idealawg

Are family trusts a burden or a tool to enhance the lives of beneficiaries?

Friend and colleague Hartley Goldstone was recently interviewed for Family Wealth Report about his new book Family Trusts: A Guide for Beneficiaries, Trustees, Trust Protectors and Trust Creators coauthored with Jay Hughes and Keith Whitaker. From the interview conducted by family office consultant Joe Reilly:

Joe Reilly: In Family Trusts, it is mentioned that most beneficiaries, an overwhelming majority in fact, believe their trusts are a burden. Why do you think that is?

Hartley Goldstone: It comes from being wedded to a predominantly negative view of trusts. Let me explain. Much of my work is helping trustees and beneficiaries develop productive relationships. If early on I simply ask: "What’s a trust?" The most common responses are - in so many words - that a trust is primarily a receptacle to hold assets, or a tax strategy, or a legal document. That view amounts to a trust being experienced as a transaction, rather than as a gift having “spirit.”

We stress in Family Trusts that first and foremost trusts are human relationships. And that the highest purpose of a trust is to enhance the lives of the beneficiaries. In this context, "enhance" means that a trust is seen as a relationship between beneficiary and trustee that supports the beneficiary’s maturity and independence. Contrast that with lifestyle “subsidies,” which can have the opposite effect. Agreement on the “human relationship” and “enhancement” principles is an important step toward re-framing a trust from being seen as a burden, to being seen as the gift of an amazing resource.

Joe Reilly: How do you deal with resistance from benefactors who would like a more heavy hand?

Click to read the whole interview.

Interview of lawyer mediator Gary Friedman: How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing long-time mediator and mediation trainer Gary Friedman. The sponsoring organization Purposeful Planning Institute (about which I have blogged here, here, and here; and for which I am Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices) is one that is close to my heart. The recording of this teleconference with a wise and thoughtful conflict professional was much appreciated and I thank both Gary and PPI. I hope you will enjoy listening.

The PPI announcement of the teleconference with links for listening and reading is below.

Inside Out: How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients

Audio File: Download/Play Recording
 
Date: August 11, 2015
 
Guest Speaker: Gary J. Friedman,  Co-Founder, The Center for Understanding in Conflict (formerly the Center for Mediation in Law)
 
Host: Stephanie West Allen, JD, PPI Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices
 
Handout: Introduction & Excerpt from Inside Out by Gary Friedman
 
Overview:  The focus of this interview is on a central tool that all conflict professionals can develop, the ability to use their understanding of their inner lives to help their clients deal with conflict.  Using tools of self-awareness, the professional can enhance their ability to bring their full attention to their engagement with the client, work with their own feelings, especially negative reactions, to bring them closer to the clients, understand and deepen their commitment to their work, and open a path between them and their client that will solve the external problem.
 
Important Points:

• If we limit our focus to the external dimensions of our clients’ problems we are really limiting our ability to effectively solve them. Understanding the internal dimensions of problems (the emotional and human element) is really at the core.
• Effective communication with others requires far more than simply listening to the words of the client, but requires the use of all our senses. Effective listening is a skill and we can all learn to avoid distractions and be truly present with our clients and in the moment with them.
• The professional’s emotional reactions to the client, particularly feelings that are accompanied by judgments, if left unattended can create walls of separation between professional and client. There is no such thing as being nonjudgmental, and the question should not be whether or not we have judgments, but what to do with them when we have them.

Purposeful Quote:  “Every conflict begins with thoughts of fear, animosity and aggression which pass through some people’s minds and spread like wildfire.  The only antidote to these aberrations is to take on fully the suffering of others.”  – Matthieu Ricard
 
Reading Recommendation: Inside Out: How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients by Gary Friedman (available online here) [the book is also available here]

Note (added August 27, 2015): Click to learn more about Self-Reflection for Conflict Professionals Intensive (SCPI), the program Friedman describes in the interview and his latest book.

These days you don't see events like this involving supreme court justices

From the ABA Journal, we learn of the colorful history of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field. The events described in the article were hardly all that added color to his life story. For a more complete look at the man, read this review of Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age, a biography. An excerpt:

And, indeed, when Field made an enemy, apparently it was for life. Thus, one of his "critics," William Turner, described Field's career in California as "series of little-minded meanliness, of braggadocio, pusillanimity, and contemptible vanity, which when known will sink him so low in public estimation that the hand of the resurrectionist will never reach him." Field returned the sentiments. Turner, who had served with Field as a California judge, was a man "of depraved tastes, of vulgar habits, of ungovernable temper, reckless of truth ... and grossly incompetent to discharge the duties of his office" (pp. 34-5).

...

