[Podcast] Earbud_U Episode #9 – Anastasia Pryanikova

Earbud_U Episode #9 – Anastasia Pryanikova, Linguist, Coach, Entrepreneur, Writer, Transmedia Storyteller and Visionary

earbud_u-episode-9-anastasia-pryanikova

[powerpress]

Marketers tell stories and mediators hear stories. And this is just the beginning of the story.

Many folks in the field of peacemaking and peace building are trying many different things to get the attention of a world that is changing all around them.

When this works, it’s beautiful, like with our guest, Anastasia Priyanikova.

Her and her partner have developed a start-up focused on all the most interesting parts of the mediation and storytelling experience. The learning part.

And she and her partner are working with a unique collaboration of artists, writers and other creatives helping them produce their best work.

Check out Anastasia Pryanikova online at http://brainalchemist.com/ and check out her learning company start-up, Bookphoria at http://www.bookphoria.com/

She’s got a special offer for all Earbud_U listeners at the end of the interview, so stay tuned for that.

Check out all the additional ways to get in touch with her below:

Email: ana (at) brainalchemist.com
Web: http://brainalchemist.com; http://bookphoria.com/; http://www.lawsagna.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lawsagna; https://twitter.com/bookphoria
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PryanikovaAnastasia
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/apryanikova
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AnastasiaPryanikova/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SelfHelpBookMuse
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/lawsagna/
Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Stamford-Brain-Book-Club/

Download the Latest Episode of Earbud_U!

[Advice] Collaboration and the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is an environmental science concept that cuts to the core of two areas critical to organizational (and personal) conflict management.

The first idea is that there are so many resources available—time, money, talent, etc.—that there will never be a depletion. Until there is.

This conception of material and personnel resource abundance is the reason that black swan events at a macroscale, such as the 2008 economic crash, or at a microscale, such as a wife finding out that her husband is cheating (or vice-versa) hit impacted parties so hard and take such a financial, emotional, psychological and spiritual toll.

The second idea is that once resources are depleted, there is no compelling reason for any one individual to take the blame (or accept the accountability and responsibility) for replenishing them, because “Everybody was taking from it.” In a divorce proceeding (following infidelity), neither party wants to admit guilt—or their own level of responsibility in creating the situation that fostered the infidelity in the first place. After 2008, how many bankers went to jail, globally, in relation to the level of damage their decisions caused?

In an environmental science context, the solution to tragedy of the commons is to fine and otherwise economically penalize people (resource depleters, polluters, etc.) in the belief that a bigger negative downside will lead to greater self-imposed, self-interested, selflessness.

In conflict engagement and conflict management, sometimes it’s best to abandon the commons (the shared relationship, the collaborative enterprise, the cooperative partnership) rather than take on the emotional, psychological and spiritual effort to save the commons.

True emotional labor, however, requires quieting the lizard brain, accepting responsibility for the tragedy (even if there’s no commensurate feeling of a need for the taking of responsibility) and moving forward collaboratively and selflessly with people and organizations that we would really rather not.

Otherwise, who will be left in the emotional commons but the spoilers, the discontented and the selfish?

-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] Sorting Emotional Intelligence

In a physical emergency, triage is the best way to address issues.

Originating during the Napoleonic Wars, triage divides wounded people into three categories:

Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive;
Those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive;
Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome.

In a conflict, confrontation or difficulty, people often have no trouble dividing their approaches to relationships in the exact same manner:

Those situations that are not likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to have a positive outcome if I address them as best I can right now.

Many people in their individual lives triage situations, relationships and other people, and mistakenly believe that they are acting with the best interests of other people in mind, and that they are acting within the bounds of emotional intelligence.

When asked, they will swear up and down that they are good at reading other people and examining what conflicts to engage in, what conflicts to avoid, and what conflicts to be neutral about.

Unfortunately, true emotional intelligence takes years of self-examination to master. Somewhere around 10,000 hours. The true test of developing emotional intelligence is moving the inner space from concerns about self (“I triage this situation with these people really well!”) to concerns about self and the other person (“How are we going to triage this situation together?”).

