Getting Out of Our Own Way

Getting out of our own way—and leaving other people well enough alone—used to be easy, right?

In the past, if we wanted to resolve conflicts, the world was much simpler.

Before the prevalence of psychology, biology, pharmacology, therapy, counseling, and the “-isms” of feminism, masculinism, cultural relativism and social justice.

The world was much simpler in the golden age of whatever time before the time we are talking about now.

Right?

Except…except…

The world of the past was actually just as complicated as the world of the present. Particularly to the people living in that world at that time.

Here’s the truth: It’s not the whiz bang technology that makes life seem fast and complicated. It’s not even the toes that we have to now tip-toe around, that it seems our grandfathers and grandmothers didn’t have to step around, that makes everything so “complicated.” In reality, life was always this complicated, but people tend to mistakenly believe that history began the moment that they were born—and that everything will end the moment that they do.

No. It has always been this complicated to get along with other people in the world.

The only difference is that we have so many more outlets to voyeuristically view the difficulty, the dysfunction and the spectacle of people who persist in getting in their own way.

-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/

The Brain at Work

The brain is a fascinating organ.

It weighs around 3 pounds and it is in charge of everything.

The mind—the abstract part of us that conceptualizes our relationships between ourselves and the world—has just as much (if not even more) control that the actual physical operation of the brain.

The mind spends most of its time making abstract sense of a world that seems–on the surface anyway–to be irrational, disjointed and arbitrary. This is a 24/7/365 job.

And then, with all of that, we pack ourselves into vehicles, travel to artificially lighted spaces, hang out with people we did not choose and were not born with, and then we wonder why the whole thing just doesn’t work after about 200 years, give or take a few decades.

Our brains betray us.

Our minds flay us.

Our bodies decay on us.

And all we have to show for it is a few little notes with dead national leaders, trees or other objects on them.

-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/

The Top 3 Hard Things

The hard things are the very things that appear easy.

Active listening seems easy. It’s easy to be engaged, totally focused on the content of a conversation or an interaction. It’s easy to pay close attention to what another person is saying, or doing, in the moment.
Active engagement is the easiest thing in the world. It’s easy to be engaged with a situation, a conversation, or a person whom we love and care about.
Active participation with your life, with another person’s life or with a critical situation is the easiest thing in the world.

But, it turns out, in a world of fractured attention spans, media distractions and fancy technical tools, attention, engagement and activity come at an embarrassingly high premium.

And we all make private choices (reflected publicly in our social media posting choices) about what events, people and places we give the most precious resource that we have–our attention–and then, when the world “explodes” the first question we ask is “Why didn’t I know about this?”

Well, we could have paid attention and could have known, if we had really wanted to…right….?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
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] Presenting to the Audience You’ve Been Dealt

Consultants and coaches never really choose the audience in front of which they will present.

It is impossible to go inside the mind of each and every individual in the room and determine their motivations, needs, desires and wants.

For the professional consultant or coach—at a certain point—you’re always kind of just winging it.

In fact, the smaller the room, the more intimate the setting, the more winging it looks like a lack of preparation, concentration and expertise.

Which, of course, has the effect of reducing trust and increasing the likelihood that the audience will turn on you.

Don’t worry about the audience that was chosen for you. Worry more about developing the tools to present effectively no matter who—or how many—show up to see you present.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Longest Good-bye

Future historians looking at the sports marketing history of the United States will be puzzled by the rise and fall of American Baseball.

They will note that it mirrored the loss of attention span in the overall culture, the need for greater and more brutal spectacle (see the fall of boxing and the rise of MMA for more of this) and the rise of American Football.

American Baseball’s long goodbye also follows closely with the fracturing of media markets and the loss of patience for the long themes inherent in long form journalism.

No event marks this more starkly than the swan song of Derek Jeter. Here is a player that–if he had come along 75 years ago–might not have been as honored because of the statistics, but would have been valued even more because of his heart.

Unfortunately, he came to athletic prominence in a time of dwindling respect for athletes as people and potential role models and a rise in overall cultural coarseness, disinterest and, of course the decline in interest around of his chosen game.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Gatekeepers’ Dent in the Universe

Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to say “no” to the next big idea.

People wake up in the morning and decide to go to their jobs as secretaries, executive assistants, Vice-Presidents and others, and do their job as best they can.

For them, that’s making a dent in their universe.

And, when a “no” falls from their lips about the big idea that you want to pitch to their boss who signs the check and makes the decision to go forward, they are making a dent in your universe.

Their dent doesn’t match your dent, but it doesn’t mean that their dent is any less valuable, interesting or relevant.

It just feels that way in the moment…

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers: [download id=”2414″] and [download id=”2390″].

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Not Boring People to Tears

When presenting, varying pitch, tempo and word order can help a consultant or coach not bore the audience to tears.

So can having a really awesome twist on a really boring and basic idea, concept or problem solving approach.

The first approach takes time to develop and cannot happen without a good deal of self-critique and continuing training and improvement, on the part of the individual presenting the information.

The second approach involves employing an angle that—once the audience is no longer amazed—can lead to even greater boredom as the thrill of the initial spectacle wears off.

A professional will focus on both of those areas, but there is also a third area with which even the most seasoned professional may struggle:

Being tuned into the emotional vicissitudes of your audience through being aware of body language, micro-expressions and other nonverbal cueing can create the daylight between the presenter who arrives in spectacle and leaves in boredom; and, the presenter who gets invited back time after time.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Missing Singularity

We don’t know if you’ve heard, but the singularity is coming.

That moment in time when human beings unite with the technology that we have made and ascend gloriously to the stars…

Unless, of course, some of us decide to not unite gloriously…

Unless, of course, some of us decide to remain late (or non) adopters of the latest technology from the whiz kids at CalTech, Google or even Boston…

Unless, of course, we destroy ourselves—or a portion of the global culture we are rapidly building—in an effort to control or dominate an aspect, not yet going human hand-in-artificial intelligence hand, with technology.

Unless, of course, the human heart remains the same…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-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/

The Truth in All of Us

Honesty is such an ugly word, everyone is so untrue.

Except that while people may be untrue, they are often also unreliable, full of mixed motives and notoriously prone to following their own emotions and senses, rather than inclined provide the truth.

How do we provide the truth to others in love?

Well, there’s no easy way to tell the truth in love.

Major philosophies, major religious figures and even major political and social leaders have gone to their deaths either from telling the hard truth in love, or from not telling the truth at all.

Maybe the real key is to focus less on our struggles against what we think resides in other people’s heads and hearts, and to instead begin focusing on our own internal struggles with our own stuff.

And, the truth, once crushed to earth, will rise again.

-Peace Be With You All-