[Podcast] Earbud_U Episode #9 – Anastasia Pryanikova

Earbud_U Episode #9 – Anastasia Pryanikova, Linguist, Coach, Entrepreneur, Writer, Transmedia Storyteller and Visionary

earbud_u-episode-9-anastasia-pryanikova

[powerpress]

Marketers tell stories and mediators hear stories. And this is just the beginning of the story.

Many folks in the field of peacemaking and peace building are trying many different things to get the attention of a world that is changing all around them.

When this works, it’s beautiful, like with our guest, Anastasia Priyanikova.

Her and her partner have developed a start-up focused on all the most interesting parts of the mediation and storytelling experience. The learning part.

And she and her partner are working with a unique collaboration of artists, writers and other creatives helping them produce their best work.

Check out Anastasia Pryanikova online at http://brainalchemist.com/ and check out her learning company start-up, Bookphoria at http://www.bookphoria.com/

She’s got a special offer for all Earbud_U listeners at the end of the interview, so stay tuned for that.

Check out all the additional ways to get in touch with her below:

Email: ana (at) brainalchemist.com
Web: http://brainalchemist.com; http://bookphoria.com/; http://www.lawsagna.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lawsagna; https://twitter.com/bookphoria
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PryanikovaAnastasia
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/apryanikova
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AnastasiaPryanikova/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SelfHelpBookMuse
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/lawsagna/
Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Stamford-Brain-Book-Club/

Download the Latest Episode of Earbud_U!

[ICYMI] No Parking Here

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” – Five Man Electrical Band (1971)

In this week’s post “How to Autopsy a Conflict,” we here at Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) addressed some of the methods which our conflict consultant (and many other mediators and peace practitioners in the field) use to examine conflicts almost after the fact.

There are many ways of communicating in the world today and a conflict communication situation came to us recently and we’d like to address it here, for the benefit of our readers.

In any conflict, both parties have three options in how they can choose to communicate:

They can be nonassertive “What good would it do to speak up?” Or, “Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
They can be passive aggressive: “I’m going to spy on you and then tell on you later to a person or entity up the ladder.”
They can be aggressive: “I am the boss. What I say goes.”

There is an apartment complex in Binghamton, NY, somewhere around the NYSEG stadium where the Binghamton Mets play. This apartment complex has on the street parking.

Typically, a friend of ours (for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll refer to him as C.) parks all the way up to the sign that reads this:

In essence, his selfish act of kindness, provides somewhere near an extra half to full space requirement for the vehicle behind his to park on what is a crowded, on-street parking, apartment living situation.

Now, one would expect such largesse to eventually be rewarded and acknowledged. And it is:

The person who wrote this…well…let’s get a direct quote from C. about this:

“This person clearly has a f—king problem.” (We had to edit that, we’ve got kids reading over our shoulders as we write this.)

Profanity aside, the head consultant here at HSCT agrees. As a matter of fact, we would call this type of communication passive aggressive at best.

Since we are about solutions to this, we have about three for you, our dear reader, our friend C., and the note leaver, that may help alleviate issues like this in the future:

In a previous post, (click here) we addressed getting to know your neighbor.

This would be our recommended course of action in this situation. You may key a stranger’s car, but not a friend’s.

Assertive, not aggressive, communication is the key. A note, left under a windshield with a message on it, provides the first, subtle message that escalation is not only OK, but preferable and acceptable.

Intimidation, fear, closed-off-ness, and anxiety are all present in this note and lay deep in the subtext of C’s feelings as well as his verbalized response.

The antidotes for all of those are collaboration through mutual understanding, clarification of perspectives and by having a rigid goal, but being flexible in the means to get there.

Finally, if you just can’t correct the parking situation on your own, call in a third party: A good friend, the police or the conflict communication and resolution professionals at HSCT.

We’ll take care of it all, from notes to nuts.

Originally published on July 10, 2013.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] How to Autopsy a Conflict

How you get started with clients who need a situation resolved?

What are the steps you take to assess the dynamics?

These are great questions that, in order to answer fully, would require several blog posts covering psychology, sociology, theology, legal and other areas. However we are going to forego all of that.

Instead, we are going to focus on the post-mortem analysis of a conflict.

In the medical field, post-mortems occur when a pathologist must determine the cause of death of a human body.

