Negotiating With Outrageous Confidence: The Diplomacy Issue

Recently, we keynoted the Ithaca College 2014 BOLD Conference.

We had a great time talking with the student attendees at the conference about negotiation and performing that act of active asking, well and with confidence.

And not just confidence, but outrageous confidence.

We have found in our entrepreneurial journey, that too many people—the majority of whom are women and/or members of minority groups—don’t ask for what they want even meekly, much less outrageously.

But, after the keynote, a point was raised to us, around the issue of using the tactics of outrageousness to boost one’s self-confidence, in order to gain only win-win outcomes.

The person wanted to know about how to maintain diplomacy when going into a negotiation while also maintaining equanimity with self—and others—while also maintaining self-assurance.

This is a great question and, in the context of the wider world, the answer is that, the spate of recent college graduates “asking for too much” or “being unwilling to work hard for advancement” does not spring from a great well of self-assurance.

Instead, both of these meta-employment-phenomena are occurring in response to the messages that older, job holding generations, have provided an entire current generation. These messages have been absorbed and we are beginning to see the results of that absorption.

In the context of the smaller world of the keynote, however, we would respond by noting that, of course there are times in a negotiation, any negotiation, that the cost of disrupting a potential future relationship, must be weighed against the benefit of moving toward a win-lose outcome.

But, until many more people (including women and minorities) begin acting with a little more self-confidence, self-awareness and even outrageousness, we believe that encouraging others to ask period, rather than to not ask for too much too soon, is the better route.

-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] Coming out of The Dip

The peace building, consultant solopreneur can’t wait until they are “in the mood.”

The fact is, the person building a project, always goes on, whether they feel like it or not.

Case in point:

Last week was not a great week for me; I would like a mulligan for last week.

Nothing went right.

The majority of the days of the week, I wanted to stay in bed and roll over to the other side. I didn’t feel like it.

For the peace building, consultant solopreneur, with no employees, that’s the dip.

Yet, this blog had a new post written, published and distributed every day.

Yet, my children got dropped off at school every day.

Yet, my clients got me on the projects that I was contracted to be on.

Yet, my three new projects for next year also continued being planned and steps were made to move forward in their execution and implementation.

When the peace building consultant solopreneur hits the dip—that moment when that person would rather be in bed, than be out in the world making an argument, making an impact, or making a difference—the hard things is to get up and just do it anyway.

As human beings in an economic and social world only beginning to recover from the hangover of the Industrial Revolution, our responsibility is to do the hard, unsexy things and to motivate ourselves first.

Or, to quote James Altucher, just show up.

That’s how you work, grind and—ultimately escape—the dip.

-Peace Be With You All-

Motivation and the Seven Second Attention Span

The well documented decline in the ability to focus has everybody who can focus for more than 7 seconds talking about it for at least the length of a book manuscript—or the length of a blog post.

But, the real estate worth fighting over, for our money, is not focus, but attention.

Focus happens after attention has been attracted. And, with so many forms of noise distracting the masses from messages that may or may not be beneficial for them, attention is at a premium.

But not focus.

Yes, we realize that the immediacy of social media responses and the immediacy of Internet based information has created concern that the human brain is changing—and it is—but the real battle is still not focus.

The reason we believe that the decline in focus is a symptom of the current Social Age, and not the disease, is because the core of attention, intrinsic motivation, has always been—and will always be—a limited resource.

And while we don’t personally believe that resources are limited, we know that society has been arranged to bring into reality the belief that while attention is limited, internal motivation should be limitless.

And yes, we have seen the neuroscience research around attention and focus, as well as the research around Pavlovian operant conditioning, punishment and reward studies and other behavioral studies since the 1950’s.

But, we still hold that as our technology has increased, from the oral tradition to Twitter, there has always been misplaced concern over focus rather than attention.

We really should have a few more books and blog posts about motivation…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Active Listening as Post Modern Art

Paintings, music, stories, and speeches used to be considered artistic pursuits; but, in a world consumed with art as entertainment and media, listening carefully becomes an artistic effort on its own.

In a networking situation, the artistic dance to truly beginning to connect with another person, involves actively listening.

Words are like brushes and the canvas is the networking event. But the person at the event is the artist.

And in a world of shortened attention spans, artistic practice has to filter into everybody’s life, not just the vaunted few who have a TED Talk, or make a movie, or cut a “hit” record, or paint an image in a museum.

Our advice to you: Listen carefully.

Honesty in Human Memory

As they fade into the rearview mirror of memory, events of the past tend to be mythologized, canonized or misremembered entirely.

