Christian Peacemaking in a Fallen World – Bully Edition

Bullies are everywhere it seems.

They are at school. They are at work.

Have they always been around or are we only now becoming sensitive to their presence and their impact?

From Donald Sterling to the workplace bully to the disaffected school shooter, modern Western culture seems to be turning up more and more of the disaffected and the dysfunctional.

Eventually, the societal call will come to violate the inviolable in order to ferret out and better address the impacts of bully pathology.

The conflation between the everyday bully and the societal scourge will become easier and easier as time progresses and peace will become harder and harder to attain.

There will be less understanding, less forgiveness and the road to reconciliation will be even tougher.

The hard work of #BuildingForTheFuture is just beginning…

-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/

The Artistic Part of Marketing

Brands and corporations assume that consumers are either always listening to their bullhorn and noise, or are never listening at all to anything and thus must be shouted at via a bullhorn.

However, if that doesn’t work, then brands get depressed, defensive or melancholy and stop trying. And ultimately disappear.

Or revert to ever larger and more unseemly spectacle.

The reality is something much more mundane–and hopeful.

Consumers’ interest and attention ebbs and flows like a river. It is fickle, unfixed and ever changing.

The hard work for brands is to remain consistently interesting, engaging and relevant so that when consumer attention comes back, the brand hasn’t changed.

The hard work of overcoming the fear of being irrelevant tomorrow and the anxiety to just keep yelling today, is the artistic part of marketing.

-Peace Be With You All-

Authentic Teaching

Authenticity has become synonymous with credibility.

Consistency has become the new currency.

Yet, in the world of content development (and the entrepreneurial base that it begins from), the “old” rules of marketing, advertising and sales still apply:

The audience doesn’t really care what you know; they only care about what you can teach them.

-Peace Be With You All-

Would You Rather Be Right or Be Reconciled?

A Christian approach to peacemaking revolves around three behavioral encouragements that are very simple to talk and to write about, by very hard to practically accomplish.

Believers are encouraged to confront first one at a time, then in two’s, then in the sight of the church.
Believers are encouraged to confront in love and to seek understanding first, rather than judgment.
Believers are encouraged to avoid confronting in the law first (via litigation) and to instead confront in the Spirit.

Think about how often we get into conflicts—in the workplace, in our families, even in our churches—and how rarely we exercise the first step of positive confrontation.

The initial step is hard, confrontation, because we would sometimes rather be right, than be reconciled.

But when we favor “rightness” over reconciliation, we do not allow the better angels of our nature to truly work on our hearts.

Would you rather be right, or be reconciled?

[See: KJV Matthew 5:21-26; Luke 17:3-4; Romans 12:18; Matthew 18:15-17]

-Peace Be With You All-

HSCT Retreats From Repealing Conflict Question

“How many people in this room have a conflict in their lives?”

We ask this question as part of our 30 second elevator speech describing who we are, what we do and what our approach to conflict is here at HSCT, every time we stand up at a networking event.

From rooms as small as four people to rooms with as many as one hundred people, no one yet has raised their hands.

We’ll keep asking, but, we recall that, even back into Biblical times, conflict existed.

James, Jesus’ brother pointed out in his gospel (4:1-3) that wars and fightings occur among people because of the desires (in the original King James version, the word used is “lusts”) that do battle inside of us.

And yet, no one ever raises their hand.

Poor—or no—communication leads to conflict.
Differences in priorities, values, goals, talents and opinions lead to conflict.
Competition over perceived limited resources leads to conflict.
And,of course, knowing what to do, and doing the opposite, leads to conflict. In the Bible, this is called “sin.”

Sometimes the worst types of conflicts, such as—well—wars and fightings, come about because of sinful actions, desires and behaviors.

So why are so many people unwilling to answer the question we pose honestly?

Well, it’s hard to admit that conflict exists, particularly if the person admitting to it doesn’t perceive there to be a conflict.

It’s also hard if the other party refuses to acknowledge that there is even a problem in the first place.

Finally, admitting to having a conflict requires us to be vulnerable, and there is no place we’d rather not be vulnerable, than in front of our peers at a networking event.

So, we’ll ask at the end of this blog post:

“How many people in this room have a conflict in their lives?”

[Thanks to Ken Sande. Check out his book here.]

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Opinion] Who Will Hire The Bigots

In a world where talent and ability matter more than character and virtue, what is an old racist to do?

Donald Sterling, former owner of the LA Clippers behaved abhorrently in many ways over the years, which was well documented everywhere:

in court documents,
among close friends and business associates,
even by a fractured, distracted, ADD-ridden, news media.

But until his comments were recorded surreptitiously and then played back, not one iota of an issue was raised.

He was even given an award by the NAACP.

But now that the dust has settled on that unrepentant old racist, what are we to think of his sudden change in fortune?

In this current incarnation of American culture, talent and ability trump character.

And character and virtue seem to only matter as they publicly buttress innate talent and ability.

See Tiger Woods’ fall from grace as an example of this.