Autopsies are performed either to answer legal or medical questions and tend to be either external, or the more common one that lay people think of, where a body is broken up and sewn back together.When a conflict communication consultant arrives on the scene, it feels like we are performing a post-mortem. And, in essence, we are performing a relational one.

Three steps are required to perform a conflict post-mortem:

Determine the players and their positions,
Answer questions about their motivations and goals,
Propose solutions that will benefit everybody.

Sometimes the solution involves changing an organizational or personal culture and that approach is what we’re all about here at HSCT.Here at HSCT, we deeply believe that changing your personal culture first can lead to changing your organizational culture.

A conflict consultant (or mediator) is called into a situation where the conflict is alive and well.

As a neutral third party, that person (typically us) has no idea what is going on.

Or, they may have only a tangential idea based off of something they were told by either a third party to the conflict, or a person involved in the conflict directly who may be trying to sway the third party participant in their favor.

Messy stuff.

So, us (or an organization like ours) enters the conflict. Our principal conflict consultant talks to all the parties involved and attempts to determine with at least 50% accuracy the answers to three questions. And yes, this is incredibly difficult.

Here are the three questions:

Who’s lying to us about the situation and their role in it?
Who’s telling us the truth about the situation and their role in it?
Who doesn’t care and wants the situation to “go away” so that they “can get back to their real lives!”?

And yes, in case you are wondering, we have actually had clients say that last one to us.

The answer to the first question—who’s lying— helps us determine what direction we go in to propose resolution to the issue at hand. We may propose a mediation, one-on-one coaching with the conflict participants, or outside resources (i.e. therapy) in addition to whatever else the parties may need.

The answer to the second question—who’s telling the truth—helps us determine who needs the most direct intervention first.

In the case of a conflict involving violence against children, elderly or other individuals who are at-risk, the answer to that question is always, the victim is telling the truth. Period. Once the person being victimized is removed then we can successfully manage other areas of the conflict. Or, disengage from it completely.

The answer to the third question—who doesn’t care—helps us determine who to ignore and whom to persuade as a potential ally to advocate for solutions that may benefit everybody in the conflict.

This is a tough position to take, because sometimes conflict participants say that they don’t care, when in reality they do. Or, they may be saying that they don’t care as another way of saying “I’m emotionally exhausted by this issue.” Conflict avoidance is a way to resolve conflicts, just not a preferable way.

Emotional exhaustion, apathy, victimization, disengagement, deceit, power games, these are all the energies that animate a conflict and keep it going and reproducing, like a cancer in the body.

Asking these three questions allows the principal conflict consultant at Human Services Consulting and Training to make a determination regarding the best path to take to resolution.

Originally published on July 3, 2013.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today.

[Podcast] Earbud_U Episode #8 – Timothy Smith

Earbud_U Episode #8 – Timothy Smith, Speaker, Former Semi-Pro Athlete, Coach, Radio Announcer, Process Performance Improvement Expert, Seeking First to Understand

[powerpress]

Understanding through active listening is the best kind of understanding that a person can get.

But many people prefer to think really hard about what they are going to say next, rather than listening to what the other person is actually say.

Timothy Smith is a performance improvement coach, consultant and facilitator, who, through his proprietary performance improvement process.

And his process seeks to understand before advising, coaching and giving advice. We connected with Tim through a mutual friend and we have become colleagues in the creative process of moving the ball forward on the hardest field that there is: the human heart.

Connect with Timothy Smith via his website: http://www.tdspi.com/Pages/default.aspx

Follow Timothy Smith on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tdspillc

Check out Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdspi

Check out the interview below the blue panel, or download it via Soundcloud, coming soon ->

[Advice] Caucusing Arete – Part 3

Wisdom and behaving ethically often overlap. But most often not always.

In a mediation, arbitration, facilitation or when having a transformative moment with a transgressing client, ethics can go out the window for the professional peace builder. This is because facilitators, mediators, arbitrators—peace builders all—are human.

There is the idea among some peace building professionals that advocacy, evaluation, design and decision-making are not integral to the role of a peace builder, and thus cannot be transformative acts. This idea underpins the much touted ethics of preserving neutrality and maintaining client self-determination.

Evaluation and transformation can happen together ethically between a client and a peace builder, but then what happens to identity, power and the deeper meaning and significance of the work of the peace building fields?