Some people like conflict, confrontation and the feeling of powerfulness that such ability to trigger a conflict or confrontation in others’ produces.

Some people don’t like conflict and will run away at the first hint of even a little difficulty.

Some people are neutral on all of this and genuinely have the ability to triage effectively.

However, in the complex business and social worlds that we inhabit (with complexity increasing rather than decreasing every day); people can rarely afford to avoid, attack or remain neutral when the opportunity for greater, deeper and more meaningful engagement presents itself.

-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/

[Advice] The Sound of Listening

People hear tone in vocal inflections, but some people are more sensitive to it than others.

In a story, tone comes about because of connoted understanding around allusions, diction, imagery, irony, symbols syntax and style. Tone also comes about because of a shared understanding about the general character and attitude reflected in figurative writing.

People are both good (making accurate assumptions based on a shared history) and bad (making inaccurate assumptions based on a shared history), at interpreting and reacting to tone of voice or a nonverbal facial expression. People are also good and bad (and getting better and worse all the time because of social media) at interpreting and reacting to tones reflected through writing.

People hear (and interpret meaning) from tone in the sound of silence as well.

In a conflict situation, what is stated (presence) is almost as relevant as what is not stated (absence). People are sophisticated communication machines and they pick up instantly (or miss terribly), the meaning (both figurative and literal) behind presence and absence.

Emotional literacy in a conflict situation requires people to set aside assumptions and reactions about what tones may mean (presences) and about what silences may mean (absences) and instead do the hard, unsexy work of actually asking the following starter questions:

What do you think?
What are you feeling?
What do you need?

Then sitting back and engaging actively with the sound of listening.

-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/

[Opinion] Justice Is Blind

Justice is blind.

Or so it is said in Western culture.

The issue with justice is not the fact of justice, which is applied through law, morals, appeals to theology and philosophy. The issue with justice is that the narratives around it are often confused with several other things.

Desire for vengeance. Dissatisfaction with outcomes. Disappointment at a lack of desired consequences.

Crime victim families walk before cameras and state: “We came here for justice and justice was done.” Or, “We came here for justice, but there was no justice today.”

A character in a movie once stated that, “Karma is justice without the satisfaction. I don’t believe in justice.” Another character infamously intoned in another film “For justice, we will go to Don Corleone!” We should remember that Lady Justice carries both scales–and a sword.

Many people scream loudly for a narrative that includes and envelops justice. They even make signs and placards with the phrase, “no justice, no peace” emblazoned upon them, but what they are really seeking is karmic retribution.

Retribution, vengeance, revenge; wrongs righted with immediacy and swift, unambivalent consequences. Punishment, meted out by at the highest order, in the fastest way, with as few innocent people harmed as possible.

There is a revolution underway in both the Western world and at a larger, global level. Societies, groups, cultures and even individuals are confusing the results of that revolution with their own desires for karmic retribution. The karmic retribution narrative begins something like this:

“Never before in the history of world, do we (typically meaning “I” or “my in-group”) have access to more information, more money and more power to transform the world in ways reflecting how we would like it to be, rather than the frustrating, unjust ways that it has always been. No longer will we (typically meaning “I” or “my in-group”) wander the world, merely satisfied with outcomes formerly guaranteed to us by ‘people in power.’ We want more. And if we don’t receive the more we are guaranteed, then we will either move on those in power to get it. Or we will call for justice until we get the material outcomes we seek.”

This narrative underlies many current calls for justice, with the immediacy of the narrative being employed, following ever newly discovered injustices, as wave after wave of more access, more mobility and more individualized power seems to wash over the societies and cultures we inhabit.

But so what, right? Under a Rawlian (or even a Lockean) philosophical world view, why shouldn’t narratives be reframed and cries for justice recried?

Well, conflicts occur when narratives differ, when perceptions of justice don’t match and whenever disruptions happen. Conflicts happen when narratives of injustices (and perceived narratives of injustice) rub up against each other.

