[Opinion] The Great Sorting

On President’s Day, it’s useful to remember that meaning and mattering matter more now than ever before.

This is reflected in the shift from important impersonal interactions at scale to important personal interactions between individuals. Meaning has always come from relationships and the community and family has always been the first incubator for the rules and traditions of relationships.

But the family incubator is breaking and changing—and has been for some time now.

This breaking and transforming leads to conflicts, disagreements, and disputes that loom beneath larger relationships with their power, their virulence, and their ability to last. Mattering generated through disagreement—what we are against as opposed to what we are for—is the great sorting, occurring as societies and cultures shift from a post-Industrial Revolution landscape to whatever comes after that.

When meaning and mattering only come from the narrative of conflict, the pure function of dysfunction becomes the call of the day, and the larger narrative shatters into a thousand pieces of glass.

What are we to do?

Relationships between people are still going to be the key to overcoming the dysfunction of the broken incubator of family, tribe, and community. Relationships, no matter the overall structure behind them, still matter more than the gossamer of tradition, economics, location, or history.

Narratives between relationships are going to become more strained and less collaborative because the difference between your tribe’s meaning and my tribe’s meaning matters more than the similarities we may share across tribes.

Meaning and mattering will become more elusive to attain, and harder to maintain, as the bonds that used to hold—tradition, family, religion, even the nation state itself—fray from the edges to the center, and those in authority (presidents, politicians, prime ministers) lose their power (but not their authority).

People seek meaning above all else, whether through conflicts, or through relationships. Joining across artificial boundaries pushes this meaning through conflict and relationship to a whole new frontier for humanity.

-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 2.09.2016

There used to be a time when it used to be ok to be…just…well…OK….

That time has passed.

We are now in an era where being “the best in the world” is not an unattainable goal. “The best in the world” doesn’t mean the best in the whole global world, with a name, a product, a process, or a service on every lip, or at the top of every mind. “The best in the world” means the best in YOUR world.

YOUR world of 2000 daily blog readers.

YOUR world of 1500 unique downloaders per month of your podcast.

YOUR world of 10000 views on your YouTube Channel every time you post a video.

YOUR world of 500 buyers of your book that you self-published.

…drip…

All that effort–that “drip,” “drip”–is where mediocre, average, and just “ok” wind up dying. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the work is the thing that matters. And if the work to gain an audience of under 15,000 people who will pay for what I do is the same as the work to gain 10 times that number, what do I have to gain by being just “ok.”?

The real rub is for those people for whom ok—or even average—is maybe the tip of their talent, drive, or engagement level.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Contributor] Convenient Culture

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

Is convenience going to be the downfall of self-sufficiency?

Perhaps this question is getting a little old, but it warrants a great deal of conversation.

The loudest dialogue in pop culture that I clearly remember, that touched on what is most likely to happen, was around the time of the release of the Pixar film, Wall-E. Despite touching on environmental issues and the dangers of unlimited consumerism, Wall-E touched on the topic of technology overtaking humanities ability to do things for itself. Some might say that The Matrix was an earlier example of this in popular film culture, but while in The Matrix, humanity was enslaved against their will, in Wall-E, humanity accepted their condition, and actively entrenched themselves in it.

The future of convenience is starting now, with innovations like the Amazon Prime button and services that will deliver food from non-delivery restaurants for a nominal fee, and those are just what has made it into the market so far. Before 2010, Toyota Motors began developing a “transforming all-electric vehicle”, called the i-Real. The concept was similar to an electric wheelchair, but the device could transform into a high-speed, possibly street-legal vehicle with the press of a button. If that doesn’t remind you of Wall-E then you should probably watch the movie again.

With the possibility of a chair that can go from the grocery store to the living room without you ever getting out of it, the possibilities for human laziness compound astronomically. While it indisputably would be a great boon to those of us who cannot physically walk, that wouldn’t be the only group of consumers.

While its unlikely something like the i-Real will reach shelves or show-rooms in the near-future, there are products that are out there already: The Amazon Prime button, food delivery services for rib-eye steaks, streaming services. All these services and devices, while convenient, have definitely served to make humans lazier. Now, when you run out of dish detergent or toilet paper, you simply press a button, rather than drive to the store. When you want to watch the latest movie, rather than going to the Blockbuster as you would have in the past, you open your laptop, or even more simply, tap a few points on your phone to stream it to your wide-screen television.

