[Advice] Broadcasting, Sharing, and Interacting

There are subtle differences between broadcasting, sharing, and interacting in any conflict scenario.

Broadcasting is what live streaming and most posting on social media is about. Broadcasting is an act that—by itself without more thought behind it—is deeply selfish and desirous of attention for its mere existence. Broadcasting a suicide attempt, or broadcasting a cat video, fall into this same category.

Sharing is what much of blogging, email newsletter creation, and some social posting is about. Sharing is an act that—by itself without more thought behind it—begins a collaborative communication process between a creator and their audience. The audience can be a Dunbar’s Number of close friends, or it can be an audience of a few thousand “followers” but sharing is about skimming the top of a building a collaborative relationship.

Interacting is what broadcasting, plus sharing, plus intentionality, is about. Interacting involves going past merely acting to prove the existence of a product, service, philosophy, or process, and goes directly to creating for an audience and their desires. Interacting means engaging actively with everyone in the audience (even those people we’d rather not engage with) and is the penultimate act of courage.

In a conflict, broadcasting is the equivalent of telling a story about your conflict repeatedly, in order to create separation between “us” and “them.”

In a conflict, sharing is the equivalent of attending training and hoping that you remember one thing that you can apply afterward.

In a conflict, interacting is the equivalent of going beyond telling your story and attending training, and taking the time and effort to personally engage with personal development around your responses and reactions to conflicts in your life.

Broadcasting, sharing and interacting are happening at all levels in our society; and, our digital tools have provided us with the ease of communicating faster and faster. But this also means that our responses to conflicts in our lives become more shallow and immediate, even as the reactions cut us emotionally at a deeper and deeper level.

[Advice] The Law of Average

It used to be ok to be, well, “ok.”

It used to be “ok” to do good enough work at home with your kids, in the neighborhood with your community, and in your church with your time.

It used to be “ok” to just show up, do what you’re told, don’t ask too many questions, and be the nail that hammered itself down.

It used to be “ok” to not do the little extras, to not give a little more, to care only at the level you were comfortable caring at and to devote little or no time to thinking about why that was ok.

And in this time, when things used to be “ok,” political world leaders still were elected and assassinated with regularity, wars still were started and ended, products were still invented and sold, television programs, the newspapers, and other forms of communication tools still worked to get you information. And people still lived and died, marketing still worked, and scandals still intrigued the masses.

So what happened?

The Law of Averages says that in a sample of any kind, from neighborhoods, to marketing campaigns, the statistical distribution of outcomes among members of a small sample must reflect the distribution of outcomes across the population as a whole.

The law has always been a fallacy, based on observed, personalized experiences that are then transposed to a much larger (or sometimes different) population sample. And the rules that the industrialists, the marketers, the politicians, and the policy makers created in the 20^th century (and that they are mightily trying to recreate in the 21^st century) are responsible for the massive belief in the law of averages.

But, wishful thinking is not reality. And the reality is, it was never good enough to just be “ok”: whether at your job, at communicating in conflict situations, or at creating a project, or taking a risk. And now, because of technological shifts that have been long remarked upon and analyzed, the fallacy is being exposed at mass, for what it is.

It’s not good enough to be average at communicating in a conflict scenario.

It’s not good enough to just show up at home, at church, in your community, or at work.

It’s not good enough to not go the extra mile, do the extra thing, and take the extra time, even if you don’t get paid for it. Especially if you don’t get paid for it.

It’s not good enough to disengage from what’s going on in someone else’s political, economic, spiritual, or financial reality because “that doesn’t impact me over here.”

Wishful thinking that “it will all be ‘ok’” doesn’t work anymore (and never really did), because it won’t be “ok.” The cultural, social, political, and financial machine that used to guarantee that “ok” would be good enough, is breaking down.

Its only individuals (not the masses at scale) who can choose to do the hard work that moves humanity collectively from merely “ok” in our emotional, spiritual, and material interactions with each other, and moves us to better, and finally to best (or most remarkable) in the world: meaning the world individuals inhabit on a daily, weekly, yearly basis, not the whole wide world.

Navigating the tension between the desire to passively slip into the anonymity of “ok” and the need to actively move from “ok” to better to best, is the place where engagement—personal and meaningful—must happen in the 21^st century if humanity is to become the best version of humanity it can be.

-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/

HIT Piece 5.10.2016

Seers.

Psychics.

Prognosticators.

All of them are false, phony, fallible, and human.

Trust me.

Nobody knows anything about how tomorrow—whether literally tomorrow or five years from now—is going to happen.

