Prawfsblawg has a thoughtful post by Mehrsa Baradaran about “Teaching While Woman.” Professor Baradaran thoughtfully and honestly describes her struggles and ultimate success learning classroom management as a new law professor. She shares advice she received from other young women professors including women of color dealing with what seem like disproportionately frequent challenges to their classroom authority.
The post is excellent; I highly recommend it to anyone considering law teaching in any form, from tenure-track to adjuncting or even guest-teaching one class.
Professor Baradaran’s experience and some of the comments on her post (by law students) prove that privilege and prejudice are still very much at work in the dynamics of the law school classroom. This is how she describes her experience:
Within the first two weeks of each class, without exception so far, there will be one or two challengers to your authority. The challengers will say something like this (usually with an aggressive tone and stance): “You say ____, but doesn’t the case actually say ____?” “I don’t agree with that, isn’t ____a better explanation?” The class will go silent as they recognize this as a small insurgency. You must shut this down. You must do it quickly, painfully, and effectively. But here’s the catch: you have to do it with a smile on your face. You cannot appear threatened or defensive. You need not spare the feelings of the aggressor, but need to convince the class that you are the one who knocks.
The professor’s and students’ identities form the backdrop of the interaction. Wrapped up as well is the context of the law and legal culture, with the professor serving as gatekeeper and guide to law students. Some of these students would rank highly on an arrogance scale, and others have so much to offer but so little confidence.
Within this context, the professor listens to the question, seeks to manage nonverbal signals in handling the question, and makes a decision how to proceed. It’s not easy. I am grateful to Professor Baradaran for sharing her experience.
Thanks to Professor Dorothy Brown of Emory Law School for feedback on an earlier draft of this post.
Thanks also to Professor Michael Higdon of the University of Tennessee College of Law for sharing Professor Baradaran’s post among legal writing professors.
On this Valentine’s Day, if you are celebrating with a significant other, consider effective listening as a gift more valuable than chocolates or jewelry. (And that really means something, at least coming from the author of Listen Like a Lawyer.)
A few specifics that might make this day more romantic. These are inspired by some of the tweets and retweets from Listen Like a Lawyer:
Keep your focus on your partner.
Cognitive control, being able to #focus on one thing that’s important, is essential to every step toward that larger…http://t.co/Hk83rNMyF6
Listen Like a Lawyer spent last week sheltering in place during the Atlanta snow debacle. It was a good week to make crock-pot chili and spend some time re-reading a good book—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
The main character is not Henry VIII or Thomas More or Anne Boleyn, but Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell was a commoner of uncommon distinction: a mercenary, a wool merchant, a lawyer, a politician, and Master Secretary to the king. This powerful and adept “nobody” earns the fear, if not the respect, of the English nobility at this “disordered” historical moment involving Henry VIII’s quest to father a male heir.
In reading and re-reading Wolf Hall, I was struck by Cromwell’s listening. The different ways he listens, and how he fails and succeeds by his listening, have much to teach lawyers.
Listening to his client’s spoken and unspoken instructions
As portrayed in Wolf Hall, Cromwell listens to what the king says as well as what he really means. Cromwell well understands that the king wishes to view himself as perfect although his desires and actions are certainly not. Thus there is a mismatch in what he says and what he wants to have done. “Sometimes it is a solace to me,” Henry says to Cromwell, “not to have to talk and talk. You were born to understand me, perhaps.”
Listening to his client’s mood
When Henry “rages,” Cromwell responds not with words but with quiet: “He sits quietly, watching Henry, trying by stillness to defuse the situation; to wrap the king in a blanketing silence, so that he, Henry, can listen to himself. It is a great thing, to be able to divert the wrath of the Lion of England.”
Listening to what cannot be written
At one point Cromwell is sent by the king to check on the former queen, Katherine, and their daughter, Mary. For Cromwell—by then the Master Secretary of the kingdom—this seems like a waste of time. Yet as he perceives the situation at Katherine’s lodgings, he understands why the king sent him in person: “The things that are happening cannot be put in a letter.”
The new queen, Anne Boleyn, seeks to make the old queen’s life miserable through her instructions to Katherine’s servants. The king does not want to contradict her openly yet does not want to bring misery to Katherine and Mary either. Only by in-person presence and careful listening to the servants’ statements of their orders can Cromwell comprehend the situation accurately and help the king avoid direct harm to Katherine while also appeasing Anne Boleyn.
