[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 10 – David J. Smith

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 10 – David J. Smith, Peace Builder, Consultant, Speaker, Educator and Author

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Some things, ideas, and even spaces are hiding in plain sight. Like the idea of walking in peace. Or building a career in helping people walk in peace.

The big question is (to paraphrase from the film The Prestige): Are you paying any attention?

Our guest today, David J. Smith is the author of many books on teaching peace. He most recently wrote the book Peace Jobs: A Student’s Guide to Starting a Career Working for Peace.

And he has come on at no better time than now, to talk about what really matters.

Look, I asked a podcast guest recently, “Why aren’t peacebuilders paid more?” and she gave that question an honest and thought provoking answer which you’ll have the pleasure of hearing next season.

I assert that the reason peacebuilder’s struggle to get appropriate compensation for the emotionally draining work that they do, is because we live in a conflict comfortable and peace skeptical society and culture.

David answers the question in another way on the podcast today.

Look, this is the last episode of our penultimate 4^th season of the podcast, and I for one, could not be more grateful and appreciative of your ears, your attention and your focus this year.

Your feedback, as always, has been tremendous for a podcast that runs no advertising other than mine, and where I don’t come on the mike and ask you to donate to my Patreon page, or to rank me in ITunes, Stitcher or on Google Play.

Though the Earbud_U Podcast is available for download and rating on all those platforms.

Thank you for all your support in this self-funded effort, and we’ll be back in January 2017 with a new year, a new slate of guests, and even a new opening I’ve been working on.

Connect with David J. Smith in all the ways you can below:

Website: https://davidjsmithconsulting.com/

Peace Jobs Book Link: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Peace-Jobs

Facebook (For Peace Jobs): https://www.facebook.com/PeaceJobs1/

Facebook (to Connect with David): https://www.facebook.com/david.j.smith.54584

Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidjsmith2013

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode #9 – Jason Dykstra

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 9 – Jason Dykstra, Storyteller, Marketer, Conflict Management Specialist

podcast-earbud_u-season-four-episode-9-jason-dykstra

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Sometimes the host screws up.

He misses the date, misses the appointment, misses the guest entirely. And then he’s gotta say he’s sorry, get the process back on track, and make no excuses.

I had to apologize to our guest today, Jason Dykstra. And while he’s an amenable guy, and things happen (as the bumper sticker points out) the way to run an organization is to almost never make a mistake.

But when you make that mistake, the thing to do is to take responsibility, stand up and say “I screwed this up. There’s no excuses. Please forgive me.”

That gives the other party the option to say no, say yes, or ignores you completely. It also gives them the option to look at your vulnerability, determine your credibility, and to make a decision about you.

Now, if mistakes keep happening, then there’s a pattern of behavior. But a one off, an “almost never happens,” a “rare but not damaging miscalculation” these are forgivable.

What’s not forgivable are mistakes that reveal an ethical, moral, or even spiritual failings.

These are the Jimmy Swaggart level mistakes.

Or more recently, the VW emissions scandals.

Or even the Wells-Fargo “clawback” issues mistakes.

And no amount of apologizing will help sweep away that stain.

Some mistakes, as an old supervisor of mine liked to point out, you can’t come back from.

What does this have to do with mediators building their businesses?

Well, there are mistakes a mediator can come back from.

There are mistakes that reveal a mediators’ patterns of behavior. But when mediators are putting themselves “out there” the possibility for mistakes explodes ten-fold.

And many well-meaning mediators market poorly (or not at all) because of fear of making a mistake.

But, as a mediator who practices what he preaches, Jason will help us walk through all of this today, and more.

Connect with Jason in all the ways you can below:

Website: http://www.jasondyk.com/

Facebook (The L3 Group): https://www.facebook.com/L3GroupTC/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jasondyk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondyk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasondyk

Twitter (The L3 Group): https://www.twitter.com/thel3group

[Strategy] Crossing the Chasm for the Peacebuilder

For the innovative peacebuilder, the truly important switch must happen in how thinking about products and services cross the chasm.

Most of the time, processes (such as mediation, negotiation, or dispute resolution) are confused with products.

A process is, in essence, a service.

Sure, there are sometimes opportunities to grow a process past a service and into a product, but this is rare.

The idea that content focused around “how-to” can be a product, is supported by the digital reality we live in now. With digital platforms, developing digital components for processes we already think of as services, should become second nature.

