[Advice] What to Do After You Thin-Slice

Thin slicing happens when the human mind shifts quickly through first impressions, intuition based on past experiences, and current information, and makes a judgment about a message, a person, or an idea.

Thin slicing is at the root of snap judgments, continuing conflicts, nagging disagreements, and fights that never seem to go away; it is near to the root of our “fight,” “flight,” and “fear” reactions.
Thin slicing is at the bottom of the contempt that we have for people and ideas without knowing why we feel that; it is at the bottom of the disgust response; it is at the bottom of most divorces, and other traumatic relational breaks.
Thin slicing is at the core of the old saying “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.”

The moment after you make a judgment—and mostly snap judgments are the first judgments made—is the most important moment, because without training and constant vigilance, thin slicing and snap judgments are often not examined, second-guessed, or unpacked.

The training, constant vigilance, and self-awareness to examine your own thin-slicing process, opens you up to feelings of empathy, understanding, and to the uncomfortable feeling of being consciously incompetent.

Particularly as you wrestle mentally, emotionally, and spiritually with a challenging idea, a person who was raised differently than you were, or to current information that supersedes past information you believed was right.

The media likes to ask the “gotcha” question of electoral candidates and celebrities, “Do you have any regrets about ‘x’ decision?” Many political candidates, and celebrities, when asked that question, tend to respond historically with words which reveal a lack of training, a lack of constant self-questioning and minimal mental, emotional, and spiritual vigilance.

Yet, here’s the challenge: If you can’t even handle being challenged on your thin-slicing tendencies on a daily basis, then expecting that a candidate running for office, a celebrity, or some other person to do what you cannot, is a childish expectation.

In a world where the penalties for making the “wrong” decision, are higher and higher, it is incumbent upon you, me, and everyone else, to start being more vigilant after we’re done thin slicing our world.

-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 2.23.2016 – The Book Trailer

My book, Marketing For Peace Builders: How to Market Your Value to a World in Conflict is one step closer to being completed today.

I recorded a book trailer (link here), laying out some important points from the book, and encouraging you to get on the pre-order list.

After you’ve watched the trailer, send me an email with the subject line: PRE-ORDER list and I’ll add your name to my list, no questions asked.

Then, closer to the end of February (which is fast approaching) I will be at the end of the proofing cycle and will open up pre-orders for people on the exclusive list only!

I’ve already got a few names, but I’d really like to add more, because I think that peacemaking and money making shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

Because I think that getting the word out about a path to peace is critical and the only way that peace builders can do that is with a stream of consistent revenue and consistent clients.

Because I know that peace building is hard, marketing and business development is even harder, and that there are no “silver bullet” solutions—no matter what the Internet tells you.

Because I know that relationship based, permission marketing is the only way for the relationship oriented, peace builder to make a mark on this conflict-ridden world with their message.

And…

Because I know that you want to go along with me on this amazing journey, one step at a time.

So, send me an email. Join the pre-order list. And let’s make peace together.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Self-Deception Game

There will always be the option to drink your own Kool-Aid.

There will always be the option to continue believing that “everything will just ‘work out’ somehow.”

There will always be the option to avoid doing the hard work of being uncomfortable while learning a new competency (consciously unskilled) and to just continue reacting to conflicts in ways that have always worked for you.

There will always be the option to continue to be self-deceived into believing that when disagreements, disputes, and fights arise that the best way to react is the way that you’ve always reacted.

There will always be the option to continue to be surprised, follow directions, avoid responsibility, never challenge the status quo, and to continue to avoid absorbing new information.

There will always be the option to disengage, or even worse, to engage selectively with people, situations, and messages that you “like” and that are comfortable for you to understand, accept, and integrate into your worldview—because they already confirm your worldview.

The systems of communication, and the economies of scale growing inside of them, that we are building and the new ways of connecting, are not going to grant outsized rewards to worldviews that are willing to choose among the above options.

In fact, the worldviews that those options represent will continually be exposed to the antiseptic sunlight of other views, shining through the new communication systems that we are constructing.

My grandmother used to say “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” But there will always be the option to construct your own truth—no matter your worldview—in the face of challenging conflict—and hope that it all works out.

Somehow…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Candy Coated World

There is a lot of advice floating around about how to build a better world. Most of the advice though, is similar to that one M&M candy in every bag which when bitten into, collapses revealing nothing underneath the candy-coated shell.

The leaning on symbolism—the candy-coated shell—rather than focusing on the hard work of developing substance—the stuff inside of the M&M—creates confusion, frustration, miscommunication, and more conflict rather than less.

By leaning on symbolism rather than substance, authors direct audiences to bite into the candy-coated shell of nutrition less advice, based in rules and religion, rather than relationship and doing the hard work.

This can be frustrating and unsatisfying, particularly when audiences are looking for advice about how to address a conflict in their lives.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Relational Resonance

Resonance is a term from physics that describes what happens when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Resonance occurs in nature when an object vibrates without you even touching it. Resonance happens when people fall in love with each other; and, resonance shifts when people fall into conflict with each other.

