[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/

[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.

[Advice] Temps, Interns & Others

For the average consultant in the area of peace building—or any other area—the temptation to choose yourself to do the work that is required is too easy to pass up.

Unfortunately, then the solopreneur-consultant spends valuable time on projects that could well be outsourced to someone else.

At the other end of the pincer is the consideration of what happens if there are not enough revenues in the project yet to hire another person?

Enter the idea of hiring temporary, contract based help or even interns, or outsourcing some white collar work to some place overseas.

There are different considerations with each of these paths:

Temps: based upon the state that you’re building your project in, temporary employees may be more of a headache to have, tax wise, than hiring a full-time (or part-time) employee. In addition, the freedom to hire temporary workers on a contract basis does not mean, philosophically, that you have scaled. Because when the contract ends, so does the involvement with the temporary worker.
Interns: This is another sticky classification of individual. Many states are now cracking down on organizations for using interns to perform work that used to be done by a full or part time worker. The legal and tax headaches may not be worth it. Plus, depending upon the state that you’re in and the higher education institution that you are working with, hiring an intern to work on a project may not be your best bet.
Overseas Outsourcing: There has been a rise in the last few years of web-based personnel companies that promise to connect the solopreneur to overseas help with white collar business functions, such as accounting, sales tracking or even receipt handling. They promise to do this for a low hourly—or weekly—rate and promise results. The problem with this solution is the element of risk. As in, how much do you really want some “bonded” company hiring people overseas to look at your receipts at 4 am?

There are no easy answers to the hiring questions that many solopreneurs, freelancers, solo consultants and others face in the realm of peace building.

Perhaps a combination of things will work best for an individual.

Perhaps not.

But once you start choosing yourself, the bigger question to ask is “When is it more appropriate to choose someone else?”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success-Vol. 2

10,000 hours is a long time to persevere and continue without gaining competence, much less mastery.

The human mind seeks shortcuts, quick answers and easy solutions, because it likes the status quo and seeks to maintain equanimity and order in a world of chaos and conflict.

Yet, without those hours, every single one of them, there can be no catharsis. There can be no learning.

When we were still actively engaged in the visual arts, we used to hear, “Every artist has 2,000 bad pieces of art inside of them.” This statement was met with incredulity at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true.

And here’s the other thing about those 2,000 bad pages, by the time the artist gets to page 1,999, he—or she—doesn’t care about what other people think about all the pages that came before.

10,000 hours does more than pound the path toward competence and mastery. It forges the will of iron to continue in the face of rejection, dismissiveness, ignorance and misunderstanding.

So that, at the end of those 10,000 hours, the human mind has become used to the very things that it feared.

-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/

Conflict in Your Organization

Have you ever heard the one about the consultant who mediated their own divorce?

No?

Neither have we.

We’ve just heard the story many times before and wondered how much of that could have been avoided with some conversations.

As a professional consultant though, in the area of conflict, or in any other area, you are going to face conflicts in your organization.

There are going to be people who disagree, dissemble and even will attempt to deceive you. Some of these people you will hire and it will amaze you the number of ways that they can harm your organization.

All of this can be avoided by having open, honest conversations about your organization, your motives, your dreams and—most importantly—your goals for their involvement in your project.

You know, the same kinds of conversations that you would have with an intimate partner, so that you don’t wind up mediating your own divorce.

Or, negotiating a firing.

Conflict is inevitable, but the responses to it—and preparation in advance of it—does not have to be.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Firing Your BFF

If you hire your friends because you don’t know who else to hire, and they’re the only ones in your circle that you trust, then you are well on your way to actually having to fire one of them someday.

And, before the successful consultant scales up to employing the person that they used to share ice cream cones with on the playground at age six, there are about three things to consider:

Does the friend that you’re going to hire have the expertise needed to serve your company well, or are they just a warm body filling a space in your organization?
Does the friend want a position because they can actually add value, or are they just there to ride your coattails?
Does the friend have friends that are going to be a headache, or an asset, to your organization if it comes down to having to hire more people?

After the successful, scaled up consultant takes these three things into consideration, no amount of connections, collaboration or previous commitments should encourage a “friendly” hire.