Listening to everyone, not just the powerful
Cromwell speaks many languages and is a master “code-switcher,” able to converse with anyone of any station. He is always collecting bits of information about the common people’s mood toward the king. In one scene, Cromwell takes off his fine ring and helps the cook to chop meat as he learns what the people are saying about Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn.
At times Cromwell listens to what he was not meant to hear, such as what people really think of him. He passes by a doorway and hears a sycophantic musician discussing not only his own desire to see Cromwell’s execution but also the musician’s belief Anne Boleyn was not a virgin when she married Henry VIII. This information helps Cromwell first assist the king in marrying Anne Boleyn and later to prosecute her.
A failure of listening
Despite Cromwell’s many strengths as a listener, he fails at one crucial moment. For years early in his career, Cromwell served Cardinal Wolsey, who became his mentor. Wolsey is a powerful man, handling much of the kingdom’s business including arranging marriages among nobles. In an early scene in Wolf Hall, Wolsey meets with Anne Boleyn’s father, brother to the powerful Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell stands in the corner.
The cardinal and Monseigneur Boleyn discuss Anne Boleyn’s unsanctioned decision to enter a marriage contract with a young nobleman. Cromwell says nothing as Wolsey insults the entire Boleyn family as lowborn, and attacks Anne Boleyn in particular, calling her “spoiled goods.” This is not, as it turns out, a good career move for him. Later, in privacy, Cromwell shares with the cardinal the rumors from London about the king’s growing alignment with the Boleyn family. He has already begun an affair with Mary Boleyn (popularly depicted in The Other Boleyn Girl). Cromwell’s action–or really, his inaction–during this crucial meeting has helped to set in motion the cardinal’s downfall. “Why did you not speak up?” the cardinal asks. “How could I have introduced the topic?” Cromwell replies.
The Boleyns later take revenge; the cardinal loses everything and dies alone. Cromwell manages not to go down as well, instead transitioning to the king’s service, where he helps the king refute Anne Boleyn’s supposed marriage contract. Cromwell then masterminds the legal and political strategy to separate England from the Catholic Church.
Wolf Hall is a worthwhile read for lawyers, especially those with an interest in literature, history, or politics. If you have read it, please share thoughts in the comments here. The second book in the series, Bring Up the Bodies, narrates Cromwell’s actions during Anne Boleyn’s reign and fall. (In an early scene in Bring Up the Bodies, one of the queen’s courtiers tries to share gossip about her with Cromwell, who is distracted and inattentive. “You are usually such a good listener,” she says.) Hilary Mantel’s third and final installment in the series, The Mirror and the Light, is forthcoming in 2015.
Patti Richardsis a tax attorney practicing independently in Atlanta. She lost some hearing in her right ear after contracting measles at age 5. She had experimental surgery as a child and went on to teach high school, attend law school, and practice law for ten years until 1999.
At that point, when she was 50, her hearing had become severely degraded. Her left ear did not hear at all, and the hearing in her right ear was weakening. Richards had surgery on the right ear to reconstruct the deteriorating bone structure. The damage turned out to be too extensive. “Since then,” Richards said, “it has been a process of constant reinvention.”
Richards began the process of fitting a hearing aid. Her experience was typical in that several readjustments were necessary: “The first time I left the audiologist’s office, the elevator bell dinged on my floor—then it dinged two more times.” She has since gotten good adjustments on a Phonak hearing aid. She does not need a special cell phone that cuts feedback; she holds a regular cell phone so as to reduce feedback in the hearing aid, or she uses speakerphone.
The nature of her hearing loss does not lend itself to cochlear implants. Her remaining hearing is compromised by allergy symptoms, so she takes an aggressive course of allergy shots.
Richards is a tax attorney. For listening to clients, she uses the auditory input with help from the hearing aid, as well as other inputs: “You can listen other ways by reading what they say, their gestures and body language.” But she noted that with a tax practice, what her clients need most of all is help understanding tax jargon and tax consequences. Thus her practice leans more heavily on her speaking and writing skills in explaining how tax law works.
“I’ve been fortunate my whole life,” she said. She recalled the sacrifice her parents made for her have the experimental surgery as a child; thinking about that sacrifice made it easier for her to accept the hearing loss and move on. “For a long time, I didn’t have to tell people about it, but now I do,” she said. “But I won’t let it drag me down and stop me.”
