HIT Piece 10.20.2015 – On Coming Out of The Dip

No one tells you when you’ve come out of the dip.

No one tells you when “the worst is over.”

When a storm passes of epic (or sub-epic) proportions, human beings poke their collective heads out of their collective homes, caves, hovels and shells, and collectively sigh a sigh of collective relief.

Then they repair the damage, pick up the pieces of their lives, their homes, their communities and move on.

Or not.

But the moving on has to come from an internal source. When an external voice tells a person to “move on” or “just get over it,” or “this will all seem better at the end” human beings tend to reject those statements because they feel to the hearer as facile as they sound coming from the speaker.

I’ve said those statements to other people in the dip, in crisis moments, and in the aftermath of trauma. I have said them after searching my heart and my mind for something profound to say that would sum up the feelings surrounding the surviving of a moment, a dip or “when the worst is over.”

I’ve failed miserably and repeatedly said those words to other people.

And now, that I’m coming out of my own year and a half long dip with my business, I feel that those sentiments are just as fruitless for me to say to myself in my own head, on repeat as they are for me to say to others.

No one tells you when you’ve come out of the dip.

No one tells you when “the worst is over.”

You have to hope that telling yourself is good enough to prepare you psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually (not to mention materially) for the next dip.

-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/

HIT Piece 10.13.2015 – 7 Areas Of Influence

There are seven areas–or “rules”–of psychology, studied by Robert Cialdini, “lock in” to each other in a hierarchical, top down structure and create a context for persuasion and influence to be effective. They are as follows:

Reciprocation – the rule that states we should repay, in kind, what another person has provided to us
Commitment and Consistency – the rule that states that once we take a stand, we will encounter personal, interpersonal and social pressures to behave consistently with our position, even if we change our minds
Social Proof – the rule states that we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct
Liking – the rule states that we would prefer to say “yes” to those whom we personally like
Authority – the rule states that we follow orders when people in authority give us orders whether we agree with the order or not, or like the person, or not
Scarcity – the rule states that opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited
Consensus—The rule of consensus states that people need to “be on the same side” (or at least enough of them) to be able to “get to agreement” around an idea

Look again at the seven areas.

Peace building and creating agreements around the negotiation table relies on these seven areas moving together, the next building inexorably on top of the last, so that the other party is convinced that a negotiated agreement is the best outcome for all parties involved.

As I have been writing this blog for going on three years now, the one question I used to get asked the most (“How do you get the energy to do what you do?”) has faded and now there is a sense of a desire for commitment and consistency. Cautious desire for continued commitment and consistency is evident now, when I talk about this blog, and all my other content development efforts. Because after three years, I’ve moved from mere reciprocation (I give you “free” content, you give me your email) to commitment and consistency (I show up and write everyday).

The social media following I have built is partly based on social proofing, but also based on liking and a sense of authority. Because, the thinking goes, “No one would blog consistently for three years about conflict management if they weren’t at least committed.”

The mindset of scarcity though, still dominates many in my audience, and truth be told, I have felt the fear of it as well. But it only comes when I launch something new, like the podcast, or adopt a different perspective on an old area and then publish that perspective.

Consensus is the last on the list, because it’s the last one to develop. Influence grows when consensus is cemented.

Peace builders know all about consensus and struggle against it in their personal, business and professional lives, even as they seek it for their clients and people in conflict.

After all, negotiation is all about getting to consensus.

Right?

The seven areas have been dominate on my mind for a while now as my following and voice grows. The only one I worry about is the consistency one.

Because that’s the only area that I have control over.

Just like it’s the only true area that you have control over in your life.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 10.06.2015

Jack Nicholson asked a question in a movie back in the 1990’s that sums up the fears that I have now.

And it’s a good legitimate question (as far as that can take a movie question), but the premise behind it is ultimately flawed, thus making it not that good of a query.

The question comes from a place of self-agency and fear.

A place of doubt and tribulation.

The question is asked by a character (for after all, Jack is an actor and inhabits a character, not the other way around) who’s movie reality is perilous at best.

But there is truth in fiction. Sometimes more truth, than even in the fact that we live our daily lives in. And, I’m a huge fan of movies anyway, so of course this is implanted in my mind and floats up, unbidden, in times of doubt.

“What if this is as good as it gets?”

Metrics, KPIs, measurements, means testing and outcomes based research are all great for attempting to quiet the deeply animal parts of our brains. The parts that scream at us. The parts that are fueled by fear of the future, a desire for selfish comfort and possess a belief only in our own agency, rather than collaboration with others.

