[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/

[Advice] Who Matters When Building Your Platform

For the peace building consultant, getting myopia in the pursuit of success, becomes a natural outgrowth of the work.

But there are people who matter, inside and outside, of all of this:

Family Members
Team Members
Business Mentors
Partners
The Customers/Clients/Buyers
The Audience

We listed those in our order, but other orders will differ, and certain pre-conditions may apply.

The savvy peace builder digs deep when building her project and makes the list. Without the list, there is no forward movement, and then myopia descends into noodling over email for half of the day.

We put the audience at the end of the list for good reason. The savvy peace builder knows that the people who applaud (or don’t applaud, or jeer, or deride, or ignore the project altogether), are not necessarily the most important people in the life of the business.

The savvy peace builder also knows not to confuse the noise of the applause (or the jeers, derision or silence of ignorance) with the importance of the project.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[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-

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/

[Strategy] Platform Assumptions

Distribution platforms are for more than just flooding an audience these days. They are now said to be forums for two-way communication and engagement, rather than one way alleys.

However, this assumes a couple of things about the nature of both distribution and engagement:

The first thing it assumes is that every person to whom an article will be distributed will have an interest in being engaged with.

The second thing is that it assumes that all forums are inherently social and designed for the back and forth that engagement implies.

Both of these assumptions are false on their face and limiting, both to the content being distributed as well as the level of engagement from the audience in question.

Just as every conflict does not need to be mediated, every distribution platform does not need to be a platform for the back and forth of engagement, commentary and opinion.

-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-

[Opinion] The Voice

Before there was ever the written word, there was the voice that was heard.

The oral tradition of storytelling has along and ancient pedigree, dating back to the dawn of humanity and continuing on through this day.

We have invented tools to record or musings, our hopes, our dreams, our poetry, our songs, our defiance and our place.

The human voice carries meaning with which the written word can never fully compete.

And in the new world of podcasting, the technology for recording the spoken word and transmitting it to hundreds and thousands of people has never been less expensive.

We are living through a Renaissance of podcasting as the field expands (11 million podcasts at last count) and as the field does so, more and more people looking to find an audience, gather a tribe, and make some noise, are going to get on the bandwagon.

We’ve been diligently working on Season Two of Earbud_U, the conflict engagement podcast, bringing together interviews with people from various backgrounds and with various experiences, and asking them the ultimate questions, ultimately.

But, Season One is about halfway through and your can hear all of the episodes, featuring all of our guests, by clicking on the links below:

Earbud_U, Episode #1 – Darren MacDonald

Earbud_U, Episode #2 – Jared Campbell

Earbud_U, Episode #3 – Brad Heckman

Earbud_U, Episode #4 – Elin Barton

Earbud_U, Episode #5 – Diane Lange

Earbud_U, Episode #6 – London Ladd

And…

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

HIT Piece 03.03.2015

I am ready.

It’s time to start building something bigger than myself.

The first e-book is coming along, as is the first traditional book, the first leadership program and the first systems design program for organizations.

The first season of the podcast is here, the second season is coming along and the first presentation to a room of over 100 people is coming in the summer.

The first webinar project is coming, the first multiparty project is coming.

And yet…

I have been insecure and lethargic since October. I have been struggling to identify if any of this is working. I don’t know if I am running to avoid failure…or running to embrace it.

What do you think?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The “Willy Loman” Mentality

A “Willy Loman” mentality is slowly growing out there, even as the era of the door-to-door salesman is really about to kick off in a big way.

The mobile phone, and the immediacy with which that piece of hardware allows products and ideas to come to consumers, is the new house door.

Attention spans wane and doors close much, much quicker in the mobile world now, than they did in the physical world of the actual door closing in the Fuller Brush Salesman’s face.

We understand that the dynamism of having to be interesting in seven seconds or less seems daunting, but the same dynamism that depresses, can also allow the savvy, the entertaining and the persistent to scale at or below cost.

That last part is important to remember for those who are daunted, just like it was important to remember when selling vacuums door-to-door.

Persistence in the face of 4.5 billion doors closing in seven seconds or less can be either a deterrent to trying in the first place.

Or, it can be the lifeblood of the salesman that Willy Loman could have been.

-Peace 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/