And when the only resolutions come in the form of power transfers and shifts, conflicts escalate quickly to violence. And, while this is nothing new (see Don Corleone) one need only look at incidents around the United States (and the world) last year to see the evidence of the conflicts and how quickly and irrevocably they can escalate.

What are we to do?

What is the balance between justice, vengeance, and the more revolution that we are experiencing worldwide?

What is the most unambiguous way for all people (even those who have chosen not to participate due to inability, lack of ability or lact of interest) to benefit from the new largesse that our recent scientific/moral/ethical/legal revolutions promise to provide?

What are societies and cultures to do, even as the center disintegrates and the power holders in culture, media, journalism and on and on, lose out in the shifting narratives of our times?

Who gets to choose?

Who gets to make the world?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

But far more energy should be spent on discussing and solving those questions and advancing the narrative of peace. Much less energy should be spent on advancing narratives that cry out for karmic vengeance, too often framed in the language of justice, while always proclaiming that fairness and equitable treatment are the ultimate goals.

-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] You May Have Already Won – Part Two

The future isn’t guaranteed to anyone.

There are so many industries, assumptions and pieces of our culture that are being disrupted by software applications and technology, that it feels like a whirlwind. But there is a growing problem.

In the world of technology, minorities, women and other underrepresented individuals and groups in the old economy are even more underrepresented in the new economy.

The future isn’t guaranteed to anyone.

The problem is not the wealth gap, or the inequality gap, or even the person gap. The problem is threefold:

Access—this is becoming the driving issue of the 21^st century. People who will have access to technology and the ability to access understanding about advancements in technology, (regardless of group affiliation, economic level, gender or nationality) will have access to the virtual/physical integration that mobile technologies and the internet represent. They will also have access to the financial, spiritual and emotional rewards that will flow from this access, first in a trickle, then in a stream, and finally an endless flood. People who won’t have access will be effectively “locked out” of opportunity and advancement and will (to use the line from Braveheart) “scramble for the scraps from Longshank’s table.”
Understanding—there are many people (regardless of race) who have no idea, who, what or how the world that is coming is being built. Case in point: We recently had a conversation with a 20 year old the other day who had no idea that the content he consumes on YouTube was actually created by someone. We had to show him some of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on around here at HSCT in order to make all of this happen. Suddenly, he was able to make the connection between “boring” writing and studying classes and developing the discipline to write, research and publish every day.
Identity—many people have voted with their feet (and their wallets) in this new economic situation. They use Air BnB, Uber, Yelp, and pay attention to Amazon.com reviews. They book tickets to the movies through Fandango, they use Urban Spoon or Open Table to book a restaurant, and they have multiple applications on their smart phones and move with ease through the neighborhoods that each application represents in the community of the internet. However, there are also still people who shop at Wal-mart and won’t buy an I-phone until it shows up there. Marketers call these people lat adopters, but their identities are wrapped up (their stories, if you will) in being late adopters. Identity still is a driver for a lot of issues.

The future isn’t guaranteed to anyone.

Yes, there are many people who “Just want it to work,” no matter what it is—the economy, their family, their job, their car or their house. They don’t want to wrestle with questions about access, have to get more education to interface with new technology or worry about what their mobile phone choices say about them as a consumer/person. They just want things to work in their lives so that they can interact with a scary, chaotic and disquieting modern world with a measure of control, safety, security and reasonable level of prosperity.

These are the people for whom the future is not guaranteed.

Mediators, social workers, conflict specialists, lawyers, and social scientists have a responsibility to act as ambassadors between these two groups, advocate for the groups that are having identity, access and education issues and make the argument to the technical folks that are building our new economy and new world, that there are people being left behind.

-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] Culture Matters

Culture means something.

We forget about the clarion call of culture in our pell-mell run toward the future. But culture matters, particularly in companies and organizations. Culture, as defined by the cultural anthropologist E. B. Taylor, is the complex whole that includes morals, knowledge, arts, beliefs, law, customs, capabilities and habits, acquired by people as a part of society.

Culture means human beings connecting with other human beings.