This moment, right now, isn’t as good as it gets. The premise is flawed, and thus the question can be rejected, as well as any conclusions that come forth from it.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.29.2015

Referrals used to be the ‘redheaded stepchild’ of the sales process.

Back in the day (and even with some organizations selling products and services even now) referrals were philosophically relegated to the back bin of the sales pitch. They were (and still are) seen as the fallback position of a sales person who “can’t close” with a prospective customer.

But, now that technology has stolen the one thing that separated a sales representative from the rest of us—information about a product or service—referrals are increasingly seen as the only way forward to even talking to a prospect in the first place.

When I attend meetings and when I network, I talk about what I do very briefly and wait for two things to happen:

The story of what I do to catch up to the other person’s story of what I do

And

The other person to decide that what I do is “too hard for them to explain to someone else.”

At that point, where both of those stories intersect, that is where the referral light begins to shine in their eyes.

Some products and services work better with interruptive marketing, poor customer service and pushy, insistent selling. In many sectors, the number of those products and services are decreasing by the day. There are other products and services that work better based on relationship, stories, referrals and networked connections. The number of those are increasing by the day.

For some of us, this is a scary prospect and there are multiple ways to address those fears. For those of us not bound to dogma and ready to take a chance to do some things that might not scale (i.e. might not “sell”) this is an exhilarating prospect.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.22.2015

You probably don’t have “what it takes” to found a start-up.
You probably don’t have “what it takes” to learn how to play an instrument.
You probably don’t have “what it takes” to build a business.
You probably don’t have “what it takes” to write a book.
You probably don’t have “what it takes” to paint a picture.
You probably don have “what it takes” to do any of these scary things.

So, you’ll probably vacillate, hem and haw, and eventually go work at a 9-to-5 job, consume content other people create through your mobile phone, watch some television and go to bed.

Don’t feel bad.

I didn’t “have what it takes” to do any of the things I mentioned above.

And, in many ways, I still don’t.

So, I just went out and did those hard things anyway.

The people who write, and opine, about how hard it is to do what they do (or how easy it is, let’s be honest) aren’t doing you (or me) any favors. Zig Ziglar said repeatedly over his 50 years long career (which he didn’t think he could do either, and which he started in his mid-40’s) that “There’s always room at the top. It’s getting out of the bottom that’s hard.”

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 9.15.2015

It’s always interesting to watch people’s faces when I talk about exploring the efficacy of attaching market value to emotional interactions.

At first they are confused, as if I’m talking about emotional intelligence. Sometimes, if they get it right off the bat, they are downright hostile. Occasionally, the person will go past both confusion and/or hostility to the question of “How are you going to do that?”

It’s amazing to me how successful the Industrial Revolution was at convincing people of three ideas that are immediately are exposed as false when I begin talking about this area:

The emotional content of work based relationships is meaningless and not worth considering.

The only energy that matters is the energy put behind the process of producing either what we can see, touch, taste or feel (a product) or what we can conceptualize and turn into a product (a service) and everything else is a scam.

The work that people do inside of families, homes, and communities really doesn’t matter, because we can’t quantify it, measure it, or slap a KPI on it, and so it’s worthy of being ignored, dismissed or devalued.

The mechanical/technological process of determining, developing and executing compensation for the market value of emotional interactions, is on humanity’s horizon, even as we speak. Overcoming the fear, resistance and hostility to the material fact of this, will be the true work of nonprofits, charities, and other organizations for the next couple of hundred years.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On 9/11

14 years ago today, out of a sunny blue sky, two planes hit the towers at the World Trade Center.

Since then, the United States has fought two wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—and, as of this writing, a third war might be ramping up to start against Syria.

When an event of the magnitude of 9/11 happens, the typical, talking head tendency is to wax poetic about “what ifs,” “might have beens,” and to mourn the victims while also demanding endless cycles of vengeance.

What tends not to happen is the asking of different questions about the event, or the placing of the event in a geopolitical and historical context.

We in the United States tend not to stop and consider the nature of events that happen to us context, because our nation, for good or for ill, consists of the multi-generational descendants of immigrant populations that had a strong desire to exist outside of history, politics and the past—and to escape those ties that bind by coming to these shores.

