Episode 182: How Lawyers Can Develop a Thicker Skin and Become More Resilient—with Dr. Larry Richard

Stephen Seckler (00:04.044)
Welcome back everybody. Just a reminder that if you're listening to Counsel to Counsel on one of the audio podcast platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you can also find us now on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, it's nice to have you here. If you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about some of the personality characteristics that make lawyers different from the general population. Much of what I know about this subject comes from the work of today's guest, Dr. Larry Richards.

I've been following Dr. Richard's research for more than two decades, and it provides a foundation for much of the coaching work I do with lawyers. Dr. Larry Richard is widely recognized as the leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior. Larry began his career as a lawyer himself before earning a PhD in psychology, and he has spent decades studying the personalities of lawyers and advising law firms on leadership, management, well-being, and the psychology of change.

I'm thrilled and honored to have him join me on Counsel to Counsel. Larry is the co-author with Dr. Darcy Linus of the book Thin Skinned, Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience, and the New Science That Can Help, published by the American Bar Association. I've been practicing and recommending some of the techniques Larry discusses in the book for years, including mindfulness, gratitude, exercise, cultivating relationships.

And learning to challenge some of the negative thinking that comes so naturally to lawyers. I had also described myself as thin-skinned, but what I particularly liked about thin-skinned is how practical it is and how it lays out the foundation for understanding why, as lawyers, we often lack resilience. I came away with a much deeper understanding of why these techniques work, along with a lot of new ideas that I can use in my own life and in my work with coaching clients. So

We're going to spend just a little time talking about what makes lawyers psychologically different and why resilience is such a challenge for us. But I want to spend most of our conversation on what lawyers could actually do about it. Larry, welcome to Counsel to Counsel. It is so great to finally have you on.

Dr. Larry Richard (02:14.142)
Thank you, Steve. Delighted to be here and thank you for inviting me.

Stephen Seckler (02:19.287)
Before we get into thin skinned, give us a short version of your own journey. How did you go from practicing law to becoming a psychologist who has spent much of his career studying and consulting with lawyers and law firms?

Dr. Larry Richard (02:32.254)
So

I come from a family of lawyers, lots and lots of lawyers going back three generations. My grandfather, my father, aunts, uncles, cousins, lots of the family were lawyers, and just about everyone seemed to not just enjoy it, but love the practice of law. So with that kind of role modeling, I just didn't even think about any other career. I applied to you know, went to pre-law, undergrad and and applied to law school, got into a good law school to pass.

Then day one of law school, I had this sinking feeling of gulp, I might have made a mistake.

And that was further reinforced as I went through law school. I felt like quitting just about every day of law school. I I found it dry, not relevant to the things that turned me on, which is really people and relationships and human behavior. And I kept looking for ways to marry the two. And if we have maybe in a future podcast we can talk about some of those digressions.

But fast forward I got my degree and

Dr. Larry Richard (03:45.501)
kept trying different jobs. I never lasted in a in a law job more than about 18 months. I just kept changing jobs. And after a couple of years of this, banging my head against the wall, I realized this is a mistake. It's a wrong fit for me. And I decided to do some soul searching. And what came became very clear is that psychology has always been my first love and I decided to go back and earn a PhD and to study lawyers.

And that's what I did. In fact, the dissertation research that I did for my degree involved a nationwide study of over 3,000 lawyers and their Myers-Briggs types. Back then the Myers-Briggs was seen as a very effective tool. It's been under some challenge by scholars since then, but

At the time I did it, it was a very respected tool. And I discovered something fascinating in that research, the personality styles that lawyers endorsed.

were very, very different from those of the general public, and different in ways that made sense. The the characteristics that define lawyers help lawyers to practice high quality law. But I've now learned since since that time I pivoted from using the Myers Briggs to using a more industrial strength reliable scientific tool called the Caliper profile. I've now used caliper for over

Years and I've learned from the caliper data that the very traits that make lawyers different from people in general not only help them as lawyers, but hurt them in lots and lots of different ways, including making it much harder to cope with change and stress.

Stephen Seckler (05:44.386)
You've identified seven traits on which lawyers tend to be outliers. Skepticism, autonomy, abstract reasoning, urgency, sociability, cognitive empathy, and resilience. Can you briefly explain that research and why those particular traits matter?