On a global scale, the one class of people who used to rely on this fact of human memory—politicians—are finding it difficult to deal with the current state of constant remembering that’s going on with the Internet and social media.

On an individual scale, we still have the expectation that other people will forgive us our trespasses, even as we can forever hold their trespasses against them, with the help of our new tools.

However, all of this electronic remembering hasn’t led to more honesty. In fact, as the tendency toward tribal social sanctioning has grown exponentially to a global scale, there are more and more media driven conflicts over who owns the narrative, rather than whether or not the narrative was honest and truthful in the first place.

This is part of the core reason why the masses no longer really pay attention when it’s revealed that someone—most importantly politicians—lied about something consequential, because honesty is no longer the coin of the realm.

Instead, who owns the narrative, for the next 24-48 hours, is what’s important. After that, well, the masses can repost in their Facebook feeds all they want, because it won’t matter whether truth (capital “T” or small “t”) was served or not.

At an individual scale, cries of hypocrisy still ring out, but the sound grows hollower with each passing year, as individuals learn from the masses, that ownership of the story is more valuable than the veracity of the content.

-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/

[Advice] Temps, Interns & Others

For the average consultant in the area of peace building—or any other area—the temptation to choose yourself to do the work that is required is too easy to pass up.

Unfortunately, then the solopreneur-consultant spends valuable time on projects that could well be outsourced to someone else.

At the other end of the pincer is the consideration of what happens if there are not enough revenues in the project yet to hire another person?

Enter the idea of hiring temporary, contract based help or even interns, or outsourcing some white collar work to some place overseas.

There are different considerations with each of these paths:

Temps: based upon the state that you’re building your project in, temporary employees may be more of a headache to have, tax wise, than hiring a full-time (or part-time) employee. In addition, the freedom to hire temporary workers on a contract basis does not mean, philosophically, that you have scaled. Because when the contract ends, so does the involvement with the temporary worker.
Interns: This is another sticky classification of individual. Many states are now cracking down on organizations for using interns to perform work that used to be done by a full or part time worker. The legal and tax headaches may not be worth it. Plus, depending upon the state that you’re in and the higher education institution that you are working with, hiring an intern to work on a project may not be your best bet.
Overseas Outsourcing: There has been a rise in the last few years of web-based personnel companies that promise to connect the solopreneur to overseas help with white collar business functions, such as accounting, sales tracking or even receipt handling. They promise to do this for a low hourly—or weekly—rate and promise results. The problem with this solution is the element of risk. As in, how much do you really want some “bonded” company hiring people overseas to look at your receipts at 4 am?

There are no easy answers to the hiring questions that many solopreneurs, freelancers, solo consultants and others face in the realm of peace building.

Perhaps a combination of things will work best for an individual.

Perhaps not.

But once you start choosing yourself, the bigger question to ask is “When is it more appropriate to choose someone else?”

-Peace Be With You All-

Trust Me

“Trust me. I got this.”

If there is any other phrase that precedes a sense of oncoming dread and mistrust, it’s this one.

If there is a statement that preceded eventual conflict more than any other, we aren’t aware of it.

Trust, when freely given, often operates as a noun, describing a person, place, thing or an animal. In such a context, trust transforms a relationship from one level and moves it into a far more intimate level.

However, in the above statement, trust transforms from a noun to a verb, requiring the giver to transform into a passive actor in their own drama. In such a context, trust transfers control from an active actor, engaged with their own outcomes, to another active actor whose motives may not be—well—trustworthy.

The sender of the phrase is looking to reassure the receiver and, typically, this sentence means that the reassurance is not working.

The professional peacebuilder should probably avoid the transformation of trust from an active noun to a passive verb, unless the relationship that she is building is long-term enough to warrant such a change.

Otherwise, she’s just asking for trouble.

-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] 10 Year Overnight Success-Vol. 2

10,000 hours is a long time to persevere and continue without gaining competence, much less mastery.

The human mind seeks shortcuts, quick answers and easy solutions, because it likes the status quo and seeks to maintain equanimity and order in a world of chaos and conflict.

Yet, without those hours, every single one of them, there can be no catharsis. There can be no learning.

When we were still actively engaged in the visual arts, we used to hear, “Every artist has 2,000 bad pieces of art inside of them.” This statement was met with incredulity at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true.

And here’s the other thing about those 2,000 bad pages, by the time the artist gets to page 1,999, he—or she—doesn’t care about what other people think about all the pages that came before.

10,000 hours does more than pound the path toward competence and mastery. It forges the will of iron to continue in the face of rejection, dismissiveness, ignorance and misunderstanding.

So that, at the end of those 10,000 hours, the human mind has become used to the very things that it feared.

-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/