[Anniversary] Our 500th Post

This is our 500th blog post.

We have written in this space about everything from conflict and best practices, all the way to marketing and “the future.”

We are proud to have our readership increase from just our Mom and family, all the way to people that we have attended our trainings and workshops, people who have become our fans, and people who are watching us from the sidelines.

We have created all of our own content: We write, we research, we network and we collaborate. All by ourselves, and without a team behind us.

We have moved our focus from just writing, researching, and getting our voice out there to the smart distribution of our content to people through multiple streams, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, our email list and our daily RSS feed.

We have also had the pleasure of developing relationships through guest blogging and contributing to ADRTimes.com.

We have transformed how we view content: no longer is it just driven by researching and writing, but now it is driven by information and insights that we gain from work that we do with our clients, employees in organizations, and through talking (and networking) with others in disparate areas, all the way from nascent start-ups to established organizational hierarchies.

We love to blog. Writing is the only way that we can think to move the meter forward on what we do, our process and our philosophies, and our approach to peace.

After two and a half years, here’s to another 500 posts. We’ll be here. Everyday.

Trust us…

-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/

[Advice] 4 Locus of Control Questions

Confirmation bias occurs when a person believes that the situations and experiences they continually run into, reaffirm their persepctive on their place in the world, and their preconceived beliefs or practices.

Conflicts-Are-The-Symptoms

Case in point: When a person looks at the amount in their paycheck every week and mutters “ Well, I guess we’ll always be middle class.”

Or, when a person tells another before a difficult decision, or contlict, “Well, you had to know that Bob was going to react that way.”

Confirmation bias occurs because we want reassurance that the stories we tell ourselves are the only way reality could possibly be organized. This is why we emotionally, psychologically and somtimes even physically, resist when we are confronted by a different outcome someone else has experienced in the same situation. The fact of the matter is, we are in charge of our own stories—and the stories that we tell ourselves—but we often don’t believe it.

This dovetails with locus of control.

Based in studies and research from the 1950’s, locus of control says that some people believe they are in control of their lives, and other people believe outside forces determine the  direction of their lives and their decision making processes.

People with a high internal locus of control believe the world is something they control.

People with a high external locus of control, believes the world controls them.

Confirmation bias reinforces the stories of both personality types: If I believe that I’m in charge of my destiny, then I will continually tell myself the ” I’m In Charge Story.” But if I believe that destiny is in charge of me, then I will continually tell myself the “I’m Not In Charge Story.”

Most often, when things are going well, confirmation bias and locus of control concerns become secondary to a good time. But in a difficulty, confrontation or a conflict around things that matter, confirmation bias and locus of control (both internal and external) can serve as drivers that both intitiate and continue the conflict spiral.

Perceptions, stories and triggers are the fuel in the car of conflict situations, and the only person who can alter the fuel successfully is you. Here are four challenge questions for determining your conflict story:

  • What did I learn about difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict from my family?

Family is the world’s first organizational structure. And many of us learned the wrong lessons from those in charge. But the real issue is that we keep confirming the same lessons repeatedly with others.

  • What did I learn about control over my environment when I left the home?

Formal schooling in (at least in the United States) begins at around 4 or 5. This is when true confusion sets in, and when uncomfortable questions get asked about “reality”—and sometimes hushed up.

  • What messages have I had reinforced through my friends, associates and even the media I chose to consume?

There is a reason that many individuals with high internal locuses of control, refuse to watch the news, choose their friends carefully and are elitist about companies to whom they decide to give their money, time and talent.

  • What messages am I sending out to the world that are reinforcing difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict stories that are no longer relevant to my experience?

If you have succeeded in overcoming a poor story, or have moved the needle on your locus of control, revisiting old stories that are no longer relevant is the surest way to experience the same things over again.

-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] 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/

[Advice] Business Mentors I

Business mentors for the savvy peace builder are just as important for the development of long-term success as are other elements of building a project.

More_Guts_Than_Money

No peace builder can truly “go it alone” but too many get trapped in silos, or behind clients, believing that they will just “learn the building of a business on the fly.”

This never works.

Our recommendation: Design a personal Board of Directors. This should consist primarily of professionals with industry experience who have no emotional investment in the success or failure of your venture.

Then, meet with them once a month (at minimum) and treat them to coffee. Listen to their ideas and expertise, but also keep your own council.

A great resource to begin this process (that’s free) is your local chapter of SCORE (link here).

-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] Who’s Afraid of Blogging?

We are “out here” all the time.

In our professional capacity, we have served (and do serve) as consultants and “advice providers” in multiple areas: marketing, conflict entrepreneurship, Big Ideas and some other areas.

However, whenever there is a discussion about social media/online marketing, and we mention that the core of marketing should be a blog presence, our clients (or trainees) get very, very nervous.

Who’s afraid of blogging?

So, we called up a good friend of ours and he provided some insight that we hadn’t previously considered. In a nutshell, it came down to three things:

  • Blogging is hard because the voice that a person (or organization) writes in, may not be the voice that shows up to do the presentation, make the pitch, address the customer or close the sale.
  • Blogging is hard because there is the possibility that, while “no one reads long form content anymore” someone actually might. And if they do, how does an organization (or individual) “walk back” something that they wrote and distributed.
  • Blogging is hard because it’s a constant challenge to keep up with distribution platforms that “change the rules” every day, the ever shifting eyeballs (we’re looking at you Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn!), and the attention and nature of audience interaction.

Who’s afraid of blogging?

We’ve also been thinking about the idea of content creation vs. consumption, active and passive audiences and how there is “so much noise out there,” which is a constant lament for some of our clients in this area.