Bernard Mayer and many others have struggled with these questions in the field of mediation, but the real, scary questions lie far outside the field and relate directly to the underpinnings and assumptions about how to create conditions for peace making, or even peace keeping, and how to plot those points as destinations between two conflicting parties.

Is it more, or less, ethical for the power struggles inherent in conflict engagement and conflict advocacy to occur between two parties, than it is for the immediate conflict to be resolved?
Is it more, or less, ethical for clients to be allowed to engage in their personal struggles in a conflict scenario, while having a third party advocate in the room to represent the voices of those not represented by the dominant power structures at play?
Is it more, or less, ethical to allow clients to manipulate the caucusing process, thereby placing third party neutrals in the unenviable position of being co-conspirators in lying, deceit, or other forms of deception that continue, rather than end, power struggles?

The average client involved in a workplace dispute, a divorce mediation, a church power struggle or another conflict/confrontation/difficulty scenario, may not know what is ethical or unethical based on some ancient Greek philosopher’s definition of how the world works.

They just want their world, in this moment, to work.

-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] Trust + Accountability = Quality

There’s a lot of negative social proofing going on right now.

Some of it is transmitted through social media; some of it comes through more traditional means.

Personal branding as a marketing term has fallen out of popularity, now replaced by the equally amorphous term “thought leader” which will soon be replaced by influencer.

Microcelebrity via YouTube, Vine, Facebook videos, and other forms of entertainment are becoming more and more popular, as the inevitability of tools that enable marketers, brands and individuals to create audiences that show up just for them.

The thing is the courage to create and develop a positive, consistent presence in the face of a lack of positive social proofing has never been in shorter supply than it is right now. At the core of this lack are three crucial areas:

Trust: There is a trust shortage. People, personalities and companies that have shown up, day-in and day-out succeed, but will the current crop of YouTube celebrities make it ten more years? And when there’s no belief that the People Who Matter are even paying attention, then organizations and individuals trust themselves more than the community.
Accountability: When there is little trust—or even belief that anything (or anybody) worth trusting will show up in the first place—then there is little incentive for people and organizations to stand up and say “Yes, I made this decision.” Social shaming, a continuing erosion of public (and private) empathy, and the increasing visibility of public (and private) narcissism, are the ingredients that create a toxic stew where Bystander Behavior (or worse) is supported, condoned and given a pass.
Quality: The quality shortage is most loudly evident in the explosion of voices on social media. But it goes deeper than that. In the pursuit of thinner and thinner profit margins, and with high unemployment and social unrest, the search for quality—of work, of attitude, of standards, of values—becomes a quiet, desperate search, which very few organizational supervisors, human resource hiring managers, recently elected politicians or media talking heads, ever really address.

Trust + Accountability = Quality.

It used to be that circumstances, such as poverty, a lack of articulation, a social power structure, were barriers which could be overcome with a little grit, persistence, faith, trust and accountability.

But the belief that underlies those ideas is eroding because the disconnect between the story behind circumstances, and the reality of erosion in the above three areas, is becoming more and more pronounced.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Collaboration and the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is an environmental science concept that cuts to the core of two areas critical to organizational (and personal) conflict management.

The first idea is that there are so many resources available—time, money, talent, etc.—that there will never be a depletion. Until there is.

This conception of material and personnel resource abundance is the reason that black swan events at a macroscale, such as the 2008 economic crash, or at a microscale, such as a wife finding out that her husband is cheating (or vice-versa) hit impacted parties so hard and take such a financial, emotional, psychological and spiritual toll.

The second idea is that once resources are depleted, there is no compelling reason for any one individual to take the blame (or accept the accountability and responsibility) for replenishing them, because “Everybody was taking from it.” In a divorce proceeding (following infidelity), neither party wants to admit guilt—or their own level of responsibility in creating the situation that fostered the infidelity in the first place. After 2008, how many bankers went to jail, globally, in relation to the level of damage their decisions caused?

In an environmental science context, the solution to tragedy of the commons is to fine and otherwise economically penalize people (resource depleters, polluters, etc.) in the belief that a bigger negative downside will lead to greater self-imposed, self-interested, selflessness.

In conflict engagement and conflict management, sometimes it’s best to abandon the commons (the shared relationship, the collaborative enterprise, the cooperative partnership) rather than take on the emotional, psychological and spiritual effort to save the commons.