The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance. When the frequency gets disrupted by an external change, the resonance goes away and the struggle to resolution really a hero’s journey back to resonance. Litigation changes the frequency of the relationship between individuals and between individuals and organizations, from one of commonality and vibrating at the same frequency, to one of vibrating at different frequencies.

What does all of this have to do with the conflict resolution professional?

Creating stories that resonate with audiences and clients who are seeking to get back into relationships with resonance, is one of the most important skills that peace builders must grasp in order to design, market, and promote products, services, and processes that will get them revenues.
Creating resonances is about getting to the same frequency—at the same time—that audiences and clients are no matter when and where they are in conflict. Thus, peace builders must consider whether advocating for early-stage interventions (rather that primarily trying to promote late-stage resolution products and services) is a better way to proceed long-term.
Creating the conditions for conflict resolution professionals and audiences to speak the same language—and thus be on the same frequency, will require conflict resolution professionals at all levels to abandon the higher language of “conflict as an opportunity for growth” and move toward the audience language of “conflict as a roadblock to be avoided, accommodated, or attacked.”

The first two are easy. The last is hard.

Peace building is about doing the hard things, doing them well, and doing them consistently—and in a committed way—and building a field and a brand over time that audiences will flock too, that clients will gladly pay money for, and that peace builders can hand down to the next generation of professionals.

Relational resonance must move from the table between clients and the peace builder to the platforms between peace builders and the world.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Bad Ideas

The equation is simple: Talents + Knowledge + Skills + Effort = Strengths

Talents are non-teachable. They are naturally recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that can be productively applied in a person’s life. Effort is also non-teachable. Effort is based on intrinsic motivation, as well as extrinsic influencers.

Knowledge is teachable. In the context of understanding what you’re good at, knowledge is simply “what you are aware of.” Knowledge is a combination of life experiences, plus academic knowledge, plus gut intuition. Skills are teachable. Skills are the capacity (not necessarily competency) to perform the fundamental steps of an activity—whether at work, at school, or at home.

That’s the academic part. Here’s the lived piece.

My strengths are in being contextual and looking backwards to the past in order to look forward to the future, gathering disparate information together from various resources, walking through life deliberately and carefully, analyze and solve problems, and think about how to find the shortest, best route to success for people.

In a list, they look like this

Context
Input
Deliberative
Restorative
Strategic

What this really means in practice is that I have a lot of bad ideas. A lot. With these five strengths, a combination of talents, knowledge, skills, and effort, I have been rewarded (not necessarily financially rewarded) in the space of many places. Without knowing where, and what, your strengths are—what you’re good at—you will have no idea what to do with all of your bad ideas.

The things is, in developing conflict engagement processes, services, and products, knowing your strengths and where your bad ideas come from, is critical for the market success of the savvy peace builder.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Projects for the Peace Builder I

It’s not easy to do what I do, if you’re a peace builder—a negotiator, a lawyer, a social worker, an educator, or an executive director.

It’s not easy to manage social profiles, blog regularly, connect with clients, fans, audience members, and event participants in ways that can grow your brand.

It’s not easy to keep up with changes in marketing, digital content creation, traditional marketing, and the worlds pf publishing, podcasting, privacy, and security.

It’s really not easy if you’re a peace builder that is struggling between the poles of “I just want my business to work” and “I just need my clients to pay me.”

Well, I’ve got some projects that are upcoming that might be of help for the peace builder:

The book, Marketing For Peace Builders: How to Market Your Value to a World in Conflict is coming out in March. I am taking pre-orders for the book right now and will send people on the list a pre-order copy if you send me your email address at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com

As a follow-up to the book, I am designing a series of workshops that will cover the material in the book, and provide updates, interactions, and engagement opportunities for peace builders. I have not decided how this series of workshops will be facilitated—in-person, online, etc.—but if there is enough interest, it’ll happen.

As another follow-up to the book, I am redesigning the HSCT website to reflect the importance of the book and it’s materials. I am launching another podcast the Marketing For Peace Builders Show, in late 2016. This will be a podcast featuring interviews from marketers, business development experts, and others who have taken their peace building brands and businesses to the place of connection and engagement.

Finally, I will be launching a LinkedIn Group—Marketing For Peace Builders—that will be a place for peace builders, marketers, and others to connect, engage, ask and answer questions, and to promote services, products, and processes that will plug-in to the peace building community in a positive way.

And that’s just the start.

I don’t believe that peace making and money making should be mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe that academic programs in the fields of dispute and conflict resolution can continue to churn out graduates who can’t pay down their student loan debts.

I don’t believe that the fields of peace building can continue to be a rump, human resource process—considered only after litigation, but almost never before—in organizations and societies in the Western world, even as disputes, disagreements, and fights continue to escalate.

I believe that the fields of building peace are at a zeitgeist moment right now, at the intersection of marketing, content creation, relationship building, and the only way forward to our future as a field is to grab the marketing moment, right now.

Would you like to join me in this moment?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 2.16.2016

Here’s an update…

I listen to a lot of podcasts. A LOT.