Dave Thomashas a “tremendously personal” practice as an executive-compensation attorney with Wilson Sonsini in Silicon Valley. At age 40, he suffered substantial hearing loss in his right ear after a sinus infection.
Thomas worked with doctors for three months to determine whether the hearing loss was permanent. A hearing test, CT scan and MRI revealed that the problems with his hearing weren’t structural. The doctors said there was a chance the hearing would return, but Thomas faced a choice: “You can have diminished hearing and hope it comes back, or you can treat it.”
The choice wasn’t difficult for Thomas. He had seen his own father struggle with hearing loss, caused by service as an artillery officer, in his older years. “It took forever to convince him to get hearing aids,” Thomas said, and when his father did begin using hearing aids, “it was like night and day watching him be be able to engage in conversation again and engage in life again.”
After the battery of tests, Thomson got a hearing aid, which—as is the case for many if not all hearing-aid users—has required some adjustments. Thomas had lost the middle auditory tones, which led to difficulty tracking conversation in groups and hearing what direction speech is coming from. The hearing aid provides valuable amplification of these tones, but too much amplification sometimes means Thomas can hear ceiling fans. He has worked hard with his audiologist to amplify the tones where he has trouble while avoiding the distraction of amplifying other tones.
Other strategies including positioning himself to put his “good side” toward the room. If it’s a boardroom negotiation, that means sitting on the corner of the table. When he speaks on panels, he asks to sit on the far right of the panel. Thomas describes himself as a “right ear person” until the hearing loss; now he uses a headset in his left ear for phone conferences. Many people struggling with hearing loss describe wearing their hear longer to cover the hearing aids, but Thomas said he had already started wearing relatively longer hair before the hearing loss. Regardless of hairstyle, he said, the hearing aid is small enough to not be noticeable unless you’re looking for it.
Thomas has some advice to other lawyers who think they may have hearing loss. “My advice is that number one, they figure it out. Go see an audiologist or ENT and have a hearing test. As lawyers, we don’t ever give our clients advice without making sure know the facts, but with personal health we’re often willing to make assumptions and avoid fact gathering.”
He also praised the technology and various cost options for handling hearing loss. Hearing aids can be pricey, but Costco is one option for reducing the cost and gaining flexibility with adjustments and returns, he said.
Thomas could do well as a coach if he decides to transition out of his executive-compensation practice. “If you need a hearing aid, own it. Deal with it,” he said. “The hearing aid lets me sit back in board meetings and go back to listening and thinking instead of worrying about hearing.”
Hearing is necessary for effective listening. Thus, hearing loss is a critical issue for professions that require listening, such as lawyering. In her frank and informative book, Shouting Won’t Help: Why I–and 50 Million Other Americans–Can’t Hear You, former newspaper editor Katherine Bouton describes her struggle with hearing loss while trying to do a job comparable in many ways to lawyering.
As her hearing was declining—always in conjunction with personal stress such as her father’s death—Bouton was faced with boisterous editorial meetings and intense individual conversations. She tried to hide her deteriorating hearing for many years but ultimately began to accept help via hearing aids and other technology. Bouton tells her story in such an honest way; I can’t recommend this book enough. For further praise of the book, see Seth Horowitz’s New York Times review.
Yet hearing loss is “an invisible disability”: “There’s no white cane to signal a problem, no crutches, . . . no bandages or braces,” Bouton writes. The lack of outward signals can mask various efforts to compensate. “Most hearing-impaired people quickly learn to nod or smile or respond in a noncommittal way, taking their signal from the speaker and the people around them.” These forms of compensation are imperfect at best, as Bouton acknowledges: “I lose the train of the discussion and ask a question that was just answered. I think we’re talking about one thing when we’re talking about something completely different.” And over time, the accumulation of awkwardness can lead to isolation and withdrawal. Bouton describes how she maintains her social lifelines, yet she also decided long ago not to participate in group conversations except with her closest friends.
Shouting Won’t Help is both a personal narrative and a treatise on hearing impairment. Bouton traces her own diminished hearing and environmental aggravators—primarily, noise. She acknowledges her fear of the conditions associated with hearing loss such as depression, heart disease, insomnia, and dementia. As to dementia, the correlation maybe a side effect of social isolation or cognitive overload, or there may be a common pathology—which, to Bouton and anyone facing hearing loss, is “deeply distressing.”
