The Top 3 Hard Things

The hard things are the very things that appear easy.

Active listening seems easy. It’s easy to be engaged, totally focused on the content of a conversation or an interaction. It’s easy to pay close attention to what another person is saying, or doing, in the moment.
Active engagement is the easiest thing in the world. It’s easy to be engaged with a situation, a conversation, or a person whom we love and care about.
Active participation with your life, with another person’s life or with a critical situation is the easiest thing in the world.

But, it turns out, in a world of fractured attention spans, media distractions and fancy technical tools, attention, engagement and activity come at an embarrassingly high premium.

And we all make private choices (reflected publicly in our social media posting choices) about what events, people and places we give the most precious resource that we have–our attention–and then, when the world “explodes” the first question we ask is “Why didn’t I know about this?”

Well, we could have paid attention and could have known, if we had really wanted to…right….?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
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] Presenting to the Audience You’ve Been Dealt

Consultants and coaches never really choose the audience in front of which they will present.

It is impossible to go inside the mind of each and every individual in the room and determine their motivations, needs, desires and wants.

For the professional consultant or coach—at a certain point—you’re always kind of just winging it.

In fact, the smaller the room, the more intimate the setting, the more winging it looks like a lack of preparation, concentration and expertise.

Which, of course, has the effect of reducing trust and increasing the likelihood that the audience will turn on you.

Don’t worry about the audience that was chosen for you. Worry more about developing the tools to present effectively no matter who—or how many—show up to see you present.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Not Boring People to Tears

When presenting, varying pitch, tempo and word order can help a consultant or coach not bore the audience to tears.

So can having a really awesome twist on a really boring and basic idea, concept or problem solving approach.

The first approach takes time to develop and cannot happen without a good deal of self-critique and continuing training and improvement, on the part of the individual presenting the information.

The second approach involves employing an angle that—once the audience is no longer amazed—can lead to even greater boredom as the thrill of the initial spectacle wears off.

A professional will focus on both of those areas, but there is also a third area with which even the most seasoned professional may struggle:

Being tuned into the emotional vicissitudes of your audience through being aware of body language, micro-expressions and other nonverbal cueing can create the daylight between the presenter who arrives in spectacle and leaves in boredom; and, the presenter who gets invited back time after time.

-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/

The Missing Singularity

We don’t know if you’ve heard, but the singularity is coming.

That moment in time when human beings unite with the technology that we have made and ascend gloriously to the stars…

Unless, of course, some of us decide to not unite gloriously…

Unless, of course, some of us decide to remain late (or non) adopters of the latest technology from the whiz kids at CalTech, Google or even Boston…

Unless, of course, we destroy ourselves—or a portion of the global culture we are rapidly building—in an effort to control or dominate an aspect, not yet going human hand-in-artificial intelligence hand, with technology.

Unless, of course, the human heart remains the same…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-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/

[Strategy] Death By Powerpoint

Multiple skills are required to be successful as a conflict resolution consultant, but none are as important as presenting and pitching.

Corporations, non-profits and other groups are used to presenting using Powerpoint as a way to anchor their points.

We’ve all been through the presentation that was similar to dying by a thousand cuts, when Powerpoint (or FlipChart, if you prefer) is misused with piles of text, a mish-mosh of images and a lack of successful communication.

There are three simple rules for avoiding death by presentation boredom, which we didn’t pioneer, but that we use in our presentations, whether we use Powerpoint, FlipChart or even Prezi.com:

10 slides in a deck = 15 to 20 minutes of presentation material
3 bullet points at 30 point font size so that even the eyes in the back can see the bullet points
1 image per slide, because anything more is confusing and disorienting.

As a consultant, the Zen of presentation comes about when you know your stuff, and can convince a group of people who think that they know your stuff, that you know it infinitely better than they think you do.

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers: [download id=”2414″] and [download id=”2390″].

-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/

Garage Sale Mediation

Garage sales are the closest that many people will get to the retail experience in their own home.

A number of items in the household are determined to be of value—sentimental, monetary, emotional or utilitarian—and then they are selected and sold to others.

