Better Law & Better Life Through Emotional Intelligence

As mental awareness and self-care has ramped up over the past couple of years in the legal industry, more and more organizations are on the hunt for resources to best serve their attorneys, and teams, at firms and at corporations.

As more and more attorneys realize that turning to these types of education and consulting is a sign of strength and not weakness, the ship of despair is beginning its turn toward better days of mentally strong and agile teams.

However, this journey of self-care seems intimidating to those who aren't accustomed to making it a priority. So, where does one start this new practice?

Enter emotional intelligence (EQ).

In working with numerous in-house legal teams, firms and associations, I have been blessed to share my knowledge of emotional intelligence to audiences that are just beginning to realize the need for more balance in their professional and personal lives. Emotional intelligence is the easiest and most universal way for anyone and everyone to manage their emotions, while being aware of the emotions of others, to achieve a less volatile lifestyle emotionally and physically.

In the book Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed, Dr. Larry Richard discussed persistent patterns and traits found among lawyers through his research. See, . In his findings, attorneys exhibited behavior that ranks high among traits such as skepticism and urgency while ranking low in characteristics such as resilience. While we all can benefit from an increased EQ, the best news is, outside of doctors, attorneys have the greatest white space of opportunity to improve their emotional intelligence professionally.

Let's look at some of the typical behavior exhibited by attorneys that is a result of low levels of emotional intelligence:

• Logic vs. Emotion: Attorneys, by training mostly, are logical thinkers and rarely bring emotion into their work and interactions. While this is a critical factor to being an effective attorney, the lack of ability to shift gears to being more emotionally aware tends to strain communication and relationship building with others.
• Low EQ = Low Creativity & Strength: Those that have low emotional intelligence are often closed off to new ideas or diverting from the black and white of factual knowledge. This also suffocates the ability to be a creative in your problem solving when it may be extremely necessary
• Poor Bedside Manner: Any person who consults an attorney (in-house or outside counsel) has run out of options for a solution and/or isn't sure about their current path of decision making. This status brings anxiety and a large dose of humility to the person seeking counsel on a decision. Due to low EQ, attorneys infrequently approach these conversations with any empathy to the emotions of the person they're interacting with, often going to the logical solution.

Most of these types of interactions are brought by conversational or situational triggers that cause some sort of an emotional response. Some of the more common triggers in the legal and corporate worlds include:

• Change management
• High pressure, quick turn demands
• Digital over-availability
• Tough decisions and/or scenarios

If you've resonated with any of those, you understand how your day can turn south in a moment. The likelihood is, you deal with all four of them every single day. So, now that we understand what the problems typically are and what causes them, what do we do about it? None of these elements are going away anytime soon, so it's time to focus on what you can do to control your own emotions and your own environment.

The following activities are critical to practice as often as you can at work to lower your stress, increase your communication and take control back in your day, every day:

• Block time on your calendar: I know what you're thinking, "I don't have any time to block!" We're all busy all the time but if you start now and look at your calendar, it is your time that you're controlling. Pick a day and time and block a recurring meeting with yourself to answer e-mails, catch up with a coworker on a project or identify efficiencies in your workflow. Make that time non-negotiable and you'll be surprised how many people will work around your schedule.
• Explain your decisions: Whether you're leading a team, interacting with a colleague or a client, it's critical to explain your decisions when you arrive at them. You may have been in a thought process for hours or days, but the people you're explaining yourself to aren't there with you. By explaining your decision making and what options you weighed, those around you will understand the goal of the end decision.
• Take feedback more positively: No one loves to be wrong or not do something to the level of expectation of another, so when feedback comes, our pride filter tends to not see it as a good thing. Think about the last time you were unhappy as a client or customer, did you say anything? If you did, you showed the company that you care enough about maintaining some sort of relationship. If you were so disgusted that you never wanted to work with them again, you wouldn't have bothered. Same with taking feedback, they're giving it to you because they want to see something improve because they want to stay engaged.
• Set time for problem solving: We have all had those days where your calendar is back to back to back to back all day long, leaving no time to react or plan for any to-do's coming out of a meeting or developing any solutions because you have to be thinking about what's coming in the next meeting. By the end of the day, you're exhausted and feel like you've accomplished nothing. Similar to time blocking, be very aware of the time you lose in all day meetings. Start scheduling 45-minute meetings instead of an hour and use that 15 minutes in between to make notes and follow ups. Come in a few minutes early to have some quiet thinking time on occasion. By giving yourself that time, you don't feel the gradual pressure building up over the course of the day to solve all of the problems at once while losing context as each meeting goes by.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of how some small changes to your daily routine can radically improve your professional life from daily stress levels to communication and effectiveness as a leader. Similar to changing your health, the small changes done in repetition over the course of time make the biggest difference. Plus, if you have the ability to improve your professional and personal life through small changes, wouldn't you want to take advantage?

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Rich Bracken is a marketing and business development executive, keynote speaker, author, and podcaster focusing on leveraging emotional intelligence for better personal and professional lives. Through his presentations, articles and the EnRich Your Soul Podcast, he arms his audiences with the tools to understand and enhance their emotional intelligence to be better leaders, teammates and people. He's had the privilege of speaking at various national conferences and brought in to organizations from Fortune 50 companies to mid-size businesses to help change their culture to a more positive, energetic direction. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on LinkedIn @rich-bracken.