The Self-Determination of Experts

What is self-determination?

It is an individual and personal equation, involving a combination of autonomy, intrinsic motivation, understanding of cause and effect and the intellect and character to make empathetic choices.

Preserving client self-determination in conflict resolution is the purview of ‘the experts”: People who are more educated than the client in specific areas, whose burden it is to take on the responsibility and ethic of care for the ignorant, inexperienced client.

The unstated message behind the label of “expert” indicates elite-based judgment that creates an atmosphere of superiority, cloistered protection from criticism, a thin skin and an outsized ego.

In an economic world of industrialization, expertise is perceived as the coin of the realm; but, when the world of industrialization fractures (as it is right now) the real power lays not with expertise but with openness.

The field of conflict resolution, based in a foundation of social justice, has developed an affinity for expertise, at the expense of client self-determination.

But, how much information does clients in conflict need before they are informed enough to be “self-determined”?

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Advice] Priorities and Struggles

The struggle of consulting goes beyond setting up a timetable for success and knowing when to pull the plug if it’s failing.

The struggle of consulting is in making generosity a priority when every fiber in the consultant’s body and experiences screams for selfishness, pulling in, pulling back and cutting off.

The priority has to be making generosity a habit, rather than focusing on the struggle to be generous in the first place.

Be warned though: Once the professional consultant shifts from struggling in selfishness to struggling to be generous, that becomes the true work.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] WATNA and BATNA

A negotiated agreement is the endpoint of many crucial conversations.

There are always alternatives—worst and best for each party—to getting to that endpoint. The alternatives are detours a negotiation can take that allow parties to migrate away from the endpoint.

If the endpoint of agreement isn’t the point of a conversation, then maybe being satisfied with the best (if we “win”) or the worst (if we “lose”) is good enough.

There are two concerns with this point of view though:

Even though parties can acknowledge with their mouths that the world of negotiated conversations exists in gray areas, very few lived actions following the conversation back that up. Plus, it’s not enough to just be good enough. Now, the challenge is to either be the best or to suck.
Going beyond getting the BATNA or the WATNA (you know, “agreeing to disagree”) there’s a concern as one party seeks to emotionally, or psychologically manipulate, the other party to a previously staked out “truth” through the misuse of persuasive power.

-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/
Website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Advice] In The End is Not Soon Enough

Mapmaker William Smith and Mennonite Wilma Derksen were recognized for the impact they created with their projects, their perspectives and their approach to life.

They “got their due in the end.”

Depending upon your frame of reference, their due came either too late or way too late.

It used to be that elites ridiculed innovation because the pedigree from where innovation came wasn’t “right.” Once mass media and mass culture really took off in the middle of the last century, the middle masses began to exhibit the same ritualistic cultural shorthand of dismissing self-belief. The masses also rejected the counterintuitive nature of becoming uncomfortable in order to do the right thing.

Now however, in the midst of the ongoing fracturing of mass media and mass culture, ridicule of innovation has splintered, emanating from multiple areas simultaneously.

People in the field of software applications like to talk a lot lately about “unbundling” and about how “software is eating the world.”

We believe that this is happening, but the real revolution will come when fractured audiences start giving all innovators their due—attention, respect, relationship, revenues—before they are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil instead of after they are gone.

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-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 12.16.2014: 3 Blogging Lessons

After blogging for almost two years, I’ve learned a few important things:

If I wait for inspiration to write, it won’t ever come. Inspiration happens when my butt hits the seat and I begin to stare at that blinking cursor and the white paper.

I became so much better at this blogging game, when I stopped writing just three times a week “because I just didn’t have time to do more” and started writing 5 times per week. And next year, it’ll be twice a day, five days of the week.

Profundity is not the point of the blogging.

If I am seeking to be profound, to stumble upon some sainted truth about entrepreneurship, conflict resolution, peacemaking, marketing, social media communication, my writing is not going to get there. My readers will find, and share, the profundity for me.

I write whether you read it or not.

The reason that blogging gets such a bad rap from “serious” writers such as novelists, journalists, research writers and others, is partially because of the nature of issues blogging covers (a “them” problem) and partially because of the lack of consistency and doggedness of bloggers (an “us” problem).

Rest assured, I’m going to keep writing the HSCT #Communication Blog, whether anyone reads it or not. I think of it like Saturday Night Live, which goes on every Saturday night at 11 o’clock (EST) because it’s 11 o’clock, whether anyone is watching it or not.

It’s all content.

The podcast, the blogging, the text on my website, the ADRTimes.com blog posts, the Facebook shares, the Quora posts, the Tweets, the workshop content, the keynote speeches, the LinkedIn posts, the e-books, the white papers, the Medium.com posts, the layered images.

It’s ALL content.

-Peace Be With You All-

Negotiating With Outrageous Confidence: The Diplomacy Issue

Recently, we keynoted the Ithaca College 2014 BOLD Conference.

We had a great time talking with the student attendees at the conference about negotiation and performing that act of active asking, well and with confidence.

And not just confidence, but outrageous confidence.

We have found in our entrepreneurial journey, that too many people—the majority of whom are women and/or members of minority groups—don’t ask for what they want even meekly, much less outrageously.

