[Opinion] What To Do With A Barking Dog

Nothing is more annoying than a persistently barking dog, whether you are traveling in a Persian caravan across the desert or you are a mid-thirties single woman in Manhattan in the 90’s.

The majority of dogs bark, because of an instinct to do so in situations they perceive as being hostile to the community, or the pack. The dissonance of noise between parties in conflict, surrounding the feedback that many people get in a communication situation, can come off like the endless barking of dogs.

And yet, if we stop screaming at the dogs of conflict to “shut up” long enough to recognize what is actually happening in the conflict interaction. Or, we can decide that the barking is pointless noise, based in fear, apathy, avoidance and accommodation, and then we can move on from the conflict.

In the crowded desert of human interactions—or the empty desert of Manhattan—communication about the Truth of conflict, matters more than the noise around what we didn’t do, what we didn’t say or how we didn’t act, yesterday.

-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/

[Advice] How to Motivate Yourself

Conflicts arise (or get worse)—both internal and external—when motivation wanes.

Because it is easier to do the wrong thing (sometimes the more convenient or expedient thing) than it is to do the right thing (sometimes the least convenient and hardest thing) in a conflict, many people revert to the apathy, avoidance, or accommodation.

Motivation is the driver for change and better responses to interpersonal conflicts, but one of the questions we get asked is “Well Jesan, all this interpersonal conflict tactics stuff is great, but what about getting people motivated to actually do it?”

We point out that the motivational speaker and author Zig Ziglar, often made the point that motivation—much like showering—doesn’t last. And that you have to renew your motivation every day, in the same way that you shower every day.

We would make three additions to that assertion as well:

Our lives must have meaning first in order for us to get motivated to confront the issues and concerns that cause conflicts, the relationships that are “suboptimal” and the situations that make us frustrated. In the field of student development, this is called agency.

Our personalities must be resilient, able to take disappointment, failure and not achieving our goals the first time around. When there is resilience, motivation matters less, because the mindset changes from “I need to be motivated before I can confront a conflict in my life” to “I am resilient and know I can get through this conflict with this other person and that’s my motivation.”

Our lives must be well balanced in all five areas of wellbeing: social, career, physical, financial and community. That balance means more than just a few percentage points of feeling good here balanced against a few percentage points of feeling bad there. Without well-balanced lives, a lack of motivation to change leads to emotional apathy and physical lethargy.

Organizations, from family (the world’s first corporation) to churches, have a responsibility to acknowledge and support the balance of wellbeing, appropriate feedback, and encouragement in the form of appropriate recognition and reward, for individuals who search for meaning in their work, play, volunteerism and worship.

Being successful at this task requires the founders, funders, owners and even contributors to those organizations, to start examining their own motivations a little closer.

Or else conflicts, crises, confrontations and aggressive behaviors will continue to demotivate those who could potentially courageously be motivated to attain new meaning when conflicts arise.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Innovation and Change

The problem stopping most workplace innovation and change strategies, is that too many people–founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters–have thought too little about how they personally and professionally respond and react to a culture built on change and innovation.

We’ve addressed this before:

You get up and go to work every morning and work with people whom you have developed third level relationships. You are tasked with accomplishing goals that may have little to no meaning for you. And in exchange, you are compensated with pieces of paper with the pictures of deceased leaders on them.

Then, changes happen (or innovation arrives), both internal and external and you are required to manage the change, manage the disruption you feel about the change and manage the responses and reactions of the other people who are impacted by the change.

In exchange for expending the emotional labor required to do this successfully, sometimes you are recognized and rewarded in ways that matter to you. Sometimes you aren’t. Too many organizations are still led by managers, teams and supervisors at the middle management level who think “Well, you got a paycheck this week. So that’s good enough.” Even worse, many of those same organizations were founded, funded and continued by people with the same Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford mindset.

Some of this is mindset is changing, no doubt.

With the work that human resource researchers, behavioral psychologists and organizational experts are doing throughout the world, the workplace is gradually shifting. As we noted in a workshop that we facilitated the other day, we are all collectively exiting the hangover remaining from the Industrial Revolution.

Innovation for people and organizations, true innovation, will require founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters, to turn the corner on two corrosive mindsets that remain, leading to all kinds of conflicts, both internal and external:

We have to stop thinking of innovation as an imposition.

People, whether employees, supervisors, managers or executives, are not prone to behaving in change-oriented ways. Because of our biology, reinforced through work, social and personal cultures, we are inclined to favor the least amount of resistance (or friction) possible. This response, of course comes from the flight and fight parts of our brains. We rationalize these responses in many different ways, but for the most part, people tend to view innovation they did not initiate as an imposition, rather than as an improvement.

We have to stop making change a “value container” for our personal issues.