Bouton’s work is a particularly helpful read for lawyers because her work as a senior editor at the New York Times had a lot in common with lawyering. She struggled in phone conversations, editorial meetings where people talked over one another, and group lunches in noisy restaurants. She missed a lot in large public events such as the Broadway plays she was assigned to cover. “I communicated with my writers as much as possible either face-to-face, where I could read their lips, or by e-mail. I e-mailed people who were ten feet away. But there were a couple of writers who wanted to talk—by phone. Often these calls would go on for a half hour or forty minutes, with me catching just as much as I needed to murmur occasionally ‘That sounds good,’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ or ‘Well, just get it to me as soon as you can.'”
As Bouton came to terms with her impairment and need for hearing aids, she began talking to some trusted former colleagues. They had noticed behaviors that could describe lawyers’ attempt to compensate as well. As one friend and colleague remarked, “’I did notice that you often held back at meetings, and didn’t necessarily engage in conversational back-and-forth after you’d given your own assessment of a piece. . . . I recognized a certain reticence in your approach to the job. I could see from your reading of our knottier science stories that your analytical gifts were considerable, and yet I sensed a reluctance to use them fully in face-to-face interactions. I attributed this reticence to temperament, or to a discomfort with the management of the magazine, or to . . . a waning of interest in the workaday routines of journalism after years in the trenches.’”
As her hearing loss became more severe, Bouton was forced to accept the loss and seek help. Her book describes many methods for addressing hearing loss, from hearing aids and cochlear implants to phone amplifiers, caption technology, and special alarm clocks that mimic the sun at dawn. Technology called hearing loops can help with otherwise incomprehensible noise in public spaces such as museums and ticket loops. Bouton worked intensively with doctors and audiologists, using virtually every technology available. Yet she also experienced rough transition with some of her hearing aids and a missed opportunity to fully adjust to the cochlear implant.
Despite aversion to being a “joiner,” she also joined the Hearing Loss Association and attended meetings, where she met new people and kept up with new technology. Although her adjustments were time-consuming and results imperfect at time, Bouton concludes the book with gratitude—both for the many advances making now a “good time to be deaf” and, on an individual level, for the “freedom of coming clean” and not having to “fake it” anymore.
Next week Listen Like a Lawyer will feature interviews with lawyers who have faced and adjusted to hearing impairment in their life and work. Please share your thoughts below or contact me at jromig@emory.edu if you would like to share your experience with hearing loss.
Conferences are a unique listening opportunity, especially for those of us who regularly stand on the speaking side of the podium. Sitting in the audience at a conference presentation lets us experience and reflect on our own listening: are we perhaps just as distracted as those we complain about when we have the podium? If we tune out for just a moment, how hard is it to reintegrate into the speaker’s flow of ideas?
Flickr/Magnus Brath
Being in the audience also gives us the social experience of listening. Listening and learning are not merely acts of individual will; our perception and comprehension are affected by the acts of those around us trying to do the same thing. There are some interesting social aspects of social listening I have learned about since starting this blog—for example, “turn sharks.”
I first read about turn sharks in Frederick Erickson’s book Talk and Social Theory. The phrase describes aggressive behavior during conversational turns—basically, interrupting someone else’s turn to speak and taking over. When there is a potential opportunity to speak, turn sharks circle the conversation opportunistically. They look for weaknesses in the speaker or pauses that would allow them to break in. If the turn shark thinks he or she can make the point better or has a related point that simply must be heard in tandem with what is being said, the shark raises a hand, uses nonverbal cues to enter the conversation, and sometimes just starts talking.
Turn sharks can be just a very strong version of what speakers want and what listeners in the audience need—that is, other actively engaged members of the audience. And a turn shark may be so aggressive because he or she really does have the most relevant or efficient thing to say. The speaker may wish to use such comments to advance the conversation.
But sometimes the turn shark begins to dominate, or to direct a conversation away from the speaker’s goals. To manage the dynamic, a speaker can try several strategies:
Demonstrate comfort with pauses and silence.
Listen receptively to each audience member’s comment, reinforcing that person’s autonomy as the speaker.
“Listen” visually by scanning the entire room to see who has a hand up, rather than opting for volunteer with the most aggressive body language.
Actively engage others in the audience by explicitly giving them a turn to speak.
Use a method such as a “talking stick” to reinforce who has the floor.
