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The Power of Images: How Visual Communication Can Lead to Better Client Service and More Creative and Effective Professionals

Earlier this week, I interviewed Susanne van der Meer and you now can listen to our discussion here.

From the Purposeful Planning Institute announcement of the interview:

Guest Speaker: Susanne van der Meer, Big Picture Consultant at Sift Visuals/Legal Visuals at www.SiftVisuals.com

Host: Stephanie West Allen, JD, PPI Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices

Understanding of procedures, facts, processes, laws, systems, policies, and agreements can be enhanced by pictures and other visuals. Because visuals are brain-friendly, they can improve the efficiency and quality of strategizing, decision making, planning, brainstorming, and teaching. Even the most difficult communication or negotiation can be made easier and clearer with images. Join us as we talk once again with visual communication expert Susanne van der Meer as she explains the ways she has used her processes and suggests ways for other professionals to learn to use the power of images.

Introduction to Our Guest Speaker

Susanne van der Meer is a creative lawyer,  strategic illustrator, and visual thinking facilitator. Prior to emigrating to Denver, Colorado, United States she worked twelve years as an attorney and corporate lawyer in the Netherlands. She currently works as a Self-Representing Litigant Coordinator at the Third Judicial District in Trinidad, Colorado.

For over a decade Susanne has operated her own design, training and consulting business to support lawyers and others in user-friendly visual communication and creative thinking.  She is the author of Visual Language for Lawyers. Her Web sites:  www.siftvisuals.com, www.legalvisuals.nl, www.goodmoodlaw.info.

[Here is a summary in English of a book by Susanne published in Dutch titled Visual Language for Lawyers.]

Recent publication in Legal Business World: “Creative Leadership to Bring Design Thinking and Other Innovation Models to Life in Legal Business.”

 

 

The Problems with Pseudoscience: Using It Can Harm Your Ability to Serve Clients

Here's the link to my interview of Dr. Scott Lilienfeld. If you listen in, I believe you will appreciate his expertise, words of caution, and wisdom. My thanks to Purposeful Planning Institute (PPI) for offering many programs of value, including this one. The description of the Lilienfeld interview distributed by PPI:

Guest Speaker: Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D., Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia

Host: Stephanie West Allen, JD, PPI Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices

The amount of neuromythology and other kinds of pseudoscience to which we are exposed to through popular media and other channels seems to be growing. How can we recognize pseudoscience? How might using pseudoscience in working with clients be problematic? Why must we use caution when trying to apply research from the lab to everyday life? Why is anecdotal evidence (e.g., I can see what I am doing helps my clients) often not sufficient or accurate? Listen in to this discussion to ensure that the science you use when working with clients improves the quality of your service.

Important Points:

• Much of the popular psychology “knowledge” that is shared in media today is pseudoscience, statements or beliefs that are claimed to be scientific and factual but lack evidence gathered and constrained by scientific methods.
• Biases are systematic or consistent “errors” that can lead us to embrace false beliefs. Confirmation bias, one we are all especially prone to, is a tendency to seek out evidence consistent with what we believe and to deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that doesn’t support our beliefs.
• While many people believe that memories function like a recording device, it is important to note that memories are actually very malleable and they change dramatically over time, particularly in response to expectation and suggestion, or as colored by one’s mood. A person’s level of confidence in their memory has very little correlation with the accuracy of their memory.
  
  Reading Recommendations:
  
  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Available on Amazon)
  The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis (Available on Amazon)
  How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich (Available on Amazon)
  Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills by Professor Steven Novella (Available on Amazon)

Effective Writing Through Understanding Reader Expectation Approach: Interview with George Gopen

Update [added April 14, 2017]: Click to listen to the interview.

Please join us next Tuesday (April 11) for my interview of writing expert Dr. George Gopen. The phone-in teleseminar is generously sponsored by Purposeful Planning Institute (PPI). Beginning at noon EST, the event will last for one hour. For those of you who are not members of PPI, you may get a complementary guest pass by requesting it at this email address.

More information below and at this link.