Dr. Larry Richard (06:01.085)
Sure. So these six of those traits, everything except empathy, showed up when I first

Gathered a statistically random sample of lawyers back in the 1990s. And what's surprising is how consistent the data have been since that time. In fact, they really haven't changed materially at all for over 30 years. These six traits, the ones you listed, skepticism, abstract reasoning, urgency, autonomy, sociability, and resilience, have been outliers.

Since that time, empathy has now added to that list as a seventh outlier trait, but the reason it's become an outlier is not due to lawyers, it's because empathy is dropping around the world in everybody who's basically under age 40. And that's probably got to do with social media. So each of these traits is helpful in the practice of law.

To a greater or lesser extent. But what we discovered in researching this book is that these traits, six of the traits, including empathy, everything but resilience, so skepticism, abstract reasoning, urgency, autonomy, empathy, and sociability, all lower our resilience in various ways. And that explains why resilience.

Has been the most atypical trait of all seven traits. And what I mean by that is

Dr. Larry Richard (07:38.822)
Most traits are distributed in a bell curve. Individuals can vary in their scores. The caliper is scored on a percentile scale, so it goes from a low of 1% to a high of 99%. And when you look at lots and lots of people, you get a bell curve distribution. Most people score middle, middle scores, 40%, 50%, 60%. And you're going to be occasional outliers with single-digit low scores or 80 or 90% high scores. But when you add

When you look at the say all bankers or all accountants or all bus drivers, you're gonna see a typical bell curve with the average at 50%. And when I look at the lawyer data, it looks pretty similar for 14 of the traits.

Caliper measures 21 traits, however, and seven of those traits are dramatically atypical. They average below 40 or above 60, which is outside what we call the standard deviation or the central tenancy, the goalposts, the expected range. Seven of the 21 traits are outliers. How does that compare to other occupations? It's seven more outliers than we'd expect. In other words, we don't expect outliers when we measure a group.

Seven of the traits are outliers. And what's fascinating about this is that resilience, let me put it this way, six of the traits are bell curve traits where the bell curve has just moved, it's above average or it's below average instead of being in the middle.

So picture a bell curve, and instead of going from 40 to 60 as the goalposts, you know, it's 50 to 70 or it's 30 to 50. But resilience, it's like somebody took the whole population of lawyers and jammed them into the bottom of the scale. 90% of the lawyers that I measure consistently, year in and year out.

Dr. Larry Richard (09:44.284)
Are below the midpoint, below the 50% mark. 90% of lawyers, in effect, are thin-skinned. So that's why the American Bar Association came to me a couple years ago and said, why is it so consistent that lawyers are so low in resilience? And they said, you know, it's surprising because lawyers seem so confident. And it turns out that

Resilience is very sensitive to your mindset. So when your mindset is positive, it raises resilience. When your mindset is negative, it lowers resilience. Well, what are we trained to do in law school? We're trained to quote think like a lawyer, right? And thinking like a lawyer means asking questions like: what's wrong with this assertion? What could go wrong with this particular transaction? Who's really being honest with me, or are they trying to do they have a hidden agenda? We're looking for

problems.

And that problem focus, that glass half-empty way of looking at the world is very, very helpful for practicing high-quality law and very, very deleterious for our resilience. It lowers our resilience and keeps it low. And because we use that skepticism skill every day in practicing law, that's why resilience is low for so many lawyers. So that that explains it. But all the other traits in various ways also conspire.

To keep our resilience low. I'll give you two simple examples. Skepticism, which is almost the calling card for practicing high-quality law, not only adds this negative mindset which directly lowers resilience, but skepticism also makes someone kind of a negative personality, which inhibits the success in building intimate relationships.

Dr. Larry Richard (11:37.916)
And relationships is the other major factor that kind of mediates resilience. So people who have strong networks of authentic connections with people, they have a kind of a damping system where they can absorb the bumps of that life serves to us. But people who are lonely and isolated are much, much more vulnerable to life's bumps.

In effect, lower in resilience. So social connection is one of the very, very important factors in protecting us from stress, from change, from threats, from anything that upsets our equilibrium. And lawyers, because of our skepticism, find it harder to connect with people, which

may be validated by the statistic that shows that lawyers have one and a half times the level of divorce compared to the general public.