Protect audience members who have been targeted by a turn shark, returning the conversational focus back to them.
For single-session meetings such as at conferences, where the audience mixes and reconstitutes for each individual session, turn sharks may be as nomadic and unpredictable as real sharks. For ongoing social situations where the same audience comes together over time—such as, for example, in a class—conversation leaders may need to institute more structured conversational customs to let the sharks have their say while keeping others out of their jaws.
Here are a few questions for listeners and for speakers reflecting on the group dynamics when they involve the audience:
If you have been a member of an audience that included a turn shark, how did you react? How did the turn of conversation affect your listening?
If you yourself have been a turn shark, what was your motivation? How did you insert yourself into the conversation, and what was the impact on the group?
If you have led a single-session meeting that included one or more turn sharks, how did you handle the conversational flow?
If you have lead a multi-session group that included one or more turn sharks, how did you handle the conversational flow?
Many thanks to Emory Law Professor Barbara Bennett Woodhouse for feedback on this post.
Listen Like a Lawyer is grateful to welcome this guest post by Kendall L. Kerew, Co-Director of Georgia State University College of Law’s Externship Program.
An externship (a field placement for academic credit) can be a great opportunity for law students to learn outside of the classroom alongside practicing lawyers and judges. If you are a law student beginning an externship this semester, you might want to consider the following ways listening skills can help you gain the most from your experience. If you don’t have an externship this semester, think about how you might be able to incorporate listening skills into your approach to a current or future internship or summer job.
1. Listen to maximize opportunities.
When you begin your externship, you may have a sense of what you want to learn from the experience. While it is important to clarify your own learning goals and expectations, it will add to your experience if you ask your supervising attorney or judge about his or her goals and expectations. What does he or she want to teach you? What experiences does he or she think you shouldn’t miss? What kind of assignments should you expect? What observation opportunities will you have? If you listen carefully to how your supervisor answers these questions, you will have a good idea of whether your goals are realistic and achievable.
2. Listen to increase understanding.
All externs have the shared goal of delivering a quality, useful work product. To get one step closer to achieving this goal, be sure you know what your supervisor wants. Listen to all parts of the assignment to make sure you understand what you are being asked to do and why you are being asked to do it. Ask clarifying questions to determine the scope and application of the assignment. Listen to the answers and ask follow-up questions.
Listening to your supervisor is just as important after you finish the assignment. Be sure to actively seek your supervisor’s assessment. Hear the feedback. Be open-minded and receptive to constructive criticism. You can’t improve without knowing where you went wrong or what you could have done better.
3. Listen to what others have to say.
You will interact with many non-lawyers during your externship. Be sure to listen to what they have to say. The administrative assistants, court personnel, and other interns/externs who support your supervising lawyer or judge can provide invaluable information about office procedures, preferences, and expectations. Listening to non-lawyers can provide you with a different and important perspective about the practice of law.
4. Listen to yourself.
Throughout your externship experience, you will be expected to actively reflect on what you are learning, not only about the law, but also about yourself and the formation of your professional identity. Set aside a few minutes each day to focus on yourself and engage in self-reflection. Ask yourself questions that will help you to figure out what kind of lawyer you want to be. What did you like or dislike about a particular assignment or area of law? What professional or unprofessional lawyering practices did you encounter and how did they make you feel? What lessons did you learn from observing the lawyers and judges around you? How do you want to practice law? Assess your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses, and map out your plan for the future (both immediate and long-term). The work you put into figuring out what kind of lawyer you want to be may prove to be the most important work you do all semester.
Kendall L. Kerew, Co-Director, Georgia State University College of Law Externship Program
The author is grateful to her externship program co-director, Andrea Curcio, for her helpful feedback and unflagging support and to Jennifer Romig for inviting her to write this guest post.
The holiday season brings many opportunities for lawyers and legal professionals to reconnect with old friends and make new ones at holiday parties, school events, and other social gatherings. Law students may also have networking opportunities at bar events and family gatherings. Making the most of these opportunities requires good conversational skills–which require good listening skills. […]
Effective listening captures information that can’t be gotten any other way. A previous post talked about the rich information found in spoken “discourse markers” that help structure and annotate speech content. Another rich source of information is nonverbal cues. Lawyers who want to glean the most information from their communication encounters should be attuned to what a speaker’s nonverbal cues are saying.