Effective Writing Through Understanding Reader Expectation Approach
 
Date: April 11, 2017
 
Time: Noon ET (60 Minutes)
 
Guest Speaker: George Gopen, JD, PhD
 
Host: Stephanie West Allen, JD, PPI Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices
 
Readers have subconscious expectations about clear communication. When a writer understands those expectations and then consciously meets them, he or she can write in a way that is effective and thus easily understood. In this call, Dr. George Gopen will explain his Reader Expectation Approach and give listeners some tips on how to use the written word to communicate well and persuasively. We will consider why good written communication is 15% word choice and 85% sentence and paragraph structure, when use of the passive is the best choice, and how harnessing the rhythm of language improves written communication dramatically. When we as writers understand Reader Expectation Approach, we are best able to not only communicate and persuade, but also convey thoughts and ideas at our intellectual best. [Click here for more information about Dr. Gopen.]

Grace Under Pressure: A Polyvagal Guide to Reducing Stress and Creating Compassionate Connections

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of interviewing Deborah Dana, an expert on Polyvagal Theory (PVT). The program was sponsored by Purposeful Planning Institute, an organization about which I have blogged here several times in the past (to see the posts, search to the right on "purposeful planning"). Below is more information about the interview and about Deborah, and a link to a recording of the interview so you can listen to this valuable hour.

Grace Under Pressure: A Polyvagal Guide to Reducing Stress and Creating Compassionate Connections

Audio File: Download/Play Recording
 
Date: January 31, 2017
 
Guest Speaker: Deb Dana, LCSW, Developer of Rhythm of Regulation Clinical Training
 
Host: Stephanie West Allen, JD, PPI Dean of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices
 
Polyvagal Theory, developed by renowned neuroscience researcher Stephen Porges, describes the role of the autonomic nervous system in regulating our experiences of stress and shaping the ways we connect with others.  The autonomic nervous system responds to sensations in our body and signals from the environment activating a trio of response possibilities: shut down and disconnected, stressed and mobilized, safe and socially engaged.  Using Polyvagal Theory as a guide, we map individual autonomic states, identify common triggers to dysregulation, and discuss ways to actively engage our autonomic pathways to alleviate stress and foster compassionate connection.
 
Important Points [prepared by Purposeful Planning Institute staff, reviewed and edited by Deb Dana]:

Interview of Norman Fischer: Some benefits of mindfulness and self-awareness for legal professionals

Today I am talking with Norman Fischer who is with the Everyday Zen Foundation. He is a poet and a Zen Buddhist priest. Click to read more about Norman.

Norman, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in my series of interviews of thinkers and practitioners who have ideas that are valuable for the legal profession. I am grateful that you are taking the time to answer my questions, and know many readers will appreciate your generosity and wisdom, too.

I have been very impressed with the program that you and Gary Friedman have designed for lawyers and other conflict professionals. In addition to specific contemplative practices, your program includes a general focus on self-awareness. How does self-awareness improve a lawyer’s level of client service?

Self awareness is a prerequisite for awareness of others. It eventually leads to it. The more you can see and feel what's going on in you, with some wisdom and equanimity, the more you can see and feel others with accuracy and sympathy. So self awareness makes you more sensitive to people, what they are feeling, needing, wanting. You become much more conscious of relationship, the nuances of human interaction. This is valuable simply for being human, but for lawyers, who work depends on being able to understand others and their motivations and needs, is it even more valuable. No matter what kind of law you do, a cornerstone of lawyering is the relationship with the client. To establish a trusting relationship with a client, one in which the lawyer really understands the clients needs and perameters, emotional intelligence (which means self awareness and awareness of others) really helps. And it helps too in determining how to deal with opponents, judges, negotiation, and more or less everything lawyers do.

Thanks very much for your response, Norman. I am often asked by lawyers if there is a way to achieve mindful self-awareness without meditating. What are your thoughts on that question?