Start-ups get this sometimes. The ones that don’t fail, the ones that do succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Established organizations forget that culture matters after a certain level of cultural inertia happens. When organizations begin hiring, and it expands to more than 150 people, culture is often forgotten in the pursuit of making profits and appealing to the shareholders’ demands.

Nonprofits underestimate the power of the culture they create and that they help develop. Then they wonder why they can’t raise more money, or struggle to justify grant funding year-on-year.

All of these different stories about culture in different organizations create the dynamic cloud that covers the creation of a society, and an overall culture.

There are three things to remember when developing a culture for your project:

Conflicts will happen, whether you have 30 people or 150 people. It seems cool when you’re talking about 30 people and “how exciting it all is,” but how people deal with conflicts will determine how the project grows…or doesn’t…
Hiring people is really important. Teams, belonging, and pedigree matter. Or they don’t. When building a company culture, knowing what you’re going to emphasize versus what you’re not going to emphasize is important. And it has to show up on more than just your website’s home page.
Failure is not an option, but learning is. This is not an excuse to make bad decisions. There are enough of those excuses out there. However, learning about how people—customers, clients, investors, fans, audience members, etc.—react and respond to your product and your culture, gives you an opportunity toward growth. Typically called a feedback loop, we here at HSCT call it a learning curve.

Here is the challenge question for your organization: If culture means something when developing your project, when was the last time you took the time, to examine how your culture could be better?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Anniversary] Our 500th Post

This is our 500^th blog post.

We have written in this space about everything from conflict and best practices, all the way to marketing and “the future.”

We are proud to have our readership increase from just our Mom and family, all the way to people that we have attended our trainings and workshops, people who have become our fans, and people who are watching us from the sidelines.

We have created all of our own content: We write, we research, we network and we collaborate. All by ourselves, and without a team behind us.

We have moved our focus from just writing, researching, and getting our voice out there to the smart distribution of our content to people through multiple streams, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, our email list and our daily RSS feed.

We have also had the pleasure of developing relationships through guest blogging and contributing to ADRTimes.com.

We have transformed how we view content: no longer is it just driven by researching and writing, but now it is driven by information and insights that we gain from work that we do with our clients, employees in organizations, and through talking (and networking) with others in disparate areas, all the way from nascent start-ups to established organizational hierarchies.

We love to blog. Writing is the only way that we can think to move the meter forward on what we do, our process and our philosophies, and our approach to peace.

After two and a half years, here’s to another 500 posts. We’ll be here. Everyday.

Trust us…

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Committing to Persisting

Persistence is tough.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this, because she has dealt with clients who would rather give up and return to the comfort of their past dysfunction, rather than attempt to go through the hard work of pushing through to create something new.

Persistence requires energy.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because she is drained at the end of a coaching session, a mediation session, a workshop session, or after writing a blog post about her work.

Persistence is formidable.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because, she realizes that having the will to do what another consultant won’t (as long as that thing is moral, ethical, legal and not fattening) is the difference between success and failure for her project, her clients, and for the niche she serves.

The savvy peacebuilder commits to persist, even when it’s not sexy, interesting or engaging, because she knows that one less peacebuilding project in the world turns out one more candle in the dark.

-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/

[Strategy] The Power of Story

Stories lie at the core of the human condition.

Stories, myths, fables and legends serve a psychological need that human beings have for connection and understanding. The people in professions that understand this, from priests and pastors to marketers and con men, can weave stories so fabulous that they can sell a person anything, from a washing machine to the cannibalistic sacrifice of virgin flesh.

Psychologists and psychiatrists know the power of stories.

They spend years in the medical and mental health fields, carefully mapping the ways in which cognitive connections develop and then the ways in which those connections are externalized with the outside world. Therapy is just a refashioning of a story that you have told yourself for so long that it has become true for you.

When we talk about stories, we inevitably have to talk about fiction and fact, truth and lies. Content and Context serve an important function here, because the ways we determine what the truth is (both “for us” and “for the other”) are important. What may be truth for you in a story may be an out and out lie for me.

