[ICYMI] Mediator’s Own Rumplestiltskin

Poltergeists can present a problem, whether they are intending to come through your television or spin straw into gold.

Poltergeists these days come through social media, offering multiple spinning wheels, promising to turn the straw of engagement and trust, into the gold of long lasting revenues.

For mediation professionals, trust is the only currency worth having, whether at the table with conflicting parties, or blogging about strategies and approaches to conflicts.

Trust goes directly to relationship in the overall mediation process as well and the revenue generated from that trust should appear as referrals on the trusted mediator’s bottom line.

Or, mediators can just wait on Rumplestiltskin to show up…

-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/

[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/

[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-

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/

[Strategy] It Is Easier…

It is easier to sit and wait for a situation to change because of external circumstances, than it is to do the hard work of failing.

It is easier.

Just like it is easier to ignore conflicts in your midst and act like nothing is going wrong inside of your organization, your family, your neighborhood, or even your country.
Just like it is easier to shrug your shoulders and let “someone else” do the hard work of confronting, challenging and changing your world (in the social sciences we call this the Bystander Effect).
Just like it is easier to put your metaphorical head down, plow forward and only look up when the week is over, the client/customer seems “satisfied” or the “job is done.”

The hard emotionally challenging work of trying and potentially failing is not for the faint of heart. It requires commitment, perseverance, grit, resiliency, accountability and a sense of responsibility to the people, the process, the change and the outcome.

Leaders in organizations that honor this hard, emotional labor flourish. Those in organizations that don’t, falter and eventually quit—quite trying, quit failing, even quit caring.

In our most recent presentation to a corporate group, we encouraged the leaders in the room to lead and to take up the mantle of failure in three ways:

Understand yourself first—We keep going back to it, but from understanding conflict, to understanding leadership, to understanding communication: physician heal thyself.
Care about the process—People don’t lead who don’t care about people, relationships, or processes. This is a tough realization and a man in the presentation came up to us and said “I realize after you said that people don’t lead who don’t care, that I often tell people that I don’t care and that ‘it takes a lot to offend me, so don’t even try.’ Maybe I should change that.”

Yes.

Build relationships—In any organization, whether it’s a family, a neighborhood or a company, we can only successfully lead through building relationships with people, not processes. People change before things.

One last point: Commitment, ethics, integrity and character in challenging the process must be in place before leadership through challenging the process can truly begin. Teach and nurture commitment and leadership will follow.

-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/

[Strategy] Going Viral

Enthusiasm, just like content, can go viral in an organization.

Leaders must be the “Patient Zero” in this scenario; caught by a vision, an idea of what could be in an organization, they then inspire to get constituents to strive alongside them.

Is this always a positive act?

No.

Steve Jobs is lauded for being a visionary leader on projects and product development at Apple, but he was (from all accounts in his biography) a horrible human being. But, he’s in good company: Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, and even Moses and Winston Churchill all had bad habits, poor temperaments and sometimes lacked the words to inspire their followers.

Should leaders be required to take “humanity” lessons before leading?

We don’t know, but without a shared vision—even if that vision comes from the mind of a flawed leader—followers won’t know where to go, and leaders will just walk around in circles by themselves.

How does a leader catch the virus of inspiring a shared vision?

Know your constituents—Know who follows you and understand and acknowledge their deeper “whys.” Steve Jobs did, and so does your local community organizer.
Know your vision—Know what you want to do and why you want to do it. Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, wanted an answer from the Pope about several things. So, he created the medieval version of a blog post and it went viral…
Know your own passion—Know when passion will wane and when it will wax. Moses went off to talk to God in the wilderness occasionally, leaving the people he was leading to their own devices. It helped him.

Speaking the language of virality is the key to spreading enthusiasm. And, in an era of increasingly fractured attention spans, leaders don’t have to go viral to the masses, just to the long tail of truly committed followers.

-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/

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success – Vol. 3

“Well that was a waste of time.”

How often have we either said those words, thought them or wrote a variation of them down?

In the pursuit of mastery, there are no such things as “wasted” hours, days, minutes, or even moments. There are only the things that did work and the things that didn’t work.

The painter, sculpture and architect, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , saved very few of his drawings. When he stared at a block of marble, he saw the material that he would have to strip away in order to release the object trapped inside.

The inventor Thomas Edison said “I haven’t failed. I’ve just discovered 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Or, at least the Internet claims that he said that.

The casual consumer of life, though, often associates failure with waste, and addition with success. We associate subtraction with loss, and “no” with rejection.

But subtraction AND addition both must happen for success to occur. And energy, no matter how we look at through our temporal, corporeal frames of reference, can neither be created nor destroyed.

If Michelangelo, Edison and the Universe can get on board with both addition and subtraction, maybe then we should stop focusing our casual conversations just around waste alone.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Project Work Trap

The savvy peace building consultant looks at project work as another version of the golden handcuffs scenario, they started their project to avoid in the first place.

Work for time is the consultant’s version of not scaling. And, in order to effectively scale such transitive and necessary products as peace, honesty, good faith and courage, project work has to be the minimally viable product.

Developing books, developing processes, developing software applications, developing “train the trainer” processes and more are ways around, through and over the project work trap.

And the savvy peace builder knows this…

-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] 3 Entrepreneurial States

There are three emotional states that can catch hold of the entrepreneurial peace builder as she is building her project:

The fear which is accompanied by every new decision
The exhilaration when a client is helped and “closed’
The dread of returning to working for “the Man”

The employee mindset is built on the idea of stability, predictability and “money that will always be there.”

The employee mindset still dominates, even in our post-Industrial world.

This mindset also tolerates bad behavior, ego driven decision making, and gives away its autonomy for dollars.

The detoxification process than the savvy peace builder experiences as she moves confidently through dread, fear and exhilaration, while also holding onto her employee life, ensures that—once her definition of success is realized—she will never go back to “golden handcuffs” ever again.

And she’ll be no good to any large organization—other than as an equal to be negotiated with, a competitor to be crushed or a morsel to be gobbled up.

The three emotional states—and their impacts— are integral to overcome because the road back to the “golden handcuffs” is a long one indeed.

-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] The Hard Thing About Now Its Too Late

The savvy peace builder is either all in—or not.

But, at a certain point, financial realities take over and the rent must be paid, or the electric bill, and the savvy peace builder must make the choice to make making peace a side hustle.

Now, typically the word hustle comes with negative connotations, but mostly it should be associated with little sleep and much success.

But, when the main work (the 40 hour grind) takes over more and more time and energy from the hustle that matters (the peacemaking pursuit) the savvy peace builder will sometimes kill the side hustle by dividing time away from it even further.

This is how many entrepreneurial ventures end, dissected and subdivided under the scalpel of the 40 to 60 hour work week and the “sure” thing that brings security, a steady paycheck and fewer uncomfortable conversations with spouses and children.

The tough decision—the hard thing about this hard thing—is that diversification of focus and talents leads to more work not less; but making the decision to keep it to one-and-a-half hustles makes all the difference between “man I’m glad I lost sleep to build this project” and “man, I wish I’d taken the time when I had it to build this project. But now it’s too late.”

Now, it’s too late.

-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/