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There’s no question that stress has taken a tremendous toll on lawyers during the pandemic. In many cases the level of work has ramped up, with lawyers trapped in their homes or some other location, tethered to their colleagues and clients 24/7, with little person-to-person interaction. Not only is the workload heavy, but few of…

As prefaced in our post of March 18, political thought happens primarily in the emotional center of the brain, not in the reasoning center. And consuming news with only one viewpoint tends to hardwire certain emotional connections, making it harder to “think” independently about political issues.

In 2019 Gordon Pennycook, a psychology researcher at…

There has long been evidence that political “thinking” is not rational, that in fact it does not involve the reasoning parts of the brain at all, but instead occurs in the emotion-processing center of the brain. In a study using functional neuroimaging (fMRI) on a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months…

Following up on our post of November 18, 2020, from across the pond comes further questioning of the value of implicit bias training. Ministers in the UK government have scrapped the training for civil servants in England and urge that it be ended for other public employees as well.

British psychologist Patrick Forscher, who examined

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Whatever you think of the recent elections, it’s fairly clear that the nation was strongly divided on its preferred Presidential candidate. So it’s not surprising that in closely fought states there are legal challenges to the tally. What is surprising is that there has been a wave of bullying to get the lawyers involved in…

Diversity is well-established as a way to improve organizational performance. Most legal organizations say, rightly, that they value diversity and are attempting to improve their numbers, but how to do that often remains an open question. The statistics of gender and racial diversity at all seniority levels are dismally stuck in low digits. Should we…

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) recently identified empathy, a component of emotional intelligence, as critical to the most effective leadership, particularly during this very stressful time when leaders must depend so much on others to help their organizations survive and prosper. Engaged employees are more productive and positively impact organizational profitability, but the…

The New York City Bar Association panel on Using Emotional Intelligence as a Tool to Improve Lawyers’ Well-Being and Performance featuring Ronda Muir, Natalie Loeb and David Sarnoff  is currently rescheduled as a live webcast on Wednesday, July 29th from 12:30 till 2pm.

The focus of the panel will be on understanding what emotional intelligence…

What a few months this has been! We can say with some certainty that emotions have been intensely and widely felt. Unfortunately, many of those emotions have been destructive to our mental health—fear, anxiety, loneliness and depression have accompanied us through this long quarantine and made it harder to persevere and perform at the high…