Not only is leisure getting lazier, work is to. Most office workers today can work, for at least a portion of their job, from home. And that trend is only going to increase. Wired suggested in 2013 that 43% of the US workforce would be working out of the office by this year. As the Internet simplifies how humans engage, from human interaction to commerce, the overarching result will be that more people will be spending time in their homes, instead of in the public sphere.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12^th grade. He has worked with his schools newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school.

In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.

HIT Piece 2.2.2016

Changes are natural. As an entrepreneur, you have to be able to roll with them and adapt to them without losing your mind, your equanimity, or your focus on the end goal.

That’s hard, because with each change, the end goal shifts from being a long-term goal, to being a short-term need.

With each change, the entrepreneur’s perspective changes and shifts as well, and sometimes, the weight of those changes can force the entrepreneur into a mental, emotional, and even financial, dip.

Powering through the dip—and making it to the other side—without losing your equanimity, your mind, or your focus on the end goal, is the only work of the entrepreneur that matters.

The reason many investors, money men, banks, and governments, tend to ignore or overlook the lifestyle entrepreneurs (such as consultants, trainers, and others) is that yes, they don’t create scalable models, but, those entrepreneurs tend to quit in the middle of dip leaving behind debt.

I’m not quitting. And hopefully, neither are you…

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.26.2016

The noise of the world seeks to crowd out the silence of being alone. The modern world eschews being alone as a sign of some sort of pathology, but this is merely more crowding out.

A leader, thinker, or developer of any kind needs to be alone to be effective. In the silence of being alone, one can learn to motivate others and yourself. Schedules, calendars, emails, all of these create background chatter that move, push, and manipulate many people into feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and never done.

I love it when my character evolves, and is challenged, in the sounds of silence, which I seek to make more space for in my work life, even as my responsibilities increase. This silence—and creating and preserving the conditions for such silence to begin and endure—is where all the work is.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.19.2015

When I’m blogging, I’m working.

When I’m recording a podcast interview, I’m working.

When I’m in a pitch meeting with a potential client, I’m working.

When I’m facilitating a training, I’m working.

When I’m designing a training for a client until 1am in the morning, I’m working.

When I’m surfing the Internet researching a business idea, I’m working.

When I’m on Skype talking with a potential client in another space, I’m working.

When I’m answering your email, I’m working.

When I’m making a follow-up phone call, I’m working.

When I’m at a networking event talking to you, I’m working.

When I’m reading a blog post, news article, or insight on my phone and it looks like I’m ignoring you, I’m working.

When I’m Tweeting, Facebook-ing, or otherwise engaging on social media, I’m working.

I’m not working when I’m at the movie theatre with my kids. Or, sitting on the couch with my wife. Or, when I’m cooking dinner and listening to jazz music. Or, when I’m reading a book.

I only actually get paid for one of those things on that list above. But without all the other things on the list, I can’t do the one thing well enough to add value to your organization so that you pay me.

Trust me…I’m working…

-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 Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We have nothing to fear but, fear itself.”

“I have a dream.”

“We do these things because they are hard.”

One of the more terrible losses in our contemporary age is the loss of soaring rhetoric, with allusions to classical Western literature (e.g. Shakespeare, Greek and Roman texts, the Bible, etc.), appeals to the common good, and an unwavering belief that Americans, together, can just “do” things.

[Opinion] The Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Image Does Not Belong to Us

This contemporary loss due to three things:

Americans no longer share a common language around problems because of the fracturing of the media environment, with a million tiny voices crowding out one large voice. There is no longer a single voice of authority, such as a Cronkite, a Vidal, or a Buckley. Instead there are multiple voices whose sources believe they are competing for authority, but in reality they are competing for attention.
Americans are no longer commonly educated in the writings of the past, partially because the Western literature canon has fallen to the wiles of multiculturalism, social engineering, and the desire to see education as a technical good, rather than as a way to link current generations to past meaning. In our efforts to replace the technical efficiency that used to be valued when we were a manufacturing country, we have moved to making education serve technology rather than wisdom.
Americans have blown up the tendency that we always had, toward being independent individualists (“get in your Conestoga Wagon and go West”), and have fetishized it to a degree never before attained by a population in human history. Since the Myth of the West has collapsed, we see this tendency most visibly in the retreat to individualized, mobile experiences, the popularity of streaming shows on Netflix, complaints about Academy Award film selections, and the overwhelming silence from populations in the center of the country who are never questioned except once every four years during elections.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up today, on Martin Luther King day, is that from Franklin Roosevelt (and earlier) all the way through Ronald Reagan, presidents, statesmen, politicians, and social leaders at least shared a common education, language, and a tendency toward a collective sense of commonality with the American people they were looking to persuade. They used that sense to make appeals to a higher good, all the while acknowledging that not everybody, including them, would make it to the end, but the journey would be glorious anyway.

This is not to say that there wasn’t separation, there wasn’t strife, and that there weren’t two views of America. If you think that the current age of fracturing is new, then take a look at newspaper headlines, political advertisements and rhetoric from the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century. There was far blunter commentary, outright conflict, and rhetorical viciousness than would be allowed today in our tamped down rhetorical climate.

What is new is the lack of common language and the results of that lack have served to create deeper political, social, and cultural fault lines, all the while, playing on the natural American tendency toward liberation, freedom, and autonomy.

Appeals of “We’re gonna’ go get ‘em,” or “Hope and change,” or whatever the catch phrase was of the eight years of the Clinton Administration (“I did not have sex with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”) don’t ring out quite as commonly. They don’t appeal to the better nature of our common American experiences. They are not as fluid, nor will they be remembered by history when certain proscriptive policies and efforts fail (or succeed), except as punchlines in YouTube videos, with a trail of bitter comments in the threads below the video.

On this day, I wonder what Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher who read Greek, studied the Bible closely, and who knew all about the moving power of common rhetoric designed to unite people (both white and black), would think about the current restless mire America is in?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #1- Travis Maus & Ryan Berkeley

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #1 – Travis Maus and Ryan Berkeley, Entrepreneurs, Cutting Edge Financial Planners, Trailblazers for Your Money

[powerpress]

People often remark that money makes people act funny. And not in the “haha,” Heath Ledger Joker way either. We talked about charging people for art last season in our ninth episode conversation with Nicholas Jackson, and we talked about charging people because art is valuable.

But what about managing money?

Nobody gets excited when you are talking about managing money.

As a matter of fact, eyes roll into the back of heads and people gradually slump down in chairs until their heads are the merest slivers above a table.

Then there’s the common situation where two adults hang out at the kitchen table talking about family budgeting every month…or they don’t

And then there’s the fact that there isn’t much education in school around the topic of money, money management of financial matters. And no, studying macroeconomics doesn’t count…

Case in point: My son was asking me about credit card use during the summer. He was on the cusp of turning 18 and wanted to know about credit scores, building a financial background and what the penalties and pitfalls would be with taking on more than he could handle.

After a 30-minute period where I laid out everything that I know about the wide world of credit creation, money management and fiscal sanity, he flopped onto the ottoman, held the cat in his hands, and asked:

Why don’t they teach us this stuff in school?

Why indeed…

In the kick-off to our third season of The Earbud_U Podcast, we talked with Ryan Berkeley and Travis Maus, partners and co-founders of SEED Planning Group, based in Binghamton, NY.

They are no-nonsense when it comes to managing your money, but they were plenty animated when it came to discussing why you should seed your financial strategies and goals with them, for both the long-term viability of your financial health, and for the long-term viability of the financial services industry.

So take a listen to Travis and Ryan, and take a little knowledge from our talk.

Check out all the ways below that you can connect with Travis and Ryan and S.E.E.D!

S.E.E.D Planning Group website: http://www.seedpg.com/

S.E.E.D Planning Group on Twitter: https://twitter.com/seedgroup

S.E.E.D Planning Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SEED-Financial-Strategies-288049794685377/

S.E.E.D Planning Group on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seed-planning-group-62410167

Travis Maus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-maus-15aa2429

Ryan Berkeley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanberkeley

HIT Piece 1.12.2016

I was watching a documentary about boxing last night.