The remainder of Kens's chapters focus on Field's High Court career, from March 1863, when Lincoln appointed him as the tenth justice, to 1897 when--suffering from marked physical discomfort and mental confusion if not feebleness--he reluctantly resigned, effective December 1, 1897. Field served during the presidencies of Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison and McKinley. In an era much less sensitive to appearances of judicial impropriety, Field remained on the bench in numerous cases where one of the participating lawyers was his brother David Dudley Field. Moreover, he welcomed his brother's management of an ill-conceived and unrealistic movement to push Stephen Field for selection by the democrats as a presidential candidate in 1880. Like his colleagues Samuel Miller and Joseph Bradley, Field believed that he was admirably suited to be chief justice, a position to which they all aspired, though in vain.

Yoga for Lawyers: Who are the lawyers who wrote the book?

A new book on yoga written for lawyers has been published by the American Bar Association. The coauthors are lawyers from New Mexico.

Hallie Love's Web site includes this description of the book:

Written by lawyers Hallie Love and Nathalie Martin, Yoga for Lawyers - Mind-Body Techniques to Feel Better All the Time, published by the American Bar Association 2014,  is a gentle introductory approach grounded in scientific studies, scholarly research, and clear instructions. Proven to relieve stress, energize, and improve sleep, the featured easy-to-learn and easy-to-do meditative techniques and therapeutic yoga stretches can change your life in just minutes every day.

With photos detailing the exercises and written descriptions of how and why to do them, Yoga for Lawyers offers techniques that can help you improve your law practice by sharpening your ability to concentrate and bettering your overall state of mind and well being.

Nathalie Martin is a prof at University of New Mexico's law school. An article about her and the book was published yesterday in Albuquerque Business First. From "UNM professor: Lawyers could use yoga for knotty problems":

Pointing to studies that show lawyers are twice as likely as others to be alcoholics and three times more likely to suffer a heart attack, a professor from the University of New Mexico School of Law has helped write a book advocating yoga to help.

Nathalie Martin, the Frederick M. Hart Chair in Consumer and Clinical Law, co-authored “Yoga for Lawyers: Mind-Body Techniques to Feel Better All the Time” with Hallie Love. Love, who is a yoga teacher, also has more than a decade of experience as a practicing lawyer.

And from Professor Martin's UNM Web page:

Professor Martin's passions include three long-term life goals: first, helping small businesses get started in New Mexico, and thus improving the State's overall economy; second, helping consumers avoid the many traps and pitfalls created by the current consumer credit world; and third, helping lawyers maintain balance in their lives.

She routinely advises law students on managing stress while practice law in a healthy and productive way, and invites students to visit her personal wellness page.

Link to that wellness page.

Here's a link to my page (contemplativelawyers.com) with articles and resources related to lawyers, meditation, and mindfulness. With so much attention now being given to these topics, it is hard to keep the page updated! Let me know if you see other links I should add.

Some days I wish I were still living in New Mexico . . .

Nonpracticing lawyer has written a new book—and she writes about mindfulness

This woman has focused on several of the topics we look at here at idealawg so when I learned of her existence I was intrigued. First, Laura Deutsch is a life-after-law story to add to our collection. Plus, she lives in Marin County where I attended high school for my last two years and much later learned mediation, and she has meditated at a Marin site right where I have often practiced mindfulness. Her book coming out tomorrow is on another favorite topic at idealawg: writing. Click to learn more about Writing from the Senses: 59 Exercises to Ignite Creativity and Revitalize Your Writing.

Today you may read a couple of her lawyer-related articles. First is "Canine Court" (San Francisco Chronicle Magazine) the story of her first trial.

Sparky the Airedale was my first client to stand trial. It was 1973 and I had just passed the bar. According to the lawsuit, the “aforementioned animal hereinafter referred to as ‘dog’ ” had collided with, knocked down and otherwise upset Alberto Gutierrez*, next-door neighbor to Sparky and his owner, Mrs. Carmen Moreno. It was a far more innocent time for dogs then, but not for neighbors vying for parking.

From the same publication comes "Type A-Zen: Is it possible for lawyers to slow down enough to tear lettuce?" in which she writes about lawyers in a meditation retreat. (Page 2 of the article is here.)

Zen lawyers. As a former practicing attorney and longtime meditator, this koan intrigues me. Type-A attorneys, aggressive adversaries driven to win, practicing Type-B Zen — letting go of control, feeling compassion and leaving no one with the short end of the stick.

The workshop leader, a former lawyer, now Zen priest, liked my story idea. So I carpooled from Marin with other workshop participants, five hours down the coast, then through Carmel Valley to Los Padres National Forest.

This made me smile.

On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being “Om” and 10 being “See you in court and may you live to regret it,” a lawyer’s idea of slowing down seems to be around 7 or 8. They are dreamy-eyed after sitting in 108-degree water, but still forceful, direct.