Stephen Seckler (12:42.209)
And you tell a funny story I've heard you give it's just a brief one about how you're you're sort of proof that that lawyers are are low in resilience because you you ask you mention that in an audience and then what happens in that situation?

Dr. Larry Richard (12:58.279)
Well, when you when you tell lawyers that they're low in resilience, they immediately think of some example of them in a practice role. so for example, a litigator will say, I can't possibly be low in resilience because I am opposed by counsel every day and their job, they are paid to make you know, to give me a headache. They're paid to ruin my life, in effect. And I'm not bothered by that. I can go against the best of them.

And I say yeah, because when we are in our legal role

We're not experiencing any doubt about whether we are competent and able to do the job. Lawyers that I deal with and in I mainly work with MLA firms, these are really well trained, smart, competent lawyers, and there's no ambiguity. Resilience or low resilience, I should say, thrives on ambiguity. So when that lawyer is confident in the courtroom, even though people are criticizing, rejecting, you know, banging their head against

whatever arguments the lawyer's making, that lawyer comes back to the office and then they run into their administrative assistant who's upset because of the tone of voice that the lawyer used. Now they came in.

Because interpersonal situations offer some ambiguity. The lawyer has to go, gosh, maybe I was harsh. I don't I don't know, was I what I I've got to defend against that. And we get very defensive and we don't like that. If you only think of examples of me in a lawyer role, it's not going to look like low resilience. But that's not where it shows up. It shows up in in these other situations. The other example that I've used in previous conversations with you.

Dr. Larry Richard (14:45.489)
Is illustrates the idea that resilience often involves cognitive distortions. It's kind of human nature. Human beings distort. We don't actually live in reality, we live in a perception of reality. And everybody has their own version of reality. It's all kind of a distortion force field. So when somebody's low in resilience,

First of all, any request, if I said, Steve, could you send me X, Y, or Z, a low resilience lawyer is going to hear that request as, Steve, you're deficient because you haven't sent me X, Y, or Z. And I'm going to get defensive about that. Also,

Even a compliment can be heard as a criticism. So I give the example of we're walking through the main street of a you know your favorite city and we pass by a clothing boutique and there's a beautiful outfit in the window and I say, look at that outfit, you'd look great in that. To most people that's a compliment. But the low resilience person says, What are you talking about? Are you saying you don't like what I'm wearing?

So this is how we distort and that's a good illustration of the distortion force field.

Stephen Seckler (16:07.618)
Have you been like eavesdropping on me, Larry? See, this is why this is why I love your work so much because and this is why I love coaching lawyers so much, because everything you write about and everything you're talking about right now, even though I don't practice, I did go to law school and I totally think like a lawyer. And I just love hearing you talk about this because it's very validating that this isn't coming from nowhere. This is part of who I am.

Dr. Larry Richard (16:10.387)
We won't talk about that here, Steve.

Dr. Larry Richard (16:34.323)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Seckler (16:36.874)
And it doesn't mean that I can't change. So one of the most encouraging messages in the book is that resilience isn't something we're simply born with or without. You describe it as one of the more learnable personality traits. So how can we actually change our resilience?

Dr. Larry Richard (16:53.191)
So you're absolutely right about that. Resilience luckily is very, very learnable. Every personality trait has some nature and some nurture. But

We used to think it was 50-50, but there's really good research over the last 30 years showing that it's more genetic for most traits. So when a trait is more genetically predisposed, it's harder to change. Resilience is an exception. It's way, way more learned with a little bit of genetic predisposition. And because it's more learned, it's more malleable. It's more able to be improved by people who want to improve it. And there's a rich body of

Scientific evidence growing exponentially that shows that there are evidence-based strategies that can help us raise our resilience. And in the book, we talk about over 50 of those strategies divided into four basic categories. So the first category is reducing negative thinking.

We often have negative thoughts in our head because our training as lawyers makes it very easy for our brains to rapidly and without much resistance think of the negative explanation for just about any event that happens. And because we get really good and efficient at looking for negative explanations when we're practicing law, in our personal life, when something happens to us and our brain wants to explain why did

That happen, the most natural, easiest to access type of explanation that our brain's going to serve up is something self-deprecating or something that is threatening, something negative. And so one of the strategies to build resilience is to get more educated about the thoughts that are going on in our head.

