they create their own stories and how they intersect with the external world, featuring myself, the article, the people with whom I interacted and, of course, the stories that they tell themselves.

When conflicts happen, the circle closes, reopens and closes again on the stories that we tell ourselves. Because while conflict is change and conflict is dynamic, it is disruptive, disjointing and personal. The stories of conflicts vary, but they typically begin with:

“They did thus and so to me. And I turned around and did thus and so to them, but they are at fault and they owe me an apology because they started it, I’m innocent and that’s the truth.”

And there it is. The two most important words in any story, whether it’s a marketing story to get you to buy a car or a religious story to get you to buy a belief, the most important thing in any story is the Truth.

Writers, bloggers, journalists, poets and others have long known the power of the truth in a story, which is why stories work so well. They appeal at a deep level to something in the human psyche that very few ever talk about: the desire to be entertained.

This desire is why fiction outsells nonfiction.
This desire is why “reality” TV is always scripted.
This desire is why, even in the midst of a terrible trauma or a horrible conflict, resolution is so hard to come by: Either one, or both, of the parties is being—at some elemental, cognitive level—entertained.

Dopamine is a neural chemical that is triggered in the midst of pleasure and pain. It lulls a person to sleep even as it creates bonding by also releasing that other neural chemical, oxytocin.

The desire to be entertained is intimately linked to the desire to be lulled and pleasured by connection. And the ultimate way to connect is through storytelling.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, anger management, deep breathing, mediation, mindfulness, are all hard and require work to maintain. They require the frontal cortex where creativity, art, poetry, music and all the other hard things live, to be activated and used.

Power enters into this in the area of telling the truth, versus telling a story. Power equals control and he (or she) who has the power (mostly power “over” another person) gets to make the rules.

Power used to be concentrated in the hands of the very few, however, as technological advancements have occurred; power has dissipated to even being in the hands of the very young and the very old. Social media, the Internet, blogs all are forms of communication that give everyone the same power and the same access, though outcomes will vary.

And thus we close the first part of the loop: Stories, fables, legends and myths serve a purpose. They allow us to categorize, compartmentalize and make sense of the world. Stories that we tell ourselves are the most important stories of all. This is why motivational speakers the world over talk endlessly about having a positive mindset; which allows us to tell ourselves stories that are positive and uplifting.

But, what do we do when the stories aren’t that great: When the trauma, dysfunction and conflicts lie at the core of our stories?

-Peace Be With You All-