True emotional labor, however, requires quieting the lizard brain, accepting responsibility for the tragedy (even if there’s no commensurate feeling of a need for the taking of responsibility) and moving forward collaboratively and selflessly with people and organizations that we would really rather not.

Otherwise, who will be left in the emotional commons but the spoilers, the discontented and the selfish?

-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/

HIT Piece 4.28.2015

I’ve been thinking about the depth of change, the nature of adoption and what it takes to move the meter.

As I have moved from mediations (trying to show parties how they can repair a boat with holes in it that may or may not have already hit the iceberg) to corporate training (trying to show parties how to build a better boat in the first place), I have noticed myself becoming more illusioned.

This is the opposite of what I’ve been told should be happening (or what some of my posts from last week seem to reflect here and here) but, instead of becoming disillusioned, I am actually becoming more hopeful.

A participant at a training last week gave me some great feedback. He said, “Never before have I been in a training that was focused on being holistic. In work, out of work, all this stuff that you’ve been talking about can be applied everywhere, to your whole life.”

Yes.

The idea of late adoption versus early adoption in product and service development is based in the power of stories. One group of people tells themselves one set of stories about a product, a service or an idea. Another group of people tells themselves another group of stories about the same things. But, eventually, a culture (or individuals) change, because of the overwhelming weight of one story over another.

Conflicts, confrontations and difficulties are the same way. We built our lives by telling ourselves stories. It’s refreshing in our daily lives (in the middle of the story, starring us) to run across someone who tells you to have the courage to unmake the story (or untell it, if you will) that has ruled your life for many years.

Yeah, I’m becoming illusioned….

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Sorting Emotional Intelligence

In a physical emergency, triage is the best way to address issues.

Originating during the Napoleonic Wars, triage divides wounded people into three categories:

Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive;
Those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive;
Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome.

In a conflict, confrontation or difficulty, people often have no trouble dividing their approaches to relationships in the exact same manner:

Those situations that are not likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to have a positive outcome if I address them as best I can right now.

Many people in their individual lives triage situations, relationships and other people, and mistakenly believe that they are acting with the best interests of other people in mind, and that they are acting within the bounds of emotional intelligence.

When asked, they will swear up and down that they are good at reading other people and examining what conflicts to engage in, what conflicts to avoid, and what conflicts to be neutral about.

Unfortunately, true emotional intelligence takes years of self-examination to master. Somewhere around 10,000 hours. The true test of developing emotional intelligence is moving the inner space from concerns about self (“I triage this situation with these people really well!”) to concerns about self and the other person (“How are we going to triage this situation together?”).

Some people like conflict, confrontation and the feeling of powerfulness that such ability to trigger a conflict or confrontation in others’ produces.

Some people don’t like conflict and will run away at the first hint of even a little difficulty.

Some people are neutral on all of this and genuinely have the ability to triage effectively.

However, in the complex business and social worlds that we inhabit (with complexity increasing rather than decreasing every day); people can rarely afford to avoid, attack or remain neutral when the opportunity for greater, deeper and more meaningful engagement presents itself.

-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] The Decay of Power

We are reading The End of Power by Moises Naim and it puts forth a powerful historically broad thesis.

Moises asserts that power, and the wielding of that power, isn’t what it used to be. That everywhere, from governments to corporations, power is diffusing and becomes diaphanous, even as the results of a lack of concentrated power become more and more disastrous.

His work is a counterpoint to Steven Pinker’s most recent thesis about violence and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s endless dour prognostications about the future and how unknowable it all is.

We haven’t finished the book—yet—but it consistently puts us in the mind of the HBO show, Game of Thrones, when one character says to another “In the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” And then, without putting too much of a spoiler out there, he dies.

Power is fascinating to us as conflict engagement professionals and consultants, because many, many people associate the trappings of power, the results of power either wielded or not, and the lack of power, with the actual fact of power itself.

At the micro-level, where families, communities, neighborhoods and social norming still hold sway, and privilege (racial, class, wealth and otherwise still mean something), power still is concentrated and wielded with terrible ruthlessness. At one end of the spectrum, we have thinkers like Naim, Pinker, and others who assert that the world is changing, and it is.

But too many of us are trapped in our own Game of Thrones. And we still seek out risk-averse, conflict free lives, endlessly chasing peace and tranquility that will calm and quiet our nervous lizard brains at the other end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, the wheel of power goes around and around and around…

-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/