Meditating is not the only way to be self aware of course. In our work with Gary Friedman we designate nine practices. Things like journaling, taking times for conscious reflection,  taking three breaths in midst of emotional situations. But meditation supports all these other practices and strengthens them. And, since mindfulness and deep self reflection depend on the capacity ultimately to be able to be "non-judgmental" that is, to step outside your usual story of how things are, meditation is essential, because only it can help to foster that. But there are many ways to meditate. In any case, self reflection practices, without meditation,are still enormously helpful. Especially when you are clearly aware of their limitations (ie, that your self reflection is always limited by your own limited point of view).

In a moment I want to ask about your Mindful Lawyering program being held next month at Garrison Institute, but first I would like you to say a bit more about being aware of our limitations and what you call “limited point of view.” Are we all limited in our awareness, both of

Photography opens your eyes to a new way of seeing: Interview with Christine Valters Paintner

I am pleased to introduce to you Christine Valters Paintner and her new book Eyes of the Heart. I read the book because of my belief that photography can increase both our mindfulness and our ability to attend to ourselves, others, and our world. The book shows us why and how the way of seeing facilitated by photography can be valuable. I asked Christine a few questions that may be of interest to conflict professionals.

The law can be a very stressful profession. In Todd Kashdan's book Curious, he talks about the relationship between curiosity and anxiety: the more curious one is, the less anxiety he or she will be experiencing. In your book, you talk about the promotion of curiosity through photography. Will you say more about that, please.

Curiosity is a wonderful quality which promotes spacious inquiry. Rather than needing to figure everything out and extract the answers, through curiosity we can hold ourselves open to new possibilities.  To be curious means to let go of my own expectations about how things should be and discover what is really there.  It means softening my desire to be right and listen into new ways of thinking and being.

Since reading your book, I have repeated in conversations several of the points you made. People seem uniformly intrigued with the notion of receiving photos rather than taking them. Please explain that to readers.

This is one of my favorite aspects of talking about photography specifically as a contemplative practice.  Our favorite and common language for photography is “taking” a photo.   We use it all the time without much thought as to the deeper meaning of the words.  But we live in a culture of taking, where we often grasp at things we want, look for life to meet our desires of the moment, feel impatient when things don’t go our way.

To “receive” a photo means to shift our intention in the process of creating an image.  For me, receiving is about acknowledging that all of life is a gift.  When I go for a walk with my camera, rather than look around me thinking about what images I can take, what kinds of beautiful things I can record as a trophy to my experience, I try to cultivate this sense of receiving gifts.  I pay attention to moments that shimmer before me, even if I don’t understand exactly why.  Something calls to me, stirs my energy, quickens me and I create a sense of spaciousness to receive that through the lens of the camera to see what might be revealed to me.

Mediators and other conflict professionals often use the process of reframing. How can your approach to photography help a person to become better at reframing in other arenas besides photography?

Interview of Judith Fein: Increasing self-awareness through travel

Today I am talking with Judith Fein, international travel journalist and author of the book Life is a Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel. (Read her blog posts here.)

Judie, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in my series of interviews of thinkers and practitioners who have ideas that are valuable for the legal profession.

Let's start with your telling us the story of how you became a travel writer. What drew you to this profession?

I had no idea that travel writing was a profession, but I have always been a traveler and a writer. My last incarnation involved writing movies and TV in Hollywood--which everything thinks is very glamorous because you get to party, eat and hang with the Hollywood set, but trust me when I say that for me it was less glam than wearing a cardboard box to observe weeds growing. It sucked the soul out of me--whoosh-- and I rumbled around wondering why I was doing it for l3 years. The actual writing was fine, but the abuse, dysfunction, craziness, and head-banging frustration finally made me say, "Basta." And once I had really basta-ed, I had no idea what else to do for a living. I was, as they say in French, "entree deux chaises," between two chairs. My butt was hanging out uncomfortably, not sure where to sit in life.

One day my sister called and said there was a new travel show on national public radio--called "The Savvy Traveler."   I knew it was next-to-impossible to get a gig, but, at my sister's New York-style urging, I recorded a crazy story about what happened when I checked into a monastery for a silent retreat, and ending up having a food fight with a nun and almost getting arrested on a dark road. I sent in the piece, and four days later they called to invite me to be a regular contributor on the show.