But the socially sanctioned comfort provided by either breathlessly predicting Armageddon or predicting Paradise outweighs the reality of individual people who relentlessly do the work, every day, regardless of what the external circumstances are—and no matter how personally Apocalyptic their worldview and frame may be.

Gradualism, eating the elephant one bit at a time, taking the time to focus: These are not flashy traits, and they don’t make for a raucous Twitter feed, a stunning reality show, or brilliant social media newsfeed. But a personal lifetime that matters, is made up not of repeated, breathless predictions, but instead of plodding, professional, daily work.

There will always be predictors (currently backed up by Big Data) and with computer algorithms and artificial intelligence on the horizon, the gap between prediction and failure of a specific prediction to come to pass (or the accuracy of the prediction coming to pass) will get smaller and smaller—probably narrowing down to a statistical meaningless difference. This will be most helpful with weather patterns and mathematical constructs—less so with people.

But the work, the plodding, professional, unsexy, work is what will matter.

And in the end, there will still be people whose life work, life focus, and lifetime professionalism will defy all the predictions of seers, psychics, and updated, Big Data bloated, statistical prognosticators, and will still be unpredictable, surprising, and ultimately, delightful.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Haters

The critic who has never produced anything…other than criticism.

The dilettante who has never done the hard work of going deeper…except in going deeper into dabbling.

The professional noticer who only notices the negatives…and begrudgingly gives space to the positives.

The Internet troll or commenter who takes perverse pleasure in commenting negatively…but who’s own personal life is in shambles.

There have always been critics, dilettantes, gossips, trolls, and commenters whose only job in the tribe is to maintain the status quo by determining who’s “in” who’s “out” and whether it makes a difference or not. And in a world where the masses mattered and the opinions of a few people could make or break the launch of your product, this function served a golden purpose: separating the wheat from the chaff.

The world has moved on though (as it always does) and the role of the critic, the dilettante, the professional noticer, the troll, the gossip, and the commenter, have to shift from curating for the masses, to curating for the small group. The function of social curation is never going to stop, but the audience that used to applaud public curation has moved on (as it also always does). This is reflected in the increasing ubiquity of trolling and the decline of constructive criticism.

And when the performer is conducting a show, the professional noticer, and the impolite troll are lumped into the general category of “haters.”

In a new communications world, in the midst of the fourth mightiest revolution in human history, the artist, the impresario, the performer putting on the show, has the power to shun the haters and their attempts to culturally curate through shaming. This is a hugely unremarked upon power shift, that has implications beyond communication in the digital realm:

What if it didn’t matter what the person in the other cubicle over thinks of you when you resolve that conflict?

What if it didn’t matter if you showed your humanity at work by treating people like people rather than like objects?

What if it didn’t matter how much revenue you made in dollars, but instead it mattered how much goodwill you could engender in the people who matter?

What if laboring emotionally was rewarded financially rather than looked upon as an outlier, or a spillover effect?

What if the statements and pronouncements of the critic, the dilettante, the professional noticer, the troll, the gossip, and the commenter couldn’t hurt your business because it’s really not for them, never has been for them, and never will be for them—and that was ok?

What if not scaling because you don’t have to please everyone at mass anymore, just a few hundred thousand people, really was the way to create engines of economic, cultural, and social growth?

What if the critic, the dilettante, the professional noticer, the troll, the gossip, and the commenter had to add something to the world and be vulnerable themselves, instead of trying to recapture an element of lost power that was an illusion in the first place?

What if you could hug your “haters,” but shun their shame, and grow from that emotionally, spiritually, and financially?

What if in every communication scenario, we started calling people’s bluffs, and having them really stand up, take responsibility and accountability, and encourage creativity from the challenge of saying “this is who I am, this is what I’m making” and let the work be on the line, rather than letting their inner selves be on the line?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Are Your Core Values?

There are values.

There are beliefs.

There are principles.

Values are what we are willing to put our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honors on the line to defend, protect, and advocate for. Values are based typically in a moral or ethical code, or standard of behavior, sometimes enforced by society and culture, but much of the time determined privately by individuals.

Beliefs are what we really think, down deep, past the words that come out of our mouths. Beliefs are a core part of the stories that we tell ourselves about the values that we have. Beliefs are about trust, faith, and the confidence in something (typically values) that will come to reality.

Principles are the combination of values and beliefs. Principles serve as the fundamental truths that are the foundation of a chain of reasoning that leads to a set of manifested behaviors that shape our realities. Principles are bedrock, they are eternal, and they sound like positions when we articulate them.

But they are not positions (which are often about personal (and sometimes public) identity or maintaining “face”) nor are they about interests (which are often flexible, negotiable, situational, and impersonal).