People make judgements and rationalize their responses to changes in many different ways, but the biggest way is that people determine that change is really a verdict on past decisions. Specifically, an indictment. This pre-conceived judgement comes from the idea that “what came before must have been bad.” This type of thinking paralyzes people in endless meaningless arguments about the validity of past decisions, closes people off to determining how the material fact of change can be integrated into the present circumstances, and blinds people with fear about what other changes the future may hold.

Innovation and change are merely stories, told by people desiring a new narrative.

Innovation and change always comes with conflict and conflict is an incubator of change.

Without founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters doing the hard work of laying the groundwork of wellbeing, strengths based leadership, emotional intelligence, and conflict engagement skills training in their cultures from the beginning, organizations will continue to find it difficult to innovate.

Even as the waves of external changes, buffet them back and forth across the blue ocean of business.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] On Preparing for a Podcast

Choosing equipment, editing the sound, uploading the audio file and choosing the distribution platform are not the hardest decisions to make when starting podcasting.

The hardest parts of the podcasting process are two-fold:

Finding interesting guests

AND

Making the guest interesting.

Finding interesting guests does not mean finding guests who are personally interesting to the host. Finding interesting guests means thinking of the demographic, the audience and the listener to the podcast. Radio broadcasters and TV hosts have struggled with this throughout time.

Making guests interesting does not mean manipulating the interview, the questions, the conversation or the process, to transform the person from an audial scullery maid, into an audial Cinderella through some form of spoken magic. Making guests interesting means thinking of the questions to ask that will cause the guest to engage in conversation with the host (us) to get to a larger point.

Getting caught up in decisions around equipment, distribution systems and platforms, uploading processes, and on and on, is thrashing and avoidance, based in fear.

Engaging with the podcasting process requires the same internal capacity to go for it and abandon the fear of performance and perfection that curating, blogging, speaking and presenting require.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 06.23.2015

I have been traveling around New York state for the last three to four weeks pretty consistently and I’ve got a few thoughts:

The amazing natural beauty and landscapes of this state reflect what the original colonists saw. I can’t imagine what this state must have looked like to the original colonists who settled here from England, Germany, Scotland and even Denmark.

And no, I’m not forgetting that the Native Indigenous People were here first.

There are very real possibilities in the state of New York, but some of those possibilities have been squandered by well meaning, but misguided people. I am not opposed to the people who have decided to live in the most populous city in this country, but there are millions and millions of other people who deserve to have access, and the possibility of growth, who are in places not in New York City.

The false dichotomy—and false conflict—between those who are within (the “city”) and those who are without (“upstate”) is the most pointless and meaningless division in the history of this state. And it is easily overcome through being open to learning, innovation and true, genuine, scary growth.

I’ve got some other observations, but this is supposed to be short.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder

Peace builder’s have to be willing to get vulnerable in their marketing.

In a professional field, dominated by people familiar with—and comfortable with—the way that the world worked under Industrial Revolution rules, this can be a difficult transition.

Peace builders of all kinds—conflict resolution professionals, mediators, trainers, attorneys, social workers, and on and on—are facing world where permission is no longer granted, and where technology gives anyone the tools to change the rules.

It is important to note, however, that perfection, exactitude and quality are thought of in different ways now. A woman at a conference last week asked us a question: “How can you write a blog post that’s ‘just good enough’ when that is out there and it could show the quality of your work to a potential client?”

Good question.

The answer is three fold:

The line from “good enough” to “perfect” has nothing to do with a potential client’s perception of the work. It has to do with the author’s perception of what they have written or created. Your “good enough” and our “perfect” are going to have different meanings. And thus draw different clients, with different motives.
In a world of endless noise and multiple information options, the higher work is not to be bound to a mythical idea of “quality” based on rules that no longer apply. Instead, quality is now defined as “being out there in a world full of noise with commitment, consistency and persistence.”
The audience decides or the audience doesn’t, but the audience has expanded by multiple factors. No longer are peace builders bound to the television, billboards, editorials, word-of-mouth referrals, and praying that the next client will come in. Now peace builders have an expanded audience to whom they can appeal (see the Long Tail for more of this idea) and with 6.5 billion people on the planet, the audience is global, not local.

Before doing any of this, before writing one blog post, or making one video, peace builders have to be willing to throw away fear, the need for assurances and their preconceived expectations, and dance with vulnerability, to market effectively.

We’ve got an e-book describing our journey through this minefield. Download it by following the link here. And it’s free.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Pursuing Justice

In a conflict, human responses range along a continuum, lurching through the stages of grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying” described the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

When parties are hurt in a conflict, many seek revenge. That hot, fiery desire to inflict the same level of pain on the offending party, which they have inflicted upon us.

The processes of conflict resolution, mediation, negotiation and even litigation, seek to insert a third-party (sometimes another person, sometimes an organization) between each party. And, at the furthest end, transformative processes (and psychotherapy processes) seek to insert a third-party between each party and themselves.