Hmm, I thought, after a while. Maybe since i have a national presence I can ask a newspaper if they're interested in one of my travel stories. Bingo! Then I queried other newspapers, magazines, and pretty soon I was a real travel writer. I expanded to the web early on, and have never looked back.

Thanks, Judie. Your response made me think about how I define profession. Most of the readers of this blog are practitioners of the law, a traditional notion of profession. But, now that I think about it, I see the word as including the sense of calling, or the embodiment or product of something you are professing to the world. Of course, many lawyers don't feel called to the practice, and are unhappy. Many of these unhappy, stressed

Interview of Scott Rogers: Mindfulness in the law

Today I am talking with Scott Rogers, a Florida-based lawyer who trains other lawyers, as well as law students, in meditation and mindfulness.  Scott, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in my series of interviews of thinkers and practitioners who have ideas that are valuable for the legal profession. The question I typically lead with is one asking people how they were drawn to their areas of expertise. I like to hear their stories.

So, Scott, let me start by asking how you got interested in mindfulness and meditation?

My interest in mindfulness goes back about 20 years when I first explored formal meditative practice.  My wife, Pam, had signed us up to learn transcendental meditation from a wonderful member of the law school faculty who had learned in India many years earlier.  I was taken with the experience, both in terms of its impact on my ability to focus and the subtle ways it shaped my moment-to-moment sense of things. I began to read a great deal about meditation and continued to practice. 

My readings introduced me to mindfulness practice and I began to hone in on this kind of practice.  It supported me through a terrific ride in law school, a series of judicial clerkships and finally a commercial litigation practice with White & Case.   With the marriage moving along and babies being born, mindfulness meditation became an important part of my life.  I think it allowed me to perform well at work and be present when I was home, and maintain perspective on the interplay of work, family, and meaning in life.

Both while clerking for Judge Rosemary Barkett and then practicing with White & Case, I was happy to share and discuss mindfulness with my colleagues.  I was always struck by their genuine interest in the subject.  And I am a big believer of “everyone in their own time." Here were people interested in this work, but finding themselves and their life just not conducive to incorporating a mindfulness practice.  I wished it were different—that at least there was a way for them to taste it and to know what I was talking about.

At this stage in my practice, the formal and informal were coming together. As I was interacting with a lot of parents and we were all sharing stories of the challenges of parenthood, I began to develop an approach to teaching mindfulness to parents, using the child as a primary object of awareness or as a cue to turn inward.   That led to the book Mindful Parenting: Verses, Visualization and Meditations for a More Joyful Life.

The success of this approach with parents naturally extended to the law.  Why not use that same methodology to develop a program for lawyers?   But instead of imagery of a child, I would use imagery of the law and legal terms. Thus was born Jurisight®.

Interesting! Tell me more about using legal terminology to teach lawyers about mindfulness.

What was most exciting to me was that the law lent itself so naturally to this method of teaching.  I did not use wordplay just to be clever.  It was as if legal terminology and the

Interview of Diane F. Wyzga, RN, JD: Storytelling in the practice of law

Diane F. Wyzga is an attorney, a nurse, and a professionally trained storyteller. She works as both a trial consultant and a communications coach to lawyers. Her company, Lightning Rod Communications, is based in San Clemente, California. A motto at her Web site: "The difference between the right word and almost right word is like the difference between lightning and lightning bug." Read on to see the many right words  Diane uses in this interview

Diane, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in my series of interviews of thinkers and practitioners who have ideas that are valuable for the legal profession. Let's get started. The question I typically lead with because I Like to hear how people were drawn to their expertise is . . .

How did you get interested in storytelling in the law? What's the story behind your coming to have this expertise?

Once upon a time, long long ago & far far away in a book and coffee shop in Pacific Grove, CA a book fell off a shelf.  I picked it up.  The year was 1994.  The book was a 20th anniversary edition of best-loved stories told at the Jonesborough, TN story festival.  I read a story. I said: I can do this.  At the time I had no clue how I would use storytelling; I only knew I was a storyteller.  And time would have to take care of the rest.