But, after the keynote, a point was raised to us, around the issue of using the tactics of outrageousness to boost one’s self-confidence, in order to gain only win-win outcomes.

The person wanted to know about how to maintain diplomacy when going into a negotiation while also maintaining equanimity with self—and others—while also maintaining self-assurance.

This is a great question and, in the context of the wider world, the answer is that, the spate of recent college graduates “asking for too much” or “being unwilling to work hard for advancement” does not spring from a great well of self-assurance.

Instead, both of these meta-employment-phenomena are occurring in response to the messages that older, job holding generations, have provided an entire current generation. These messages have been absorbed and we are beginning to see the results of that absorption.

In the context of the smaller world of the keynote, however, we would respond by noting that, of course there are times in a negotiation, any negotiation, that the cost of disrupting a potential future relationship, must be weighed against the benefit of moving toward a win-lose outcome.

But, until many more people (including women and minorities) begin acting with a little more self-confidence, self-awareness and even outrageousness, we believe that encouraging others to ask period, rather than to not ask for too much too soon, is the better route.

-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/

[Advice] Coming out of The Dip

The peace building, consultant solopreneur can’t wait until they are “in the mood.”

The fact is, the person building a project, always goes on, whether they feel like it or not.

Case in point:

Last week was not a great week for me; I would like a mulligan for last week.

Nothing went right.

The majority of the days of the week, I wanted to stay in bed and roll over to the other side. I didn’t feel like it.

For the peace building, consultant solopreneur, with no employees, that’s the dip.

Yet, this blog had a new post written, published and distributed every day.

Yet, my children got dropped off at school every day.

Yet, my clients got me on the projects that I was contracted to be on.

Yet, my three new projects for next year also continued being planned and steps were made to move forward in their execution and implementation.

When the peace building consultant solopreneur hits the dip—that moment when that person would rather be in bed, than be out in the world making an argument, making an impact, or making a difference—the hard things is to get up and just do it anyway.

As human beings in an economic and social world only beginning to recover from the hangover of the Industrial Revolution, our responsibility is to do the hard, unsexy things and to motivate ourselves first.

Or, to quote James Altucher, just show up.

That’s how you work, grind and—ultimately escape—the dip.

-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/

Motivation and the Seven Second Attention Span

The well documented decline in the ability to focus has everybody who can focus for more than 7 seconds talking about it for at least the length of a book manuscript—or the length of a blog post.

But, the real estate worth fighting over, for our money, is not focus, but attention.

Focus happens after attention has been attracted. And, with so many forms of noise distracting the masses from messages that may or may not be beneficial for them, attention is at a premium.

But not focus.

Yes, we realize that the immediacy of social media responses and the immediacy of Internet based information has created concern that the human brain is changing—and it is—but the real battle is still not focus.

The reason we believe that the decline in focus is a symptom of the current Social Age, and not the disease, is because the core of attention, intrinsic motivation, has always been—and will always be—a limited resource.

And while we don’t personally believe that resources are limited, we know that society has been arranged to bring into reality the belief that while attention is limited, internal motivation should be limitless.

And yes, we have seen the neuroscience research around attention and focus, as well as the research around Pavlovian operant conditioning, punishment and reward studies and other behavioral studies since the 1950’s.

But, we still hold that as our technology has increased, from the oral tradition to Twitter, there has always been misplaced concern over focus rather than attention.

We really should have a few more books and blog posts about motivation…

-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/

[Strategy] Active Listening as Post Modern Art

Paintings, music, stories, and speeches used to be considered artistic pursuits; but, in a world consumed with art as entertainment and media, listening carefully becomes an artistic effort on its own.

In a networking situation, the artistic dance to truly beginning to connect with another person, involves actively listening.

Words are like brushes and the canvas is the networking event. But the person at the event is the artist.

And in a world of shortened attention spans, artistic practice has to filter into everybody’s life, not just the vaunted few who have a TED Talk, or make a movie, or cut a “hit” record, or paint an image in a museum.

Our advice to you: Listen carefully.

Honesty in Human Memory

As they fade into the rearview mirror of memory, events of the past tend to be mythologized, canonized or misremembered entirely.

On a global scale, the one class of people who used to rely on this fact of human memory—politicians—are finding it difficult to deal with the current state of constant remembering that’s going on with the Internet and social media.

On an individual scale, we still have the expectation that other people will forgive us our trespasses, even as we can forever hold their trespasses against them, with the help of our new tools.

However, all of this electronic remembering hasn’t led to more honesty. In fact, as the tendency toward tribal social sanctioning has grown exponentially to a global scale, there are more and more media driven conflicts over who owns the narrative, rather than whether or not the narrative was honest and truthful in the first place.

This is part of the core reason why the masses no longer really pay attention when it’s revealed that someone—most importantly politicians—lied about something consequential, because honesty is no longer the coin of the realm.

Instead, who owns the narrative, for the next 24-48 hours, is what’s important. After that, well, the masses can repost in their Facebook feeds all they want, because it won’t matter whether truth (capital “T” or small “t”) was served or not.

At an individual scale, cries of hypocrisy still ring out, but the sound grows hollower with each passing year, as individuals learn from the masses, that ownership of the story is more valuable than the veracity of the content.

-Peace Be With You All-