One of the better ones out there for entrepreneurs, thougth leaders, and others that isn’t filled with Silicon Valley hype, or “unicorn” nonsense is the Stanford Entrepreneurial Podcast series. This podcast allows real entrepreneurs to advance their ideas, and increasingly has been a platform for venture capitalists and others to come to Stanford.

Mitch Joel continues to care about his industry, marketing, the changing nature of work, and innovation. His Six Pixels of Separation podcast is beyond interesting and it drops every Sunday. Oh, and he just had his 500^th episode. Talk about longevity in the podcast medium…

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is actually trying some revolutionary things with their branded content in the podcasting space. From Science Fridays to Stuff You Oughta Know, they have managed to brand their sound, their host approach and interview style, and even the types of questions that they ask. Public radio may be on the decline in cars, but it will survive (in one form or another) on the Internet. The podcast I listen to—and am consistently fascinated by—is Death, Sex, and Money. Hosted by Anna Sale, the podcast cuts to the heart of things left out of polite conversations.

Adam Carolla is building a pirate ship. All that means is if you don’t like his podcast, then it’s not for you. This is the best possible approach to building content with the tools that the Internet provides, particularly if you don’t want to be beholden to corporate sponsors, the whims of mercurial audiences, and the dictates of “good” taste. Listen to the Adam Carolla Show and find out what I’m talking about.

Podcasting is a medium of relationships, engagement, collaboration, and a place to build a brand, drip by drip. Thank you to all who are out there putting out their craft.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Great Sorting

On President’s Day, it’s useful to remember that meaning and mattering matter more now than ever before.

This is reflected in the shift from important impersonal interactions at scale to important personal interactions between individuals. Meaning has always come from relationships and the community and family has always been the first incubator for the rules and traditions of relationships.

But the family incubator is breaking and changing—and has been for some time now.

This breaking and transforming leads to conflicts, disagreements, and disputes that loom beneath larger relationships with their power, their virulence, and their ability to last. Mattering generated through disagreement—what we are against as opposed to what we are for—is the great sorting, occurring as societies and cultures shift from a post-Industrial Revolution landscape to whatever comes after that.

When meaning and mattering only come from the narrative of conflict, the pure function of dysfunction becomes the call of the day, and the larger narrative shatters into a thousand pieces of glass.

What are we to do?

Relationships between people are still going to be the key to overcoming the dysfunction of the broken incubator of family, tribe, and community. Relationships, no matter the overall structure behind them, still matter more than the gossamer of tradition, economics, location, or history.

Narratives between relationships are going to become more strained and less collaborative because the difference between your tribe’s meaning and my tribe’s meaning matters more than the similarities we may share across tribes.

Meaning and mattering will become more elusive to attain, and harder to maintain, as the bonds that used to hold—tradition, family, religion, even the nation state itself—fray from the edges to the center, and those in authority (presidents, politicians, prime ministers) lose their power (but not their authority).

People seek meaning above all else, whether through conflicts, or through relationships. Joining across artificial boundaries pushes this meaning through conflict and relationship to a whole new frontier for humanity.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Work + Job = Labor

68.5% of employees in American workplaces are either actively disengaged or not engaged with the work that they are doing at all.

This is due to many issues and factors, including the absence of support from other people in doing the labor that matters most. Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, don’t often think that emotional labor has much value because it’s not easily measureable, quantifiable, or knowable.

The other factor that causes employees to either actively disengage or just not engage, is a lack of understanding about the difference between work, a job, and labor. For far too long we have confused those three terms. So let’s get some clarity:

Work is passion. It’s the thing that lights up an engaged employee in the morning. Some employees are engaged by tracking numbers on spread sheets, and some employees are engaged by dealing with difficult people. The vast majority of employees are disengaged with work that they didn’t start being passionate about in the morning, and will forget the second they get home.

A job is series of tasks for which employees get paid. But then again, maybe not. Employee’s jobs are often confused with the term work. However, tasks rarely get employees engaged in the workplace due to gaming of the internal organizational reward and promotion system, strong at the workplace social sanctioning, and continual conflicts between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for accomplishing tasks.

Labor is the combination of work (passion) plus a series of tasks (job) that spool out across the overall life of an employee. The term “labor” is often only used in the economic sense to describe a series of discreet outputs. But, for the not engaged or actively disengaged employee, labor is a continual drudgery, full of disappointment, stress, conflict, and confusion. Labor is something to be abandoned as soon as the workday ends, and dreaded as soon as the weekend closes, to be put down with relief at retirement.

Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, as well as organizations on the whole, have a social responsibility that goes beyond sharing profits, engaging in wage transparency, or working collaboratively within a local, national, or international context. They have the responsibility to their current and future employees, to create opportunities for engaging in work that will dovetail with individual passions, in the pursuit of a lifetime of long-term emotional labor.

Otherwise, social conflict, organizational collapses, and fewer and fewer outsized rewards accruing to an ever shrinking pool of employees, is one of many possible, conflict-filled futures.

-Peace Be With You All-