But for many it hasn’t.

At least not yet.

There are four ways to cross the chasm in thinking, from a strong consideration and focus on services, to a strong consideration and focus on products.

Deep listening requires surveying clients (formally and informally), compiling that data, and executing on the results of that listening. By the way, deep listening is beyond active listening, and is something that peacebuilders are increasingly seeing as a tactic for clients at the table.
Deep understanding is the corollary to deep listening. Deep understanding requires accepting that crossing the chasm is the only way to scale. Plus, it requires accepting that one-offs, workshops, seminars, and more of the traditional ways of engaging with audiences, clients, and scaling a “lifestyle” business, have changed irrevocably.
Deep advice requires accessing the wisdom contained in the organizations peacebuilders may already be working in. It also requires listening to, and reading, advice that comes from non-traditional places. Accessing, and considering deep advice is strategic and tactical. Deep advice not only comes from outside the box, but also it comes from looking in another box entirely.
Deep courage is the last way to cross the chasm. Execution is about courage, and many of the reasons that serve to “stall out” the crossings peacebuilders attempt, is less about not doing the other three things listed above, but is more about the lack of courage to pull the trigger and execute on a truly scary idea.

Philosophy first, tactics second, and courage always to change how peacebuilding happens in our digital world.

[Strategy] What is Conflict? For the Peacebuilder

Conflict is a process of change, if you believe in the process view of conflict. Changes can’t happen unless internal conflicts lead to an external conflict that changes parties.

However, if you search Google, what parties really believe about conflict shines through:

How do I get out of my marriage?
How do I get away with it?
What is the best way to get a divorce?
How do I cheat?
How do I get away from my wife?
How do I get away from my husband?
What does divorce do to children?
How do I get my boss fired?
How do I avoid getting fired by my boss?
How do I get a different job?

Our Google searches reveal our inner truths. They reveal our inner desires to avoid, delay, surrender, or negate the uncomfortable process that lead to changes that inevitably must happen in our lives if they are to improve for the better. A better we can neither understand, nor see, in the present of our short-term fears.

Our Google searches reveal that, for many of us, the answer to the question “What is conflict?” is “A negative thing that makes me uncomfortable and that needs to be avoided—or made to go away—at all costs.”

Our Google searches reveal that our resistance to change is strong, our comfort with conflict is deep, and our view of the conflict, the process of getting through it, and the changes on the other side of it, are deeply negative.

Which is why, if you’re a conflict resolution practitioner, your work is cut out for you. But not in getting parties to resolution.

Your work—your deep emotional labor—lies in doing the digging to persuade and convince well-meaning parties in conflict (and those yet to be in conflict) to chip away at the cruft surrounding their preconceived notions, revealed through Google searches, of conflict as a negative.

As a conflict practitioner, this is your process of change.

What do your Google searches reveal about how you view conflict?

[H/T] Justin R. Corbett

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 2

There are three hard parts to launching any peace building project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).

When launching a peace building project, the savvy peace builder often doesn’t think too hard about the first part. In peace building fields from mediation to law, attaining technical knowledge is considered a rite of passage. Which is why peace building is so dominated by the presence of volunteer labor at one end (mediation) and highly paid labor at the other end (litigation) and there is a squeeze in the middle. As a result, many peace building practitioners continue to fund a self-perpetuating economy of training and certifications, rather than doing and experiences. This is a hamster wheel for another reason: The training and certifications are to reinsure that the peace builder continues to remain proficient in old skills they already know and practice (i.e. mediation skills) rather than training and certifying them in new skills that might be uncomfortable fro them to learn and practice (i.e. marketing, sales and business development).

The second hard part is getting the hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly if it is new.

When launching a peace building project, learning new hardware (or software in the case of many entrepreneurial peace builders) is the second hardest part. Admittedly, there are ton of applications and software solutions that can be cobbled together to create the operational infrastructure for a functioning business model. But too often peace builders (as do many other entrepreneurs) become so focused on avoiding learning the new application (or fiddling with it constantly) that they miss completely the third hardest part of developing and launching a peace building project—sales.

The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience to genrate a lead, create a relationship and to close a sale.