I joined the local storytelling guild and the National Storytellers Network, traveled to conferences, workshops and festivals, met other storytellers, got mentors, learned stories and found venues to tell them. I told stories at the Different Drummer Bookstore (famous as the only gay and lesbian bookstore in Laguna Beach, CA), for every Rotary within a 50 mile radius of my home, for women’s groups and incest survivor groups, at holiday parties and rodeos, at local hospitals, environmental rallies, grammar schools, colleges and universities, prisons and juvenile halls. Some gigs paid. Most did not.

In time I built up a portfolio of keeper stories. In time I dared to write my own stories, and tell them. Then I went for the big time: I applied to join the National Speakers Association as a professional member. I was accepted. I thought I was on my way to the big time of national speaking gigs. The Universe had other ideas.

I applied to teach a college level course on storytelling at Learning Tree University. Two of my students were long-time practicing lawyers. They came to the course because they wanted to enhance their advocacy and presentation skills. What could I teach a lawyer about storytelling? Robert McKee had the answer:

Storytelling is the art of expressing meaningful change in the life situation of a character in terms of values to which the listener reacts with emotion.

This is what lawyers do all the time! I just needed to overcome law school’s linear analytical training that says he who dies with the most facts, wins. And show lawyers how we listen to stories.

I began teaching that the factfinder listener energetically connives and conspires with the attorney-storyteller because they want to believe the story and do something which matters. In the grip of a heartfelt story artfully told, the factfinder listener’s mind is fully engaged creating a parallel world of social judgment based on their world views and experiences. Now the attorney and factfinder are one: working in concert in a cooperative enterprise considering options, possibilities and outcomes. As of a recent verdict in June, I have 11.11 million reasons why I continue to believe that a heartfelt story artfully told using language with power, passion and precision will engage your jury every single time.

Whether we win or lose, the overall task of any lawyer is to speak for those who cannot. Even when the client loses the case, I believe that the saving grace is this: the lawyer has given the client a singular opportunity to tell their story and be heard. As Maya Angelou reminds us, "There is no greater burden than carrying an untold story."

To reinforce the notion of what lawyers truly accomplish in their day-to-day struggle to find and tell the stories of truth surrounding their clients, I'd like to offer this thought:

The stranger who tells our stories when we cannot speak not only awakens our spirits and hearts but also shows our humanity -- which others want to forget -- and in doing so becomes family.[Mende Proverb, Sierra Leone]

I am intrigued by what you say about overcoming law school's training. Here's a three-part question for you on that topic; I am very much looking forward to hearing more. (1) Would you describe how you do that? (2) Why it is important? (3) What's wrong with facts?

Interview of Mohammadreza Hojat on the empathy of service professionals

Today I am talking with Dr. Mohammadreza Hojat, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Jefferson Medical College and author of the new book Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes. Hojat, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in my series of interviews of thinkers and practitioners who have ideas that are valuable for the legal profession.

How did you come to be interested in empathy in the medical profession? I always find the story behind the expertise an intriguing place to start.

As a psychologist by academic training, I was curious about why people behave as they do in making or breaking human connections.  I started to engage in medical education research more than two decades ago with this question in mind: How can patient-doctor connection, as a mini social support system, lead to positive clinical outcomes?

I became convinced that the alleviation of human suffering would flourish by enhancing empathic engagement in the caregiver-care receiver relationships.  This is true in medicine as well as in any other public service profession that requires one-to-one relationship, including legal services.

In addition, changes that evolved in the current market-driven health care system that are detrimental to patient-physician relationships, physicians attention to financial incentives, and cost containment regulations formulated by health insurance companies, and their rippling effects on medical education prompted me to empirical research of empathy in medical education and patient care.  This research led to the publication of my book: Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes.

Thank you. I certainly appreciate what you tell us about the role of empathy both in today's health care system with its many competing tensions and in the alleviation of human suffering. How do you define empathy in the context of patient care?