The display of items is critical—the better the display, the better a chance of the homeowners actually selling the items —as is good weather and other conditions that are outside of the homeowners’ control.

Customer service is, of course, the primary driver throughout the sales process once items are actually displayed outside the house.

Kids of all kinds, as well as friendly pets, are used to establish a connection with anyone who drives up and says “Hey. What do you have for sale?”

Various websites, such as Ebay, Backpages and Craigslist, have taken over many of the more ineffable marketing and advertising pieces of the garage sale experience, but the sales process itself remains the same as ever.

Mediators and peacemaking professionals would do well to keep the aspects of garage sales in mind as they build their projects:

Keep it simple with a few high profile items
Don’t be afraid to let things go (how many unsaleable items do you then drop off at Goodwill or Salvation Army)?
The sales process from opening to closing relies on being personable, engaged and maintaining a friendly disposition throughout.

Kids and pets sometimes help as well.

Just some things to keep in mind.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

The Political Body

The monumental conflicts of the 21st century will revolve around who owns your privacy.

Think about it: When you engage in social sharing–and, increasingly all of the Web works because you decide to share pieces of yourself with others–you tacitly provide approval and permission to your personal life.

Carol Hanisch had it right, but not the way that she thought. The body even is going to be turned to the benefit of the social Web, collected data, and politicized privacy.

But the core question remains: Who owns you, your data and even your body? Women have a right to choose, but does everybody have a right to privacy in spite of wanting access to the social web, wearable and even methods of payment, that collects their data?

Intriguing questions, and ones that are already being asked, but not answered, by ethicists, moralists, lawyers, philosophers and others. We know this: where there are no easy answers, black and white seem to be the only ways forward.

Which leads inevitably to more–not fewer–shades of gray.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

[Advice] Networking, Word-Of-Mouth and Marketing You Can Afford

For the consultant the three most valuable forms of marketing are as follows:

Networking
Word-of-Mouth
and Referral.

Let’s break those three down from the most valuable form of marketing to the least valuable, because we approach them a little differently than many other consultants operating in this same space, no matter what the field.

Everything is networking, from the sales funnel conversations to any random email, we approach every opportunity to connect with somebody—client, customer, fan or follower—as a potential networking opportunity.

Does this mean that every contact will give us cash in exchange for services?

Absolutely not.

As a matter of fact, 95% of all of our networking never ends in a sale.

Disheartening? Maybe. But it’s our most valuable form of marketing, because the more people we get in front of the better the exposure we have and the stronger our story becomes.

Then there’s number two:

Word of mouth is possibly the least sexy way to make a sale.

After all, no film or television show ever popularizes the interaction where a person states that, “Oh yeah, Susan is a great person. You should work with her.”

But, word-of-mouth comes about because of a job well done, a client well satisfied, a blog post well written, a networking conversation well handled or an “I don’t know” honestly said.

You know. The really unsexy stuff that happens in between the cracks of the business.

Finally, referrals are great, but here at HSCT we don’t chase them as a primary marketing driver.

They are very hard to get and are based on trust, time and relationship.

They don’t come because of a blithe turn of phrase or a perspective well stated.

Referrals as a marketing tool are the furthest down the funnel, because they are the most expensive to buy and are the least easy to afford.

Networking is the most valuable form of marketing that a consultant has when building a business. Word of mouth can only come after networking and thus becomes the second most valuable form of marketing. Finally, referral is the least valuable form of marketing, not because it can’t be mastered, but because it tends to be promoted as the easiest one, and is really the one based on years and years of the other two.

-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/

[Opinion] The 10 Year Overnight Success

The road to any kind of success in any field or endeavor is scary, narrow and full of switchbacks, failures and dashed dreams.

Having the courage to pull the trigger in the face of uncertainty, disruption and defeat is the primary driver of all successes.

Living the courage in our heads to do the things that success requires is not the position of strength.

The position of strength is the courage to perform the acts in the human heart that might lead to uncertain outcomes.

The solution to the disconnect between attaining success versus the courage to do the hard things with integrity, lies deep in the human heart.

Oh…if we had known this, we might have seriously considered taking ten years to become a watchmaker.

-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/