Click to order her new book now.

To trigger important conversations, use short stories or other readings

As I blogged about recently, well-chosen movies and movie clips can be used to start conversations on topics that may be difficult to broach, including relationship challenges and death-and-dying-related matters. Short readings can serve the same purpose.

Excerpts from the forthcoming book Final Chapters, reminded of the valuable function of appropriate readings for facilitating necessary but sometimes anxiety-producing conversations, those talks that can be terrifying, at least uncomfortable, easily deferred. Click through and read "Enhancing Dementia Recipe" (the middle piece); perhaps, as I was, you will be moved. Just a few words and yet a strong impact.

Short, well-written, even jarring, readings can motivate you to sit down and have a talk about the future, whether it be about your marriage, divorce, child-raising, or death. Readings can provoke talks with your family or with your clients. Read anything good lately?

Interview of Judith Fein on ancestral travel and her new book about navigating to the land of her ancestors

I have interviewed Judith Fein before about increasing self-awareness through travel. Today I am again interviewing Judith, this time about her new book The Spoon from Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands. She was kind enough to give me a review copy of the book and I savored every page. Because it is both an engaging and honest memoir, and a gripping, hard-to-stop-reading adventure tale, I recommend the book to you. Now read on as I ask Judie some questions about The Spoon from Minkowitz.

Judie, for those readers who have not yet read your latest book, will you give an overview of your concept of ancestral travel, please?

There are many forms of ancestral travel. The first, and most obvious kind, is traveling to the land your ancestors came from. The more you know about their place of origin--the country, the town or village, any buildings that may remain from their life-- the more potent the trip will be. But even if you know no details, it is powerful to walk the land they walked, breathe in the air, go to the markets, taste the food, talk to people. I think it is the best antidote to the pervasive malaise of rootlessness and disconnectedness that afflicts us.  This kind of ancestral travel has great intergenerational appeal. You can go with family elders who lived there, or you can take children to discover their family roots. Of course you can go on your own, too.

Another form of ancestral travel is what I call Emotional Genealogy. You find anyone in your family, starting with the oldest members, and ask them questions. You "travel" into the past of your family by finding out what the stories are. No story is too small or inconsequential. Each bit of information is a lead, a clue about where you came from, which is part of the identity of who you are.

And the most intimate form of ancestral travel is looking at (and finding out about) the behavioral patterns that have been passed down in your family. The positive traits, of course, and then the negative ones, like pain, anger, victimhood, silent suffering, lying--that have been handed down. When you look at the behavioral legacy, you have the option of transforming it rather than transmitting it.

A number of people who read this blog are involved with helping clients pass on wealth to the next generation or generations. A growing number of them also see values as a part of the gifts that can be part of a formal or informal inheritance. Do you think knowledge of one's ancestry and of one's place in the ancestry-life-legacy flow can affect how people see the concepts of inheritance, estates, maybe even ownership? Did your ancestral travel to Ukraine change your ideas of what you want to leave behind?

There are so many kinds of wealth. I think that if you or a client can pass on family stories, family history, transparency about what came before, connection, objects, writing, photos from an ancestor or ancestors, this is an immeasurable form of wealth. What if clients left money for the next generation specifically to take a roots trip? And maybe included tips on how to do it, where to go, what to look for, in addition to any heirlooms? This can be left in writing, or, even better, as a video. How about requesting that money be given in the ancestral town or city to restore a cemetery, expand a library, buy school supplies, purchase new seats in a religious sanctuary?  If the town or village is not impecunious, what about a memorial plaque to the ancestors? Or a small building or room in a building in their name? It is very hard to get the attention of the next generation, because so many things pull at their focus and time. But if you show through inheritance that family knowledge is as important as family funds, it can be the beginning of a sea change in the way people see themselves in relation to those who came before them and those who will follow them. One day we will be the ancestors. Who will remember us? Maybe they can remember us for the values we impart as well as the wealth we have accumulated. Maybe they will thank us one day for connecting them to those who came before them. If we forget our forebears, then we, too, will be forgotten.

i have a longing to go back there and put some money into the hands of people i met. i wrote to ask

Life after law: Author, religious retreat leader, and spiritual director

After she realized the legal profession was a not a good match for her, in fact that she'd rather be shot than spend the rest of her life practicing law, Deborah Smith Douglas walked away from that career and turned more attention to her spiritual journey. A longtime resident of Santa Fe, she has written The Praying Life and coauthored with her husband Pilgrims in the Kingdom.