But, as a conflict engagement consultant, I believe in two things:

Sometimes war—or conflict—is the answer. It just depends upon what the question is that has been asked.As for the violence and bloodshed that war produces, along with the political, cultural, historical, emotional, psychological and spiritual disruptions, well violence is never inherent to conflict, though managing disruptions is key to navigating toward successful resolutions.
The sins of the past revisit us over and over again in the future until we figure out new ways to resolve them. The 16^th, 17^th and 18^thcentury pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial sins of the British and French Empires toward the Ottoman, African and East Asian Empires, have yet to all shake out and everything that has happened in the first 14 years of the new Millennium is proof of that.

Let us honor the dead, keep consideration of the living and work toward positing more questions that can be answered with peaceful conflict instead of the violent kind.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.08.2015

Whenever I get together with people in a social setting, they ask, “What do you do for a living?”

And I tell them.

Their very next response, depending upon their educational background, is “Oh yeah, I took some organizational development classes when I was in school. They were the best classes I took.”

We talk for a few minutes more about how what I do (engaging with conflict) helps organizations become better at what they do (whatever that may be) and then they wander off.

Or I do.

If organizational development classes are some of the best classes offered through MBA (or other business programs), why are so many individuals within organizations still resolving conflicts poorly?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.01.2015

The drumbeat always starts after August vacation in the month of September, at the beginning of the fourth fiscal quarter of the year.

“If you had worked harder, you wouldn’t be here.”

“If you had planned better, this wouldn’t be so bad.”

“If you had been better with ‘this’ client or ‘that’ client, you would have the call back now.”

“If you had written faster, or better, or with more emotional laceration, then you’d have more followers, clicks, attention, trust, by now.”

It’s the drumbeat of failure. It’s the drumbeat of fear. It’s the drumbeat that leaves me wanting to curl up in a corner and not really do anything for the rest of the day, the week the month, the year.

Speaking and believing in life, success (whatever that means) and moving forward, inexorably, is the key to overcoming all of this. But the drumbeat doesn’t care. The drumbeat wants me to dance, with the steps of anxiousness, fear, and trying to predict a future that I can’t possibly know.

This isn’t about business, or money, or security.

The drumbeat is always about fear, surrender, and playing defense.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 08.25.2015

I am a live streaming video fan in general and a Meerkat partisan in particular.

You probably haven’t heard of the mobile application Meerkat, though its two more popular cousins, Blab.im and Periscope.tv are getting a lot of attention from tech bloggers and online magazines. The Meerkat app “blew up” at SXSW this year because of some shenanigans with the Twitter API, which you can read about here[link]. Part of this is because live streaming video is popular right now as a way to immediately connect with public events and personalities. The other part of this is because live streaming video is the next step in the continuing disassembling of television as a content delivery mechanism.

I like the Meerkat app for many, many reasons. The top two are:

The app integrates seamlessly with Twitter and you can publicize your Meerkat streams to your Twitter followers to grow your audience on two platforms.
The app also allows you to invite others onto your stream to either “host” a show with your viewers or to be interviewed by the host of the “show.”

Now, if you are a peacebuilder in any of the conflict management spaces—from facilitation to coaching to mediation to negotiation—you can probably already see the benefits of live streaming video to grow your business practice, develop a niche following and to grow your brand.

Here are a few thoughts I have around this new intersection between peacebuilders, marketing and technology:

Live streaming a mediation or coaching session to your Twitter/Facebook followers and fans might not be the best way to ensure client confidentiality and build trust, but you might have some clients who would be willing to have their lives placed on view for you to showcase what you do in real time. This would work particularly well if those clients are connected to you as a peacebuilder online.

Live streaming samples of you working (i.e. “This is what a session looks like,” “This is me explaining my philosophy and approach to peace,” etc., etc.) would be a way to immediately get feedback from potential clients and customers around tone, approach and other areas, rather than the one sided bubble of blog writing. There’s already a person on Meerkat who streams his Tai Chi sessions and talks to followers as he’s performing.

Live streaming to build a brand presence requires maintaining the same habits that you have to in order to blog daily: Show up on schedule, on time and engage effectively. This is easier (and harder) with live video than with the more controlled spaces of Youtube, Vine, SnapChat video or any other service that allows you to edit your presentation before uploading the content. With live streaming, it happens as it happens. However, this can be a way to schedule time with another peacebuilder and build an “Oprah” type show via Meerkat that goes on the air everyday and builds a sense of consistency and relationship with viewers.

These are just three ideas I have after messing around with the Meerkat app and researching live streaming video for the last few months. I am sure that some enterprising and entrepreneurial peacebuilder will use this platform (or Blab or Periscope) to begin to explore the possibilities of live streaming for peace.

If not, maybe I’ll host my own show on Meerkat….

-Peace Be With You All-