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, writes in his new book, Focus, about nonverbal cues as an element of attention:
“[A] steady stream of nonverbal exchanges rushes to and from everyone we interact with, whether in a routine hello or a tense negotiation, transmitting messages received every bit as powerfully as whatever we might be saying. Perhaps more powerfully.”
As far as the breadth of information provided, Higdon cites the following (admittedly broad) definition of nonverbal cues:
“communication by means other than words.”
This communication comes via body movements, characteristics of the voice, proximity and spacing, movement, pauses and other temporal features, and “surrounding furnishings and objects that may add to one’s identity.”
Actors work on their nonverbal communication and thus can be a good starting point for brushing up on this aspect of communication:
To see an exaggerated but charming example of nonverbal communication, follow Roger Ailes’ advice in You Are the Message: watch a tape of Angela Lansbury—with the sound turned off.
For a funny and all-too-familiar example of annoying nonverbal behavior, watch this smartphone advertisement about a date night gone awry: “Date Night.”
For lawyers, heeding nonverbal cues can enhance client communications. Heeding these cues can also provide a deeper strategic understanding for negotiations and disputes. When communication in person with clients, nonverbal cues send important signals:
Do you have the client’s attention?
Does the client understand your content?
Does the client like and trust you?
What are the client’s “pain points” with the process you are describing?
Does the client have the power or confidence to make an independent decision?
Is the client interested in continuing the conversation, or does the client want the conversation to end?
In addition to being highly informative, nonverbal communication is generally believed to be authentic—that is, “more spontaneous, harder to fake, and less likely to be manipulated,” compared to explicit verbal statements, as Higdon points out. This belief is reflected in U.S. civil procedure’s prohibition on credibility determinations at the summary judgment stage: the judge or jury at trial can see, hear, and evaluate all of the nonverbal cues that aren’t present on paper at the summary judgment stage.
So what can a lawyer do to better listen to nonverbal cues? Lawyers could benefit from watching tape of great, or even just average, lawyers in action, and focusing on these main criteria:
body language;
“paralanguage” (sounds other than language); and
appearance.
The goal of this exercise would be to focus very closely on the cues that usually seem peripheral when we think we’re listening just to content. Exercising our focus on these cues can enhance our attention to them during day-to-day interactions. Attending to the unique information in these cues can help lawyers have better conversations with clients and better understand the dynamics of in-person interactions.
Please share your experiences and advice on observing and interpreting nonverbal communication in law practice.
Part of effective listening is dealing with what you hear from your own self-talk. As reported by Susan David and Christina Congleton in their Harvard Business Review article on Emotional Agility, we speak on average 16,000 words per day–out loud. A comment to the article suggests that internal self-talk generates 20,000-40,000 “neurological” words per day.
The idea behind the Emotional Agility article is exactly what I wanted to write about here at Listen Like a Lawyer at this time of year. Law students are headed directly into exams, a petri dish for negative self-talk, as Alison Monahan has written about here at Ms. JD. Recent graduates are about six months out of school and either moving past the honeymoon phase of a new job or still seeking employment. Practicing lawyers face pressures to close out the year in terms of projects, deals, cases, and billable hours. In general the holidays can be a time of stress, and those involved in the legal profession have our own brand of stress around this time. Stress leads to “internal chatter” that may be counterproductive.
Thus these difficult times are exactly when effective listening skills in terms of dealing with your own self-talk is so important. Self-talk is pervasive, but as David and Congleton write, sometimes we become “hooked” on certain “rigid, repetitive” thoughts. To break these patterns and become more emotionally agile, they recommend recognizing, labeling, and accepting these chattering thoughts–followed by intentionally acting not on the chatter but on your own values. I recommend the full article (available free with registration) as well as the comments, which acknowledge related models serving both therapeutic and business/leadership goals.
Particularly for law students headed into study periods and finals, there is no better time than now to work on productive management of self-talk. As one example of a resource, here is Berkeley Law’s online guide addressing law student stress. And one of the sources cited there is Debra Austin’s law review article on “neural self-hacking to optimize law school performance.” I recommend this article, particularly the solutions section at the end. The benefits of mindfulness and meditation are most directly related to the self-talk issue. But other solutions such as exercise and sleep have powerful indirect effects on negative self-talk as well.
Lawyers, law students, and legal professionals: please share your own experiences and advice about effectively dealing with self-talk. Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving to all.
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