Hurt parties seek justice through formalized litigation processes—but if we are being honest in this space (and we often tell workshop groups that we deal in truth), we must acknowledge that wounded parties seek a reckoning, with the outcome in their favor.

With this acknowledgement and understanding, it is important to note that revenge comes to the forefront and begins to poison even the most neutral of processes. Revenge disturbs parties in conflict, because culturally, we have been taught to abdicate our tribal rights to revenge to the state (in the form of mediation, litigation, etc.) in exchange for material safety and security.

True justice, Biblical justice, however, is really about forgiveness. Forgiving the other person requires each party to do three things; all of which can seem impossible when parties are in the throes of the five stages of grief:

Recognize and acknowledge anger, but do not become swept up by the emotional flooding that results. The corollary to this is to avoid the emotional toxicity of the other party’s anger in a conflict.
Control and manage the tongue. More and more research proves the psychological power of human storytelling. Gossip, rumors, innuendos, tales, and other forms of telling the conflict story repeatedly, add to the emotional and psychological detritus that piles up around the conflict, further confusing the pursuit of justice as forgiveness.
Realize that forgiveness is about justice for you as a party in conflict, not a panacea for the other person. There’s a lot of confusion in beliefs around justice and forgiveness. Consequences to actions can be legal, moral, ethical, and behavioral and come in other ways. But when we forgive as an act of justice, we release the agency of committing those acts to others in authority, rather than taking the authority (and it’s consequences), on ourselves.

Parties who have been wounded in conflict have a right to be angry, to be afraid, and a right to disengage for their own psychological and emotional protection. They do not have a right to inflict more pain, or to escalate the conflict under the pretext of pursuing justice, when in reality they seek revenge.

-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/

[Strategy] Playing Chess in Conflict

Playing chess is something that not everyone does.

In the film Training Day, Denzel Washington tells Ethan Hawke that his moves on the street—playing criminals and cops against each other—are “chess not checkers.”

The strategy and thought process, the impulse control and persistence, and the ability to tap into the emotional content of your opponent on the other side of the board, make chess a worthy game for comparison to people in conflict.

But what happens when one of the parties ceases to respond in the familiar ways of the familiar chess game, and instead kicks over the chess board?

And what happens when one party in the conflict is playing chess, but the other party is playing checkers? Or pinochle?

Not everyone has a brain for managing the emotions of conflict, the responses of the other party, or the emotional ability to dive in with grit and persistence when the outcome may be less than guaranteed.
Not everyone has the courage to care about outcomes in conflicts and disputes that involve them, or the people that they work with or love, and the personal willpower to act on that courage.
Not everyone has the ability to determine when it’s time to move from being a bystander to a situation that could lead to conflict toward being an active participant in attaining a positive outcome.

But, we contend, that everyone has the capacity to learn how to do all of these things. Even if, once they have learned how to do all of these things, they still refuse to act.

Because, sometimes it is easier to do nothing, and even that act of inaction, moves chess pieces around on a board.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 06.16.2015

When something is missed that should have been obvious, that feels like a monumental failure.

What feels worse than that is when something is missed that should have been obvious, and no one tells the person who missed it about the mistake.

The feeling that no one is paying attention enough to point out the flaws in the design, is the same feeling that Steve Martin had playing to an empty room early in his career.

Online however, there are plenty of empty rooms, with people talking in them, but the people talking can’t see that the room is empty, the audience is slipping out and the lights are slowly being clicked off, one by one.

This is the real reason many people don’t try to do stand-up (or start blogging) but would rather attend a stand-up show, or casually consume blog content. There’s no risk of failure or shame in consumption.

There’s also no risk of humiliation, because no one read, or listened, closely enough in the first place to point out constructive criticism.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Balance is Not Mocked

Permission and permissiveness should not be confused.

Permission is something that is traditionally given. Permissiveness, however, is a passive act. Primarily a passive-aggressive act.

Permission seeks to collaborate and coordinate with another party. Permissiveness seeks to establish its own boundaries and is based in a “no” that sometimes comes off as a “yes.”

Permission is up front in establishing the hierarchy by which it operates. Permissiveness is sneaky and—let’s be frank—a little arrogant.

Permissiveness is taken from a party in conflict. Permission, however, is neither given nor taken. It exists in the whisper space between asking and taking.

There is a state of permission in many, many conflicts—interpersonal, work, church, school—that is confused with the permissiveness to “do as I like” accompanied by the corollary of “you suffer what I wish.”

The moment in conflict when a party commits an act of permissiveness is the moment when a conflict deepens negatively.

The moment in a conflict when a party commits an act of permission is the moment when a conflict deepens positively.

Do not be confused. The balance of permission/permissiveness is not mocked.

-Peace Be With You All-