[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/

‘All right. All right. All right.’

We laugh at movies featuring the 35 or 40 year old who won’t leave the parents’ house and get a life.

We believe that the current Best Actor recipient once starred in a movie centering around such an animating theme.

But failing to launch (or even failing to recognize the oncoming signs of failing to launch) is not just the provenance of Hollywood scriptwriters and actors, it is a real occurrence in the real world of corporate boardrooms and small business back rooms.

Typically, this failure coalesces around an idea, an innovation or a project that doesn’t get enough organizational political support, organizational money or organizational time. This most obvious failure to launch shows up on the cover of the industry magazine, or as a hit piece on a blog or social media.

But failure to launch also happens quietly, under the radar, lurking like a submarine beneath the conflicts between people in the workplace. And it’s a moment that is so fleeting—so ephemeral—that it’s missed almost all the time.

The failure goes something like this:

Sharon and Bill have a disagreement about a project in which they are both invested. Sharon can’t see Bill’s point of view. Bill thinks Sharon is being obstructionist on purpose. But before Sharon and Bill can really get into it, they both pause—maybe at the water cooler in a conversation with another person, maybe in traffic on the way home—and they have a moment where the thought “Maybe I’m wrong here,” flits across their minds.

Like gossamer.

And just like that, it’s gone. Along with the twinge of regret and disappointment—as well as an oncoming sigh—accompanied by each parties’ resolve, hardening to “Do what is right. For the company.”

The question that makes consultants uncomfortable to ask—and employees and employers uncomfortable to ponder—is the question that on the face seems confrontational and too direct, but underneath is probing. Aiming at the dark heart of what happens in—and out—of the cubicle:

“Have you ever failed personally at resolving a business conflict?”

Or put another way, “When was the last time you failed to launch?”

-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] Making Yourself Livable With Others

If you are dedicated to building your entrepreneurial business, it’s going to be tough for someone to live with you.

There are two ways to deal with this:

You can hope that your idea is so good, that it stands out above the other 95% of ideas out there in your niche/target market and that customers, clients and vendors in that very narrow space, will beat a path to your door. Then, you will become the darling of Silicon Valley (or whatever valley you find yourself in) and you partner—in life or in business—will just come along for the ride, relieved that it only took 3 years for you and your idea to make the cover of Fast Company or Inc.

Or…

You can take a long, hard look at your idea and determine that the only thing that separates you from everybody else is—well—you, and then talk to your partner—first the life one—and explain to him or her, exactly how all of this is going to play out.

Explain the long nights, the depressive moods, the brushes with financial, emotional and spiritual failure.

Explain the loss of courage and the regaining of it.

Explain that all of this might not work—as a matter of a fact, in the first year there is a good shot it won’t work–and you’ll have to go back to your 9-to-5 to pay back that massive home equity loan you foolishly took out to fund your dream.

Neither way is good, but the most clear eyed, entrepreneurial consultant, knows that she has to have the courage to have this first, most important, sales conversation with her significant partner, before she can have another…and another…and another…

In the meantime, she should get a hobby that is as far away from what she is doing as possible so that she has something else to talk about, other than either being on the cover of Fast Company or her latest near miss.

-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] Talking to the People Who Don’t Matter

The people who never believed in you.
The people who said “that’ll never work.”
The people who mutter under their breath at family dinners or cocktail parties.
The people who write ridiculous, inflammatory comments on your blog.

These are just a sample of the people who don’t matter.

Why, if you’re building a consulting or coaching business, are you still trying to convince them of the rightness of your pursuit, the importance of your ideas or the validity of your life?

The people who fall into these categories (and there are many more) have never mattered to the success or failure of this project you are on.

And, fortunately, they never will.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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/

[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.

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: 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-

At This Point…

…what difference does it make?

This is a question that lies at the midpoint between successfully realized failure and rationally justified escape in any conflict.

We ask ourselves this primarily because we believe that we will fail to resolve a conflict in our favor (or in a way that reconfirms our position—no matter how flawed), so we feel justified in giving up.

We surrender, in some cases, to our basest nature and/or we let circumstances take over a situation that could be well under our control if we engaged with a little self-awareness, a little less self pity and with a little more courage.

We don’t judge the motives of the former senator and former Secretary of State in making this statement, but we do note that many, many people, significantly less prominent in the history of the, world have muttered this quietly to themselves.

-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/