When launching a peace building project, content development—books, articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, workshop/seminar content, and on and on—is seen as the most overwhelming aspect of launching. At the core of most content development practices are three objectives for the peace builder to consider:

What do I want my content to do? (i.e. drive brand recognition, drive sales, create actionable leads who will pay, etc., etc.)
Where do I want my content to be distributed? (i.e. from a workshop, from a blog post, from a podcast, etc., etc.)
Who do I want my content to target? (i.e. women with children, business owners with conflicts, men in divorce, judges in arbitration, etc., etc.)

Unfortunately, many peace builders get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively out of fear on “how to make money” rather than focusing on “how to make a difference.” To be successful as an entrepreneurial peace builder, the things is to manage thinking about how hard the three hard parts might be to accomplish collectively, rather than avoiding actually taking the concrete steps to think (and act) differently about at least one of them individually.

-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 10 Year Overnight Success IV

We laid out for them, at one point in the meeting (a meeting that we had scheduled for, pushed for and planned for, by the way) all of the projects in which Human Services Consulting and Training is currently involved.

When we were done talking, we admitted to feeling—and thinking—that we have been in a bit of a long-term dip, since last October.

They (the other party on the other side of the table) laughed and told us that we had been “very busy” for being in a dip.

In another interaction we had, we were talking with another up and coming podcaster. We were talking about how long it takes to create a blog following versus creating a podcast following, versus creating a video based following.

We talked about how you need at minimum, 1000 raving, dedicated fans, gathered from the long tail, to make this work in the long-term.

Our fellow podcaster raised his eyebrows and said something to the effect of “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.”

Someone else, about a year and a half ago, said the same thing.

Stories of success (and the pornography of failure stories) litter the Internet, entrepreneurship, small business literature and, the truly American section of the local bookstore, the self-help section. But what is never pointed out in those stories, is that for at least a decade before you read the story on the Internet, became a fan online, watched a TV show with a “shark” in it, or even picked up that self-help book, the people that made that were toiling away in anonymity, just like you.

The path to both success and failure takes a decade of commitment and consistency, trial and error, tears and joy. Dizzying heights and terrible dips.

And whether you’re building a product, a service or some weird, wonderful hybrid, you better be willing to commit to a ten year long journey of ideas that might not work, people that might not like you all the time and projects that might fly, or crash and burn.

What separates the employees, from the risk takers, and the owners from the entrepreneurs is the willingness to go on a ten-year long walk.

Just keep walking…

-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/

[Strategy] 0 to 1 for the Peacebuilder

In every industry, there are zeros and there are ones.

Zeros have the advantage, because they understand something fundamental that all of the ones who follow them do not: Innovative thinking, processes, relationships and much more, lead to dominance in the marketplace of ideas, products, processes and services. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, wrote about this phenomenon in his book [link here] Zero to One.

Don’t believe us?

Well, there were a lot of car companies before Henry Ford took the assembly line process apart, and re-engineered it, piece by piece. That was his “zero” innovation.

There were a lot of search engines before Google came along and developed an algorithm so that a consumer could search the Internet like a dictionary and that businesses could buy words and terms in auctions. That was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s “zero” innovation.

There were a lot of (and there still are) gourmet chefs before Gordon Ramsey, Anthony Bourdain, and many others came along, each with their own innovative approaches (“zeros” all) and offerings for the marketplace.

In the field of peacebuilding, there are a few zeros, people who have innovated “outside of the box” in their approach and philosophy around building a peaceful world: Kenneth Cloke, Christopher Moore, Bernard Mayer and a few others, such as William Ury and Roger Fischer.

The next zero in the world of peacebuilding will be the innovator who accepts and integrates the digital landscape into peacebuilding, from content creation to platform building to gaining client’s trust through the use of data gathering and implementation tools, the field of peacebuilding—conflict resolution, mediation, arbitration, negotiation, diplomacy—must move forward in the digital world.

There are people—pioneers really—who are making the jump, from Colin Rule to Jim Melamed and even Giuseppe Leone and David Liddle. But it’s not enough.

The distance between the first mover, the zero, in the marketplace and the one, the first follower, is huge. For an example of how huge, remember that Yahoo existed well before Google and now, in both market share and influence, it is light years behind Google.

In the field of peacebuilding, the zero who innovates first to the marketplace on the building of a more peaceful world, will be light years ahead of whoever follows them, or whomever they overtake who believed that they had first mover advantage initially.

Want to find out more about the process behind being becoming a first mover in the peacebuilding marketplace?

Then download the FREE eBook from Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT), The Savvy Peace Builder by clicking the link here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-Peace Be With You All-