Dr. Larry Richard (18:52.401)
To identify ways that we distort, there are about a dozen well-known distortion strategies that everybody uses, but most of us aren't aware of those. So we try to understand these cognitive distortions or thinking traps, they're sometimes called. And then once we make them visible,

We can experiment with different ways of thinking that still give us the same message that our brain was trying to deliver, but without the negative emotions that are often associated with it. And that in effect is a way of raising resilience. So that's the first strategy is working with somebody's cognitions to improve their thinking and maybe introduce more positive ways of thinking, less negative ways of thinking. What's behind that?

Steve is what's called the cognitive model, which basically says there are three dimensions of human behavior that are all wrapped up in an intersecting way: our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions. And while we talk about those three as if they're discrete separate things, in the real world, thoughts, feelings, and actions are all intimately connected in our brain.

And so if you change one, you change the others. If I change my thoughts, it will produce different feelings and result in different behaviors. And if I do the opposite, if I change my feeling, it'll change how I think and change my behaviors. And if I behave differently, it'll change my the my thoughts and my feelings. So it's a two-way street for all of the dyadic combinations.

For these three components, and we can intervene in any way. So the manage your resilience by reducing negative thinking starts at the cognitive level, the thought level. The second strategy starts at the emotion level, and that is to raise positive emotions.

Dr. Larry Richard (21:01.777)
When you experience more positive emotions in your daily experience, you're also going to have more positive thoughts and less negative ones. And as a result, your resilience will be higher. So

One of the interesting findings that we discovered in our research for the book is that positive emotions are not just feel-good. A lot of lawyers roll their eyeballs anytime we say the word positive, and they they kind of mutter something like, here comes the touchy-feely BS. But the science tells a different story. The science tells us that not only are positive emotions pleasant.

But every emotion releases hormones into our system and positive emotions produce a cascade of all kinds of positive chemicals. And those positive chemicals not only make us feel good, but here's the the kicker, they neutralize chemically.

The toxic effects that negative hormones from negative emotions have produced. So people who spend their day practicing law are, whether they realize it or not, we're actually releasing a lot of negative hormones into our system. And if you don't offset those with some positive emotions and positive hormones, they're going have a noxious effect on your well-being. But by spending more time in positive

you're actually chemically helping yourself. You're chemically neutralizing the effects of the negative stuff that's kind of part of the bargain of practicing law.

Dr. Larry Richard (22:41.147)
The third strategy is social connection. As I mentioned earlier, relationships and support systems and authentic connections with people are one of the most protective mechanisms that we know from the scientific research. It not only builds resilience, but social connection actually improves overall life satisfaction. There's research showing that it's strongly connected to our longevity, to our ability to sustain.

Long-term relationships, to leadership effectiveness, to engagement in the workplace, and a whole bunch of other things. Connections are how we are wired as human beings. We are born to live socially. We're not meant to be isolated creatures like some animals. And so when we fulfill the biometric

Mandate that we're designed for, and we channel our ability to form intimate connections with people. It is protective and it builds our resilience and makes us more able to tolerate stress levels and to cope with change and to do all of the things I mentioned at the outset. And then the fourth category is a little different from the first three. The first three categories, you know.

Reduce negative thinking, increase positive emotions, build social connection. Those are all direct resilience-raising strategies. The last category, which is about self-care, is basically about creating conditions that allow those first three strategies to take hold.

And the fourth category of self-care includes four basic, well-known, simple strategies. Number one, getting adequate sleep. Number two, eating a healthy diet. Number three, getting adequate exercise. And number four, using appropriate stress management strategies on a regular basis.

Dr. Larry Richard (24:48.035)
If we don't do any of those things, it's gonna be much, much harder for any of the interventions in the first three categories to have their full positive effect.

So I could work with you all day long on reducing your negative thinking, but if you only got four hours of sleep, you're not going to get the payoff that most well-slept, well-rested people would get. So getting you know, getting adequate sleep is one of the kind of underrated self-care mechanisms. it's it's now receiving a lot more treatment in the literature, in the scientific research than it ever used to, so that's a good thing.