There is little productive talk about values using anything but position-based language, designed to inflame people, rather than unite them. There is even less productive debate about beliefs using anything other than language designed to conjure up images of religion, rather than relationship. In both cases, the use of persuasive, argumentative, anchoring language is designed to separate people from each other (which is easy), rather than to engender deeper introspection (which is hard). And too often in our public language, at work, at school, in social media, and other places, we use the language of principles to talk about positions—or even worse–to justify behavior based in mere interests.

Don’t let people fool you. There’s plenty of hard, emotional work in introspectively determining what your values are, articulating to others what your beliefs are, and in figuring out how both of those are walked out in your lived principles.

But there’s no glamour. There’s low (or no) pay. And there’s often no audience. But it’s when there’s no glamour, pay, or audience to put on a show for, that we discover what really lives at our core.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Priority Management vs. Time Management

You can’t get more hours in the day.

I can’t get more hours in the day.

Neither can anybody that you know.

But have you looked at your priorities lately? Have you examined the choices that you make that reveal the priorities that you have?

Your p riorities matter more than how you spend your time. But this is tricky because, while it may be obvious to us (and everybody else) what our priorities are when we choose what to have at lunch between a roast beef sandwich or a vegetable dish, it’s only obvious to us (and not so much to anybody else) what our priorities are when we choose between being engaged or disengaged in a conflict.

Priority management reveals our deepest choices, desires, and motivations around, under, and above, the thing we talk about valuing the most—our time. Talking about the choices that undergird our priorities is not sexy or exciting. It’s sharp, cutting, and sometimes embarrassing. Which is why it’s easier to write about being productive, or “managing” time, rather than training adults in how to prioritize their lives by examining the stories they have chosen to create around their lives, and the lives of others.

Like many things in our lives, the thing that matters even more than our priorities (which are revealed after we make a decision) is the narrative we tell ourselves about our priorities before (and after) we make the decision to act on them. Or not.

To go back to the previous example: You may choose the roast beef sandwich because you think that meat tastes better because you were raised in a household where meat was eaten 3 times a day. Another person may choose the veggie dish because they think that the roast beef is too fatty and salty, and they’re trying to lose weight and eat better because they want to sit on the beach without embarrassment in August.

So, one makes roast beef, or veggies, the priority, then they order lunch in a blink, and they don’t beat themselves up over it.

But the story changes when the stakes are higher, like in the story we tell ourselves about what we do at work, the work that we have chosen to do, or the tasks we are asked to do at work. The story changes when we have to choose between priorities at home, and priorities in the community.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] What’s On Your Billboard?

If you show me your checkbook and your daily calendar, I’ll show you your priorities.

This basic truth is difficult (not hard) for many well-meaning people to accept, which is why time management, productivity, “hacking,” and other terms have come into the Internet lexicon over the last few years.

In the workplace, the industrialists’ idea of greater and greater productivity being encouraged through the adoption and integration of labor saving/time shaving devices and machines, has led to a revolution, going on since the 1970’s at least, where the work people used to do is now being done by machines—whether they be hardware or software.

But the rub is that all those employees still feel squeezed for time. Squeezed even as work and life more and more overlap and intrude upon each other. Squeezed even as the current generations in the workplace demand more meaning and mattering in even the performance of menial labor. Squeezed even as the new, post-modern, post-industrialist creators, digital geniuses, and the financial manipulators seem to accrue more wealth, while those who didn’t get in on the ground floor, seem to accrue fewer and fewer rewards.

If you show me your checkbook and your daily calendar, I’ll show you what areas of your life get the most of your attention.

We can do very little about the creators, the digital geniuses, or the financial manipulators, but we can do something about the areas that are near to us. Our checkbooks reveal the stories we tell ourselves about our money. Our calendars reveal the stories we tell ourselves about our time. Because, while we may not all have the wealth of Warren Buffet, we all still have the same number of hours in the day that he does.

And this is where the friction—the intrapersonal conflicts—really lie: Many of us believe the story that the industrialists of the last century told us repeatedly about our money, and our time. The story is that time = money and if you’re not working to get paid, and if you’re not productive in the way that they want you to be productive, then your priorities are skewed. And whatever time you have leftover in the day is a gift from them.

The labor movement fought against this thinking, leading to the creation of unions.Unions effectively used the language of rebellion, and changed the language of priorities, in favor of those who were working. But now, in the face of a post-industrialist economy, individuals making their own priorities paramount matters more than either the story on life support of the industrialists or the clever linguistic jiujitsu of the union representatives.

If you show me your checkbook and your daily calendar, I’ll show you what’s on your personal, interior billboard.