Boxing is based on four major assumptions that have stood it in good stead as a popular sport in America—until its relatively recent dethroning by MMA.

The first assumption is that all good boxers come from backgrounds of poverty, violence and crime, and that they work their way out of those situations through force of will.

The second assumption is that the audience is electrified by the external fight against the opponent in the ring; whereas each individual boxer is in the ring to see if he can “go the distance” and win the internal fight.

The third assumption is that the business that supports the boxers and the economic system built around the fighter who is taking all the risk, is an inherently corrupt and unethical system, built on deceit, lies, and greed.

The last assumption is that boxers are going to get injured (concussions, Alzheimer’s, broken bones, etc.) because the inherent nature of the sport is brutality for the sake of spectacle.

The boxers featured in the documentary, from Evander Holyfield to Bernard Hopkins, all lived out either some or all of these assumptions in one way or the other and became changed by all of them. And it got me thinking:

What assumptions am I operating under?
What fights are the audience watching me “win” publicly, when the greatest battles are the ones that they don’t ever see?
What words were spoken over my life when I was a child by my parents, the neighborhood, the friends I had, that influenced me to get to where I am today?
What is the economic system that supports (or hinders) the business that I’m in of making peace?
What am I risking (physically, financially, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, etc.) in order to “go the distance” and can I do it, or will I declare, just before I would’ve won the fight “no mas”?

There’s no “Old-Timers” Day at the retirement home for boxers. Many end up broken—physically, financially, and spiritually—but for those individual men, fighting was the only way out of death.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.5.2016

Well, it’s a New Year and here are some new hits:

It’s time to start saying “no” more often: This doesn’t mean that I’ll be saying “no” to every opportunity that comes along, but it does mean that there is going to be a newly instituted “three strikes and you’re out” mentality and behavior moving forward. It’s amazing to me that more professionals don’t say “no” when they are treated shabbily by large clients. Integrity and respect matter more this year.

It’s time to clean out my email inbox: With two (and upwards of three) different email accounts I juggle daily; last year was a time suck of epic proportions around email. I have started 2016 by deleting 19,276 emails from my “promotions” tab in Gmail. And that’s not an exaggeration.

It’s time to write more often: After working with an editor on my upcoming project, I have become more convinced that second drafts of blog posts are the way to go, rather than what I did last year too often. As a matter of fact, this is a second draft right here…

It’s time to read more books (that relate to where I want to go, versus where I am right now): Last year I read a lot, but this year, I’d like the reading to be more targeted, like The Consulting Bible by Alan Weiss. This book I started over the holiday and it’s been kicking my butt.

It’s time to be done by 6pm (or 7pm): The nights that my kids are home (and I’ve been at home grinding all day) I should be done by 6pm. Yes, I know that Gary Vaynerchuk and many others promote the grind and the 8pm to 12am philosophy of working, but I get up at 5am, so….

It’s time to be more “real” in my blog writing (and to get someone else to build a website/manage it for me): I spent an unconscionable number of hours last year on the back end of the website that supports this blog. But I’m not a webmaster, web designer, or web consultant. I’m a conflict engagement consultant, corporate trainer, and social media marketer for peace builders. It’s time to outsource the rest of it.

It’s time to “get real” about video, streaming and otherwise: Yes. I know about the upside down economics of working on YouTube’s farm. And I realize that less than 2.5% of the country has even heard of Periscope, Meerkat, Vine, Twitter Video, Snapchat Video, or realizes that Facebook rolled out video on their platform in the 4Q of 2015.

But I know.

And I know what they’re about and the utility (or lack thereof in some cases) of the applications to my business.

It’s time to travel more—for business: Last year, I logged close to 10,000 miles in travel. Just around the state of NY alone. I need to expand beyond the state of NY and expand into air travel, which means more targeted focus in the last area.

It’s time to meet my audience (both in person and digitally) and to engage with them more: The audience is everything and I need to meet them more. I know who my fans are, and I know what they like, by virtue of which blog posts they share, like and comment on. So, I’d like to meet them in person, to grow the network, grow the engagement and to talk with them about the upcoming projects and products, I’ve been developing and will be launching in mid-1Q, mid-2Q and mid 3Q. Stay tuned…

-Peace Be With You All-