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/

The Truth in All of Us

Honesty is such an ugly word, everyone is so untrue.

Except that while people may be untrue, they are often also unreliable, full of mixed motives and notoriously prone to following their own emotions and senses, rather than inclined provide the truth.

How do we provide the truth to others in love?

Well, there’s no easy way to tell the truth in love.

Major philosophies, major religious figures and even major political and social leaders have gone to their deaths either from telling the hard truth in love, or from not telling the truth at all.

Maybe the real key is to focus less on our struggles against what we think resides in other people’s heads and hearts, and to instead begin focusing on our own internal struggles with our own stuff.

And, the truth, once crushed to earth, will rise again.

-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/

[Advice] 3 Truths of Innovation for Human Failures

Working in the space of forgiveness and reconciliation has exposed us to some unusual truths, that people and organizations experiencing conflict situations in the more “concrete” segments of our world–such as the workplace, or the school–would rather ignore.

The first truth is that people in conflict are truly people and bring all the dimensions of people, including spiritual ones, to bear in a conflict, no matter the location of that conflict situation.
The second truth is that many segments, organizations, and profit-centers in our Western culture would prefer to ignore those spiritual dimensions and how they play into conflicts spirals.

This is based upon the mistaken belief that spirituality only occurs between 9am and noon on Sunday mornings.

Or not at all.

Ever.

The third truth is that high conflict people have a spiritual dimension that rules their behavior, based in deep seated beliefs, past experiences, and deep seated traumas and that no one engagement–or workshop attendance–and learning of new skills will “fix.”

Our “move fast and break things” approach to innovation and disruption is fine in the world of physical objects such as technology, but falls miserably short when addressing the issues that real people bring to the table when they are organized into groups of larger than three to accomplish a task.

There’s no app, or cybernetic/Internet of things, revolution that’s going to address these three truths.

The only way to get there is to delve deeply, truthfully and uncompromisingly, into the human heart.

Download the new FREE eBook courtesy of Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT), on Forgiveness and Reconciliation by clicking the 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: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

3 Easy Pieces

There are three areas to cover before the mediation process can begin:

Once a mediator is established in these three areas, then a negotiation to a settlement can begin.

-Peace Be With You All-

On 9-11

13 years ago today, between 8:46 am and 9:03 am two planes hit the both the North and South towers of the World Trade Center.

The ripples from that event are not done going out yet into the pool of years that will compose the remainder of the 21^st century.

The results of those events—and the consequences from our decisions in response to those events—are shaping our lives, our governmental policy and our societal responses to everything from social justice to economic policy.

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-

The Other 95%

Nonverbal cueing involves 95% of human communication efforts.

Professional speakers and presenters realize, at a professional level, what many people know at an amateur level:

What you say with your face and body matters more than what you say with your mouth.

In a dispute resolution process, nonverbal cueing is far more important to coming to resolution that anything that either party may say.

Mediators’ nonverbal cueing can protect the agreement process, or reveal doubt about either the participants or the resolution itself.

Eye contact, micro-expressions and body language are the grout in between the tiles of conflict resolution processes that can either ensure that an agreement remains adhered to by either party—or can ensure that no matter how many “yeah, yeahs” are given, the agreement will fall apart.

-Peace Be With You All-

Arbitrary Colors

Railroad engineers decided in the 1830’s that red meant “stop,” white meant “go” and that green meant “caution.”

Now, the idea of red indicating danger goes backward in history, beyond the Roman Empire itself and no one is really sure whether natural or social evolution is the driver here.

So, it’s arbitrary. We could just as easily have decided that green meant danger.

Well, wait a minute:

When we are angry we talk about “seeing red.”
When we are talking about conflicts we sometimes use the term “blood on our hands.”
When we talk about war, the banners of war tend to be the color red.

Even our blood is red.

Humanity has embraced the color red in an arbitrary manner that is indicative of how we embrace conflict. It is no coincidence that our language around conflict is colored red.

Marketing is the most arbitrary practice in any organization, though the outcomes can be objectively measured through analytics and metrics.

Just as the metrics of stoplights and “go” lights can be measured in the reduction of traffic accidents at a particular intersection.

Conflict communication management—and it’s unmentioned cousin, reconciliation—is considered equally arbitrary, but the outcomes of training, workshops, interventions, discussions and feedback, can be objectively measured through sophisticated analytics and metrics.

But, too many organizations would still rather arbitrarily pick a color for a stop light at the intersection of their workplace conflicts, rather than purposefully pick a series of solutions based on measurable, agreeable outcomes.

The hard work in an organization is not picking a stop light color. The hard work is agreeing that there should be a color for the light at the intersection in the first place.

-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/

Failure is Not an Option

It turns out that the most important trait for success for children is conscientiousness.

Conscientiousness now has become the third positive character trait for success in life along with grit and empathy.

Empathy is a core trait of emotional intelligence, in that it requires us to abandon self to try to get into the skin of others.

Raising children who are conscientious—even in this world—and who will find a way through failure without damaging others, is the only way to bring about the next great moon shot.

You know that place where failure is not an option.

-Peace Be With You All-

Unbundled Civility

Let’s have an honest talk about the good old days.

And, please bear with us. This is going to go a little long.

Civility and discourse seem to be on the wane as the instantaneous nature of communication becomes more and more ubiquitous in our everyday lives.

It appears as though society has traded civility, good manners, good breeding and other elements of moral and Godly character, for an increase in perceived authenticity, the freedom to air our “dirty laundry,” and unload embarrassing baggage, not only on social media, but increasingly in the workplace, the church and the school.

Along with this comes the exchange of grace and forgiveness for the freedom to judge any mismatch of words and deeds, to take measure and revel in spectacle.

Thus, incivility becomes a new form of pornography—briefly gratifying when we are being “true to ourselves” and emotionally “authentic” at the workplace meeting table–but leaving behind a wake of emotional, psychological and moral damage upon others.

George Washington diligently copied in school 110 maxims for proper behavior, that were initially hand written and passed down from Jesuit scholars in the 16^th century and were titled Biensance de la Conversation entre le Hommes (Decency of Conversation among Men).

They come from a time before the 21^st century, when social conduct was considered more than just a sign of good breeding. Proper social conduct then, was part of the pavement on the road to success, along with grit, conscientiousness and perseverance.

But what about now?

Culture is changing because of three things:

The speed of our communication
The irreverence of our communication
The disruption of long standing social mores

The conflicts of the 21^st century in organizations of all kinds, will be between the vocal minority (also composed of the silent majority) who will hold to the rules of civility in discourse, no matter what the platform.

And those who will appear to be the majority (who may in fact be in the minority) who will throw the rules out in favor of the illusion of freedom, authenticity and the easy path.

-Peace Be With You All-

Most Valuable Battleground

Is anyone listening?

Reading well, listening thoroughly and responding appropriately are the hallmarks of working through the minefield that is adult interaction.

However, our brains are changing demonstrably through intersection and interaction with the internet, social media and mobile devices.

The brain already processes information twice as fast as a human being speaks it, and thus attention wanders and multitasking becomes a way to keep the brain engaged and to avoid boredom, rather than to actually accomplish tasks of merit.

Listening well and maintaining eye contact is critical, but as face-to-face communication has degraded, eye contact becomes the hallmark of a valuable conversation.

The bunker that we have built inside of ourselves is cracked through eye contact, listening well and responding appropriately, but attention—true attention—becomes the most valuable battleground in the 21^st century.

-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/