What are your priorities?
What does your checkbook reveal about where you spend your money?
What does your calendar reveal about how you divide up the same number of hours in the day that Warren Buffet, or Mark Zuckerberg, or the guy down the street, has?
What do you—as an individual—really value?

Answering those questions honestly, and with penetrating self-awareness, will begin the process of getting more out of your life—and the choices you are choosing to make—than any time management article possible could.

-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/

[Strategy] On Non-Defensive Listening

Defensiveness.

Stonewalling.

Denial.

Silence.

These are all aspects of defensive listening. This is the listening that involves argumentation. This is the listening that involves a lack of focus on the other party. This is the listening that involves pushing your “I’m right” on someone who doesn’t believe, want to hear about, or care about your “I’m right.” They believe in their own “I’m right.”

All of the aspects on defensive listening are most often cued to others, not through speaking (although vocal inflections, tones, and word usage do play a part) but instead through the nonverbal communication of body language, facial expression, and onomatopoeia (sounds that when written convert to imagery (and sounds) in our minds).

Non-defensive listening is about the opposite of all of this. Non-defensive listening—above all else, even above non-defensive responding—is about focusing on the other person’s communication in order to understand, get clarity, and respond, rather than react, appropriately.

Without all the stonewalling.

To effectively engage with non-defensive listening, there are three things to do right away:

Focus on what the other person is saying, doing, and communicating in an interaction. Fear modulation is huge in this area.

Engage with a response that will address what the other person actually communicated, rather than what you think they communicated, what you think they meant to communicate, or even what you wanted them to communicate.

Be silent as a way to cause separation in your own head for thoughts to come to your mind clearly. This is practicing silence as a form of mindfulness, rather than using silence as a method of escape from the conversation, or interaction.

Above all else, being intentional—as if you were a brand advertising a car in Times Square—is the number one way to engage effectively with non-defensive listening.

Otherwise, there’s going to continue to be a lot of “coulda,” “woulda,” “shoulda” in your communication.

[Opinion] Listening When You Don’t Care

Listening when you don’t care is hard, because of four reasons:

We want things to be easy—The word “easy” just means that, on our terms, the interaction of listening, requires nothing of us—or the minimal amount of emotional labor possible.

We want things to be our way—we are selfish. There’s nothing surprising about this. But what is surprising is the number of different covers we place on top of our selfish tendencies, in an attempt to conform to whatever behavior the social group demands.

We want interactions to be friction-free—this just means that, the more direct the communication—or the more direct we think the communication is—the easier it seems for us to engage in. And by the way, this also means that, as long as people agree with us, and things are our way, we have stasis and security.

We want to be right—this is the other part of selfishness in our communications, and like most parts of our interpersonal communications, it’s deeply internal.

Then there’re the adoption curve:

On any distribution for anything in the material world, or in the human experience, there are people who are early adopters (easily understood and understanding) there are people who are late adopters (barely understood, and barely understanding) and then there’s the vast bulge of people in the middle.

The people in the middle are those people who don’t really care if things are easy to understand, or hard to understand, they just want the communication to work, preferably for them, or their situation.

The trouble with the middle is that it’s where everyone believes that they are. In reality the bulge is heavy at the left side of the curve. Many of us are not really listening at all, because we’re not really caring at all…

At the heart of listening—rather than not listening, or only listening long enough to find out when we can jump in to refute whatever is being said—is emotional labor: caring unselfishly, delaying the gratification that comes from stating our point, engaging with the friction rather than seeking to reduce it, and abandoning the impulse to be right.

-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] On Focus Past the TL;DR World

In a world of seven second attention spans, and stimulus reward systems based in electronic tools that update with vibrations, beeps and blinking lights, believing in the efficacy of the multitasking myth is mentally and emotionally deadly.

The organizations, teams, and even individuals who will “win” the future, who will be the most successful in the long-term, will be those that can focus on one thing at a time. They will also be the ones that allow their employees the ability to mindfully focus on tasks to accomplish goals and reduce the friction engendered by interruption, conflict, and poor communication. This is the place where our new tools can take us, such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, and even the internet everywhere and in every physical thing.

It’s going to take more than a few new tools to reverse the evolution of the human brain: A brain wired for stimulus, reaction, giving into impulse, and desiring the illusion of safety and stasis at the expense of everything else. Sure, mental and tool-based “short hand” may fool our brains into thinking that we are avoiding chaos and indecision, and encouraging stasis and security, but in a world where the short-hand for absorbing ideas we’re too impatient to deal with is “too long; didn’t read” we need more focus, not less.

-Peace Be With You All-