Self-leadership lessons from Leonardo DiCaprio

Any lawyer can develop a new trait or habit by "acting as if." To explain, here is an excerpt from an article on lawyer self-leadership that will appear in the next edition of The Complete Lawyer. [You may now read "Lead Your Brain Instead of It Leading You."] The article was written by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz and me and will be out mid-May. I will post the link to the whole edition on lawyer leadership when it comes online. The edition includes articles not only on the brain and leadership, but also appreciative intelligence and lawyer leadership, innate aptitudes and lawyer leadership, and leadership development in law school. In the meanwhile, here's our article excerpt  . . .

Strategy #4:  Act as if you have already mastered the new skill

Jeff coached Leonardo DiCaprio in his role in The Aviator. [Interview of Jeff Schwartz about the OCD coaching.] DiCaprio played Howard Hughes who suffered from severe OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder]. DiCaprio took on the role so well that he began to experience OCD. [Read "Expert: DiCaprio developed 'Howard Hughes syndrome'."

Acting as if you have a trait causes both brain changes and chemical changes throughout the body. Therefore "acting as if" with attention to what you are doing is a very powerful technique for altering and mastering behavior.

Before neuroscience had proven that brain changes are created by behavior accompanied by full attention, the great acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski knew this intuitively. Stanislavski worked with his students to help them convincingly act their roles. He believed that a person cannot experience a feeling on command but the actor can evoke the feeling by willfully experiencing what he called "antecedents" to that feeling. Antecedents are actions.

For example, suppose a person wants to feel confident consistently and by doing so begin to develop “confidence neural pathways” in the brain thus making it easier for him to feel confident. That person should concentrate on and enact such antecedents of the feeling as:

•    How does a confident person sound when speaking, laughing, asking questions?
•    How does a confident person listen?
•    How does a confident person walk, sit, gesture?
•    What does a confident person think about?

By answering these questions and letting the responses guide behavior, the person grows in confidence.

A person skilled at self-leadership has a strategy of who she or she wants to be and can use "acting as if" as one tactic to become that person. The self-leader is fully aware of his or her actions, knowing that those actions create the brain connections and habits that facilitate future behavior. The person who is not aware of his or her action and its consequences is not a self-leader.

Note (added April 24, 2007, at 6:15 PM Mountain): You may listen to another interview of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz. In this interview, he discusses his book The Mind and the Brain.