When culture giveth position, power, accolades and applause, culture can also taketh away.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are Sterling, Woods, former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich not human? Do they not bleed?) But a desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when character is linked exclusively to talent and ability forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

Because everybody fails.

Particularly the envious.

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

Wisdom in the Machine

When the astronaut Dave powers down the rebellious HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more recently in the 2013 film, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix, we determine through pop culture, what machine “death” looks–and feels–like.

The fact of murder comes from the fact of life and ideas and philosophies that we have as individual humans–and collective societies–about what traits constitute life.

In the case of a machine, we here at HSCT take the position that a machine cannot overcome the limitations of its creator.

Life is defined, not only by self-sustaining processes (we were asked while writing this post, if it would be murder to power down a machine created by another machine) but also by wisdom that is attained through life experience.

The crux of wisdom lies at the intersection of common sense, insight and understanding.

HAL 9000 may have had one, or even two, of those things—such as insight and understanding—but “he” (see how we anthropomorphized an inanimate object there) lacked the third trait in spades: common sense.

Just like Skynet in Terminator or the machines and computer programming networks of The Matrix, HAL 9000 was unable to negotiate in good faith with his creator.

“He” made an “all or nothing” decision about Dave’s presence, Dave’s mission and Dave’s motives and then took extreme action.

The same way that the machines did in The Matrix and Terminator.

The ability to negotiate with others in good faith, and to honor those agreements, is a human trait based in knowledge, experience, common sense and insight, not just a happy byproduct of a conscious mind.

And until machines have the ability to negotiate with, not only their environments in the rudest sense of the term, but also with their creators, we should feel free to power them up—or down—at our will.

After all, our Creator does the same thing.

Right?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Trapped on the LIE

Imagine if when people were in conflict, they were transformed by changing their minds and approaches to conflicts, rather than conforming to “the way things have always worked?” (Romans 12:2). Applying principles expounded by the Gallup Organization, people can be transformed, but many prefer to conform to patterns and behaviors that stem from three areas:

Lies that they tell themselves about the nature and type of conflicts in which they are involved,
Attitudes that have been “wired” into them through past experiences, traumas, stresses and difficulties,
Insecurities that they have that bind them to their traditional attitudes and thought processes

Now, we shouldn’t be deceived (and I’m not the first one to point this out) but whatever we create in a conflict from whatever basis we create it, we are going to get back in return (Galatians 6:7).

So, shouldn’t we be acting from our best selves, based on our strengths and what we’re really good at, to respond to conflicts in our lives, rather than reacting based upon lies, insecurities and falsehoods?

[Thanks to Pastors Dawn & Joe Coudriet for pointing these ones out to me]

-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/

[Advice] The Most Perfect Gift

What is the most perfect gift that you can give?

During the holiday season, particularly around Christmas, the societal stress level in the West, increases as people pursue purchasing the “perfect gift.” The inherent, human tendency to have “stuff,” pushed by marketers, advertisers and other consumers, is hyped through Black Friday sales and “deep discounts.”

Also, fear is pushed that a holiday celebration will be “ruined” without the attainment and giving of that “perfect gift” to that person in your life.

If we stop however, and remember that the point of Thanksgiving is to be reflective, and that the point of Christmas is to focus on redemption, then the hard part is not slogging through the mall, stressing over an online purchase or crowding into a retail space at the “last minute.”

The real hard work between Thanksgiving and the New Year is focusing on the active act of engaging in reconciliation and forgiveness with those whom we have harmed, and who have harmed us during the past year.

Financial outlay then falls to the bottom of the list and the true cost—in time, energy, emotional effort and spiritual development—stands revealed.

-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] Generous Polluters

In an abundance economy, there is one polluting element that is produced.

It’s more toxic than carbon dioxide and more damaging to the environment than the plastic bag island floating out somewhere in the Pacific.

It’s more damaging to the body politic than a disease epidemic. It corrodes and destroys as surely as acid does.

This pollution destroys access, ownership and privacy. It overrides the values that a connection economy is based upon, including honesty, transparency, clarity, motivation, courage, self-awareness, focus, discipline and empathy.

It turns adventure into obligation and has its own properties.

It is colorless, odorless and tasteless.

We’ve even written about it here in this space before.

Fear is the most abundant, most toxic, most polluting element generated in an abundance economy:

Conflicts arise in the abundance economy from a fear of a future that is likely (rather than preparation for the future that is desired), a perceived (or actual) scarcity of material resources and a lack of patience.

Mediators, lawyers, counselors, theologians, therapists and others in the helping professions are going to become more middle class (and in some cases, wealthier) in the developing connection economy, because fear is not disappearing. As a matter of a fact, fear is growing and expanding as the disruptions generated by the inexorable rise of an abundance based economy, become more and more acute.

The lizard brain has been with us too long.

However, there is one antidote—one environmental scrubber—for the pollutant of fear. Plus, it’s the final leg on the three-legged stool of the connection, abundance based economy of both now and the next 100 years:

Cooperation.

-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/