To learn more about her decision to shift away from the law, listen to this interview by Judy Alexander from University of California at Irvine. Douglas talks about how one of the steps towards her current vocation came from her love of poetry; she studied Gerard Manley Hopkins and doing so lead her to the Jesuit way of praying. Balance in life was part of what drew her to the Rule of Saint Benedict and she contrasts balance with what she learned as a lawyer. Douglas also describes the importance and inspiration fiction* has been for her, and about trusting one's "uh oh feelings." Teachings come to her from unexpected places and activities in life; she tells us about wisdom that came from a homeless man at Denny's in Kansas. The many gems in this interview also include her ideas about the value of gratitude, of looking back to find life's lessons in retrospect, and of what she learned from the law that she now uses in her work.

Click now to listen to this uplifting and motivating interview.

*Click for Douglas's essay "Saved by Fiction" (The Christian Century).

A guide to writing about the past to create a better future

Writing about the past can be therapeutic, even transformational. Writing Away the Demons is a very good book about that process. From the Foreword by David Read Johnson:

There is a bridge between the present and my past. I call her memory, and over her I travel back and forth, my home now there, then here, seeking comfort against the uncertainties that press on me. With her, I revisit the kind gestures, the warm embraces, the belly laughs that graced my life along the way and that help me face the rising edge of time which greets me each morning.

But I also travel back along that bridge into the darker corners, and don't know why. Surely I should heed the signs of warning and calls to turn back that have been placed along the way, by me, after previous upsetting forays! Why do I return to these moments or months of grief or fear or violence, that raised fist, the shameful disrobing, those awful words, which sliced my heart in two? Let memory fade. Let the day begin anew. Let me be buoyed by the possibilities of the future, not the hard facts of the past. ...

...

...I am certain that this book will command your attention. Like the people who broke out of prison by digging a tunnel with spoons, these authors have broken out of their prisons of memory with pens. This is not a book about transformative writing; this book is transformative writing. The authors write deeply and beautifully about their experiences and their healing process, illustrating directly both their resiliency and the power of creative writing. Dr. Reiter provides an excellent overview of the therapeutic effects of writing in the first chapter, noting ten principles derived from a broad range of sources [overview of the principles] ... . Throughout, one feels the power of transformational writing in altering people's relationship to their own history. ...

There is a bridge between the present and my past. I call her memory, and after reading this book, I think I can call her friend.

Public spaces, private dreams: Why I gave sidewalk chalk as Christmas gifts

Merry Christmas to you! I hope you are having a good day celebrating in the way you wish.

We will be having brunch with friends and then moving on to a theater to see Saving Mr. Banks, a movie I hear is partly about achieving a goal. For a surprise at brunch, I have put together a Christmas stocking full of little gifts for each of the couples we are seeing and tucked inside packets of sidewalk chalk. You may ask—and they may too after emptying their socks—why give this child's toy, some silly chunks of colored chalk?

My answer: Because I read about the book Before I Die. The book spurred me to think about our public spaces, the places we share with our neighbors, and about the internal spaces, the dreams we share with few or maybe no one. To inspire that kind of thinking is part of the reason Candy Chang designed her project. It's a fill-in-the-blank chalkboard on the wall of an abandoned house, now being duplicated all over the world. In chalk, people answer the question of what they want to do before they die. (More here.)

Chang says in an interview (Forecast Public Art):

I used to think of sharing with my neighbors for very practical reasons, but it’s changed into something much more personal. The projects I make come from questions I have. They started out quite practical: ... How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other’s doors at a bad time? How can we share more of our ideas for our vacant storefronts?

They’ve become more emotional as I’ve become consumed with personal well-being and what it means to lead a fulfilling life. And this has made me look at my neighbors differently. We’re not just neighbors in a place, but we’re also neighbors in making sense of our lives. How can we share more of our hopes, fears, and stories? We struggle with a lot of the same issues. How can we help each other see we are not alone?

How can we help each other see we are not alone? That's a good question, one that I want the gifts of chalk to represent. The chalk asks my friends: What goals and dreams do you have? Is there any way I can help you achieve them? If so, please tell me. Or draw me a picture . . . there are many blank sidewalks around my home and yours.

Note (added 2:45 PM): Well, brunch was so-so; the food was lukewarm and the prime rib was so tough I could not chew it. When we had Christmas brunch at the same place a couple of years ago, it was very good. Then, this afternoon, we arrived at the theater to learn that the time listed on the Internet did not match the time the movie was showing. So no Saving Mr. Banks!

Next year, we will go back to our regular plans which include brunch at a Jewish deli, a walk in the nearby shopping center, and a movie at the theater there. Today presents a terrific opportunity to be mindful in the midst of a tepid situation. As my guy said a few minutes ago, "There is nothing we can do now; we'll be sure not to make this mistake again."

It's a sunny day with a beautiful blue sky. Much here is very, very good. And we are now laughing about the way plans can take you straight down the road to the unexpected.