The answer to the question is that only a few organizations, people and entities are not afraid of blogging. Everyone else either blogs, tweets, facebooks, or distributes to their own level of comfort and desire to be either an active participant in the social space—or not.

Are you afraid of blogging?

-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] Goodbyes and Butterflies

Everywhere there are voices.

We wonder what the Five Man Electrical Band would have to say about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and on and on and on…

With so many voices, how does a person hear the still, small voice of the inner being?

When we were little children, our Grandmother used to tell us that “God doesn’t box with the world.”

Innate wisdom like that is lacking in the world today. All of the recent talk and interest about mindfulness, meditation and the like is indicative of a deep human desire to shut out the endless external noise and hear a deeper voice.

Historical perspective is something that’s good to note here: our Grandmother must have been in her 60’s when she told us that bit of folk wisdom and the Five Man Electrical Band serenaded us on Goodbyes and Butterflies about signs in the 1970’s, so this isn’t something that just started with social media.

The professional peace builder longs to go to the balcony, and take a break from the noise and shouting, to find the part of themselves that seeks to bring others to peace.

Perhaps this is the deeper reason why some peace building professionals struggle with creating content, marketing and some of the other core practices of entrepreneurship; and, why so many of them shy away from the crowed noisy social spaces, where voices are endless, loud and berating.

-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] A Utopian Singularity

The release of nuclear power was greeted with a mixture of awe and triumph.

 

Splitting the atom was—at one time—the most difficult task that humanity had set itself upon completing.

Once the atom was split, however, and the power released from that act was applied to the making of war and the destruction of human lives, in order to—ostensibly—prevent the loss of other human lives, humanity recoiled in horror at that which we had accomplished.

Robert Oppenheimer’s words at the Trinity test ring down through to our time: “ Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

And now, we have arrived at yet another linchpin moment in human history. Just as the act of splitting the atom and releasing it’s energy was supposed to bring humanity closer to a utopian peace, we are now at a moment where very smart people are promising us that we are ready to release the potential of AI and many other technologies.

They promise us a jobless future of endless prosperity, with at least our basic needs completely fulfilled.

They promise us a future of 3D printed food, self-driving cars, predictive machines that will learn what we need and provide it to us without question.

They promise us a future where there will be haves and have-nots, but that they line between the elite and the commoners will be the same as those who can defeat—or prolong—their own deaths through genetic manipulation, and those who know that the technology is out there to do this, and cannot get it.

But, in the midst of all of these promises—remarkably similar to the many promises made to humanity by well meaning smart people (like Robert Oppenheimer) before we released atomic power—they do not ask the truly existential questions the release of such technologies creates:

What’s most disturbing to us is that none of the really smart people in genetics, neurobiology, data analytics, computer and software technology or any of these other fields, seem to be interested in sitting down with a few philosophers, religious practitioners and policy makers to even discuss the questions in the first place.

To quote another famous man: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Humanity’s progress is too important to be left alone in the hands of the very smart people.

-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/

[Opinion] Build Your Own House

When living in a house that someone else has built, there is always a sense of something that could be better, roiling around underneath the veneer of “being comfortable.”

Walking around in that house, the renter (or person paying the mortgage) always notices nails sticking out, annoying rough edges and corners of door jambs and knobs, cabinets that are the wrong height and colors of the walls that are “off.”

But, most people put up with those irritations in a house, because…well…it takes a lot of technical—and emotional—knowledge, to design your own house, to your own specifications, that’s comfortable for you.

It’s the same thing with the houses that we have built on top of the virtually property space of the web: social media platforms, apps, websites and many, many other items.

Too many clever people in the web space complain too much and too loudly, about the houses they are paying rent to live in. And as clever as they are, they are not picking up a pen, a ruler and sitting at a slanted desk, to design and build something of their own.

In order to develop the web past where it is now, we need more clever people building houses, versus renting houses.

And the amount of real estate is always expanding…

-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] The Cranberry Sauce Has Stuffing In It

On Thanksgiving Day in America, it’s tempting to look at the whole thing as merely a set-up for the coming commercialization and endless marketing of Christmas.

However, the first Pilgrims didn’t look at it that way and neither did the Native Peoples who helped them celebrate the day.

Individually, Thanksgiving is wrapped up in visiting family, traveling to the table and avoiding conversations about things that matter, in favor of things that don’t.

You know…to keep the peace.

Papering over conflict in life didn’t work for the Pilgrims (they transitioned from a commune based system of economics and social ordering to a market based system after a hard winter of near starvation where no one worked) and it won’t work for you in 2014.

Acknowledging differences with respect, maintaining traditions and honoring symbols are at the core of the Thanksgiving tradition.

Let us also remember, that the triumvirate of holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years’—are positioned on the calendar to remind us that thankfulness, redemption and new beginnings are due to everybody, not just those who are part of our immediate tribe.

-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/

[Opinion] Who Will Hire The Bigots

In a world where talent and ability matter more than character and virtue, what is an old racist to do?

Donald Sterling, former owner of the LA Clippers behaved abhorrently in many ways over the years, which was well documented everywhere:

  • in court documents,
  • among close friends and business associates,
  • even by a fractured, distracted, ADD-ridden, news media.

But until his comments were recorded surreptitiously and then played back, not one iota of an issue was raised.

He was even given an award by the NAACP.

But now that the dust has settled on that unrepentant old racist, what are we to think of his sudden change in fortune?

In this current incarnation of American culture, talent and ability trump character.

And character and virtue seem to only matter as they publicly buttress innate talent and ability.

See Tiger Woods’ fall from grace as an example of this.

When culture giveth position, power, accolades and applause, culture can also taketh away.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are Sterling, Woods, former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich not human? Do they not bleed?) But a desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when character is linked exclusively to talent and ability forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

Because everybody fails.

Particularly the envious.

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com