But we often, you know, think if we can have sleep deprivation during the work week and then catch up on the weekend, we'll be fine. That's not what the research says. It's really something we need to get every single day. in terms of diet, basically whole foods, plant-based diet.

least to know ultraprocessed foods, sugars, simple carbohydrates, and even animal protein, the more we eat, the more it has deleterious health effects. So whole food plant-based diet, and it's a it's a spectrum. It's you know the more you follow the what the research says is healthy, the more benefits you accrue. exercise, it doesn't take a lot. The difference between sedentary

And three moments of exercise for 20 minutes each a week is game-changing. The difference between three versus five moments of exercise a week is helpful, but it's not nearly the magnitude of going from sedentary to three exercises. So just a minimal amount of aerobic exercise.

Dr. Larry Richard (26:45.186)
Every week is very, very important for people. And then stress management, there are lots of different strategies that people can use. The whole idea behind stress management is we can't control the sources of stress, but we can mitigate the way that stress lands.

And one of the simplest mitigation strategies is to disrupt the stress response, because every time you do that, your your sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight part of your body, it has to start all over again stressing out and reacting. If you can disrupt that sympathetic nervous system response,

You can keep the stress hormones at a lower level. If you just have uninterrupted stress, it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds. So what can disrupt that? meditation, yoga, tai chi, progressive relaxation, muscle relaxation, you know, structured breathing, there's a whole bunch of

Self-management strategies that are stress reducers, and we talk about a lot of those in the book as well.

Stephen Seckler (28:03.342)
Okay, well there there's a lot there and and and I we're not gonna be able to get into much much more of it, but I I do want to dig a little bit deeper on a few things. First of all, on the issue of positive thinking and how thoughts control emotions and emotions control actions and there's a a loop that connects all three of those.

Aristotle said that you don't have to be brave to act brave. If you act brave, you become brave. And I didn't I'm not a student of Aristotle, but when I was after I published my own book, Think Like a Lawyer, Act Like an Entrepreneur, I I tried to make the point that focus first on your action more than on your on your thinking, because for many lawyers it's a lot easier to focus on action and then if even though you're not feeling it

you do it, but then you'll become more apt to be thinking positively about the result. And I know that for myself. I you know, I just said this to my wife the other day, yet again, you know, you know I'm gonna have a negative reaction to a lot of things that you say. It doesn't mean I'm not gonna do them and it doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy them or even get a lot out of them. But that is kind of the way I'm wired. So what do you f how do you feel about that as a technique? That, you know, to start the starting point being like, okay, just

For example, if it's business development, you're expecting to be rejected if you reach out to, you know, five former clients. But just do it anyway and then when you get some positive result, it'll it'll change your thinking and you'll become more positive. What do you think about that?

Dr. Larry Richard (29:42.269)
So first remember that it is a three-legged stool, thoughts, feelings, and actions. And you can intervene using any one of those as a starting point.

I often tell lawyers, because you're experts in thinking, thinking might be the easiest pathway to start with. But on the other side of that, because our our skill at thinking negatively is so well honed, maybe that's not the case. So, you know, this is something that each person can experiment with themselves. So maybe thinking is a good way to start. Acting, you're absolutely right. What Aristotle said has now been borne out.

Many times in empirical research, showing that when people take actions, it does change their feelings and their thoughts. You can absolutely, with the example you gave of business development, if you are uncomfortable asking people for the sale or trying to pitch your services, you're right. The more you do it, the more the edge comes off it. Think of it this way: all human beings have a circuit in our brain that's designed

to scan the environment for possible threats.

And we can interpret social situations just as much as a threat as a physical threat. In fact, the same real estate in the brain is used to react to f social threats like rejection as somebody you know holding a gun and asking for your money. So when you have a person who is uncomfortable with selling.

Dr. Larry Richard (31:24.72)
What's really happening there is they are triggering their threat circuit. Something about that, usually the the imagination of getting rejected, is making somebody feel threatened when they're asking for a sale. But if you keep exposing yourself to that action, the repetition

trains the threat circuit to go, it's this again. I see, that didn't didn't turn out horrible last time. And you keep doing it over and over and over. And after a while it does take the edge off of it. One good analogy for that, there's a book called Embrace the Suck, which was written by a Navy SEAL. And he talks in there about the training that Navy SEALs go through. And one of the things that they have to be trained in is underwater demolition.