As Michael Corleone once infamously said “Friends and money – oil and water.”

Think about hiring someone other than your BFF, so that you don’t have to hack that relationship to make it work again.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Interviewing for Your Project

The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning.

Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell to others at a price high enough to justify having an employee, only then can you make a hire.

And many solopreneurs/business owners, approach hiring with a mindset grounded in the back end UX they suffered through when they were looking to work for somebody else.

Typically the process goes as follows: You bring people into a room, after putting several of them through a grueling process of assessment—both psychological and sometimes physical. Then you ask them a series of ridiculous, HR designed, pre-formatted questions.

After this, everybody leaves the room and the consultant/solopreneur/business owner makes a blind decision to hire or not hire the people put through the process. This decision typically follows a series of arbitrary, meaningless, showy conversations with partners and others, that have told nothing about how well the potential employee can perform in the position; and, have everything to do with intangible–and potentially illegal to consider–character traits.

This is the interview process and a lot of times both the interviewer and the newly hired individual is dissatisfied with what happened in the room.

Look, if you’ve successfully leapfrogged to business owner from freelancer, then there are three things that you should be looking for before you even think about going down the hackneyed road of interviewing:

Is the person that I am talking to conscientious?
Is the person that I am talking to accustomed to failure and does this person have the grit to get through it?
Is the person that I’m talking to going to fulfill the material needs of my business at a human level?

That’s it. Those are your interview considerations.

Now, you’re an entrepreneur first and a business owner second. Go blow up the model of the process.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Working From Home

The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. Right?

When you’re working from home, there approaches a point of contention, unless you are very clear right away, around what working means and doesn’t mean.

There are children who don’t think that what you’re doing is work.

There is the partner who leaves the house everyday and leaves you with a stack of “Honey-Do’s” that could choke…well…an old gray mare.

There are the general disturbances of the household and addressing household emergencies that crop up during the day, as well as distractions from other forms of entertainment in the home.

The savvy consultant working from home knows that defining lines, particular boundaries and even the well articulated IRS deduction can determine whether success or failure knocks at his door—or at the door of the co-working location two streets over.

-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] Making Yourself Livable With Others

If you are dedicated to building your entrepreneurial business, it’s going to be tough for someone to live with you.

There are two ways to deal with this:

You can hope that your idea is so good, that it stands out above the other 95% of ideas out there in your niche/target market and that customers, clients and vendors in that very narrow space, will beat a path to your door. Then, you will become the darling of Silicon Valley (or whatever valley you find yourself in) and you partner—in life or in business—will just come along for the ride, relieved that it only took 3 years for you and your idea to make the cover of Fast Company or Inc.

Or…

You can take a long, hard look at your idea and determine that the only thing that separates you from everybody else is—well—you, and then talk to your partner—first the life one—and explain to him or her, exactly how all of this is going to play out.

Explain the long nights, the depressive moods, the brushes with financial, emotional and spiritual failure.

Explain the loss of courage and the regaining of it.

Explain that all of this might not work—as a matter of a fact, in the first year there is a good shot it won’t work–and you’ll have to go back to your 9-to-5 to pay back that massive home equity loan you foolishly took out to fund your dream.

Neither way is good, but the most clear eyed, entrepreneurial consultant, knows that she has to have the courage to have this first, most important, sales conversation with her significant partner, before she can have another…and another…and another…

In the meantime, she should get a hobby that is as far away from what she is doing as possible so that she has something else to talk about, other than either being on the cover of Fast Company or her latest near miss.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Talking to the People Who Don’t Matter

The people who never believed in you.
The people who said “that’ll never work.”
The people who mutter under their breath at family dinners or cocktail parties.
The people who write ridiculous, inflammatory comments on your blog.

These are just a sample of the people who don’t matter.

Why, if you’re building a consulting or coaching business, are you still trying to convince them of the rightness of your pursuit, the importance of your ideas or the validity of your life?

The people who fall into these categories (and there are many more) have never mattered to the success or failure of this project you are on.

And, fortunately, they never will.

-Peace Be With You All-