Mediators specialize in getting to the truth by first acknowledging that everybody tells a shaded truth: Not necessarily a lie, as in, a story told with the intent to deceive, but a truth that is bent and shaped through content and context to service a particular interest: theirs.

The third factor that influences all of this is power. Now, social justice practitioners and thought leaders talk a lot about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and who is using it to oppress or to privilege.

Power, however, is also based on content and context. This is a tough truth for true believers in social justice, and why the panacea of a socially just future will never be fully recognized.

There are too many competing stories.

When every story competes for primacy in the external realm of an open, capitalistic market, some stories win and some stories lose. The story of Coca-Cola is obviously a winner in the marketplace.

The story of all kinds of insurance—from life and health to car and home—is neither winning nor losing. The story of MySpace is definitely losing: As did the story of Pets.com, Borders and Woolworths.

When we think of the personal brands that we present online, from our social media presences to our tendency to spam and flame each other in the “below-the-fold” comments section of our favorite online articles, stories and storytelling become even more important.

Case in point:

I read an article here http://tinyurl.com/q98wp8c, which served to activate my own stories that I tell myself about writing, famous authors, the nature of public opinion, online journalism, Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, obscure Viennese writers, World War 1 intellectualism, racism, social justice, wealth inequalities and the ubiquity of online blowhards.

And that was in the first two minutes after I had finished reading the article.

A couple of hours later, I was talking to my lovely future bride and her son and relating the story of the article, further embellishing the story I was telling myself about the article that I had just read.

This is the power of a story and of storytelling. I start out reading someone else’s words and end up making my own meaning of them. Then, to make matters worse, I influence others in how they create their own stories and how they intersect with the external world, featuring myself, the article, the people with whom I interacted and, of course, the stories that they tell themselves.

When conflicts happen, the circle closes, reopens and closes again on the stories that we tell ourselves. Because while conflict is change and conflict is dynamic, it is disruptive, disjointing and personal. The stories of conflicts vary, but they typically begin with:

“They did thus and so to me. And I turned around and did thus and so to them, but they are at fault and they owe me an apology because they started it, I’m innocent and that’s the truth.”

And there it is. The two most important words in any story, whether it’s a marketing story to get you to buy a car or a religious story to get you to buy a belief, the most important thing in any story is the Truth.

Writers, bloggers, journalists, poets and others have long known the power of the truth in a story, which is why stories work so well. They appeal at a deep level to something in the human psyche that very few ever talk about: the desire to be entertained.

This desire is why fiction outsells nonfiction.
This desire is why “reality” TV is always scripted.
This desire is why, even in the midst of a terrible trauma or a horrible conflict, resolution is so hard to come by: Either one, or both, of the parties is being—at some elemental, cognitive level—entertained.

Dopamine is a neural chemical that is triggered in the midst of pleasure and pain. It lulls a person to sleep even as it creates bonding by also releasing that other neural chemical, oxytocin.

The desire to be entertained is intimately linked to the desire to be lulled and pleasured by connection. And the ultimate way to connect is through storytelling.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, anger management, deep breathing, mediation, mindfulness, are all hard and require work to maintain. They require the frontal cortex where creativity, art, poetry, music and all the other hard things live, to be activated and used.

Power enters into this in the area of telling the truth, versus telling a story. Power equals control and he (or she) who has the power (mostly power “over” another person) gets to make the rules.

Power used to be concentrated in the hands of the very few, however, as technological advancements have occurred; power has dissipated to even being in the hands of the very young and the very old. Social media, the Internet, blogs all are forms of communication that give everyone the same power and the same access, though outcomes will vary.

And thus we close the first part of the loop: Stories, fables, legends and myths serve a purpose. They allow us to categorize, compartmentalize and make sense of the world. Stories that we tell ourselves are the most important stories of all. This is why motivational speakers the world over talk endlessly about having a positive mindset; which allows us to tell ourselves stories that are positive and uplifting.

But, what do we do when the stories aren’t that great: When the trauma, dysfunction and conflicts lie at the core of our stories?

-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/