Ronda Muir gave a presentation entitled Beyond Words: Communication in the 21st Century on Thursday afternoon, June 25th, at the Annual South Dakota State Bar Association convention held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Kudos to the organizers, fellow presenters and staff who arranged for beautiful weather and made the event so successful.

A few questions at the end of the talk deserve to be repeated and the answers expanded now that there’s no concern about running out of time.

A gentleman rightly reminded everyone that reading literature (both fiction and non-fiction) is a good exercise to increase emotional intelligence because it helps us understand emotions–how they developed and what happened over time, and also how to manage emotions, since we read about what management strategies did or did not work in those scenarios. Similarly, music (particularly classical, including opera) exercises our emotions. The passages in a musical narrative often stirringly arouse our feelings–of tentativeness, fear, aggression, a swelling of pride or love and eventual relief, joy or grief. That experience reinforces our physical experiences of various emotional states, our ability to identify those states and also helps us understand how those emotions may evolve over time.

One question highlighted how lawyers’ tendencies toward skepticism, introversion, abstraction, urgency, low sociability, and high pessimism can work together to lower our ability to initiate and build strong relationships, or at least our comfort in doing so. And that discomfort is easily perceived and experienced by clients and others we work with who don’t have those same tendencies.

A gentleman asked what can be done to improve the decline in emotional intelligence of law students during law school. Some efforts are underway, replicating some of the changes that have been made in medical schools. Classes on mindfulness (meditation) and stress management help students learn how to better balance their emotions. Requiring work to be done in groups and teams offers lessons in successful social interaction. Students interacting with real clients in school legal clinics allow them to get frank feedback from clients, professors and other participants on more than just their pleadings. Professional development classes that focus on communication and ethics classes that encourage empathy also provide opportunities to develop higher emotional intelligence. It would be a big step forward if law schools required a basic emotional intelligence assessment to be completed either with applications or early during law school, as many professional schools–medical and nearly every business school–are doing.

Two of the last questions related to emotional management. A woman asked how to better approach interviewing a potentially abused child, a daunting task. To start with, letting go of the anxiety and any early disgust or anger about what might be disclosed is important. Those emotions would be conveyed to the child by emotional contagion, particularly because of the lawyer’s clearly higher status. Recognize those emotions and use meditation practice to let those emotions “flow down the river.” Meeting the child with openness, compassion, trust and patience would be very helpful in building a relationship. Being non-reactive and non-judgmental about whatever is disclosed would also encourage openness.

The other question was how to react to the contagion of emotions that we are all exposed to but sometimes don’t want to experience. Again, emotional management skills are useful. Those unwanted emotional states are easily transferred to us, but we can manage how we react by again using mindfulness practice to recognize and then let go of the worst emotions. Some people can redirect their emotions by referring to scenes that give them pleasure or make them feel calm–such as imagining beautiful outdoor scenes or reliving memories of pleasant interactions or favorite places.

The typical example of a time that calls for emotional management is when–on our way to the first dinner with our prospective in-laws, or an important meeting with the managing partner, or a presentation to clients–we spill coffee all over ourselves.

What to do? Recognize the feelings–anxiety, frustration, fear, anger–and realize they aren’t going to put you in a situation where you get what you want out of the upcoming meeting, that they may in fact be contagious, making the meeting even worse for everyone. Then manage those emotions to get the outcome you would like. Set those unhelpful emotions aside, let them flow down the river, truly let go of them, and focus on conjuring the emotions that will be useful, that you want communicated: openness, trust, patience, warmth, curiosity. Despite the coffee stains.