And as part of the training they have to go underwater to a a cold dark body of water and crawl into a caisson, a big, you know, concrete tube with all their gear underwater. And most people that's just creating paralyzing fear.

And they're gonna start you know hyperventilating and they're gonna get just you know not able to think straight the first time that happens. But when they've done it 50 times, the next time they crawl into an underwater caisson in the dark, their brain's going, this again. And their breathing is gonna be normal, and their ability to think is gonna be much more improved. And so repetition, what psychologists call exposure therapy.

Constantly giving yourself a chance to try out the threatening thing to the point where the edge is taken off of it because of the repetitive experience. That's a real thing, and that's something that anybody can try. And the beauty of it is you can adjust it yourself. You can take little baby steps or try big steps, whatever person's comfortable with. They can be their own guide in terms of exposure therapy. And you know.

Dr. Larry Richard (33:33.653)
know, try little little steps. Maybe they don't want to, you know, go into a cold calling situation and ask for the sale for the very first time out. Maybe they just want to hint at it or try it with somebody they know or do something that's not as threatening and then move on to more threatening situations eventually. In fact, one of my favorite books to recommend to clients is a book called Rejection Proof, which while it's about rejection, it's really about any kind of fear.

And it's it's written by a guy who is not a psychologist, but he's just talking about his own experience of getting kind of tired that he was getting rejected all the time. And he set himself a goal of being rejected one hundred days in a row.

And he decided he was going to design a program that was increasingly more challenging. Each day he'd come up with some loopy kind of rejection. And and his theory was, you know, exposure therapy. If I keep getting rejected, eventually it's going to wear off. And sure enough, by the middle of the book, he's having fun with it. He's doing these really phenomenal, colossal, you know, almost unimaginable things.

that made me laugh out loud that I I I think, my God, I can't believe what he's created this time to try to get rejected. And half the time he doesn't even get rejected because he's surprised to find that the thing he thought would be a rejection turns out to be a warm interpersonal interaction that had some very positive aspects to it. But it's a really good

you know, kind of learning experience to read his book and see how he went from totally fearful to overcoming it by the repetition of rejection moments.

Stephen Seckler (35:25.656)
I just wanna be clear that if you're trying to get better at business development or if you're doing networking to advance your career, whether it's finding an in house role or just making a lateral move, you do not have to go into an underwater caisson in order to build your resilience at this. okay. Larry, Larry, let me interrupt for a second. Jelko you can d delete this part.

Dr. Larry Richard (35:44.028)
Yeah, absolutely. No no one needs to do that really.

Stephen Seckler (35:53.483)
I'm I'm like every time I record, talk about resilience. It's like I'm like convinced that this great interview that I'm doing is gonna completely screw up and the technology's not gonna work. I've been doing it for eight years and I've never once done a recording where I haven't felt this way. You are not your your image unfortunately has kind of gotten, you know, fuzzy for quite a bit of this and I'm hopeful that that's irrelevant, that it's just gonna upload from your computer.

Dr. Larry Richard (36:18.226)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Seckler (36:23.5)
And it won't be seen that way. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed. You don't have low bandwidth, do you? I hope not. 'Cause you're 'cause you're 'cause your vo your voice is very clear. All right. All right, let let's get back to the interview. Sorry about that.

Dr. Larry Richard (36:29.346)
No, I don't see any in shuttle that you're next like.

Stephen Seckler (36:39.052)
Larry, you're mentioning so many great techniques. I think one of the one of the issues for a lot of us, including what you just said, including recommending another book, which by the way, I think the first stop is to get your book and to read that because you do have a lot of great exercise in it ex exercises in it. But there there are fifty different things that you could do. So so where should somebody start? Like I'm you know, I'm I'm listening to your interview here, I'm a guest, I'm

I'm listening to the podcast and and I'm thinking to myself, I can't do all those things. I'm too busy. I have too much to do. Where could I even start? So what would you recommend in that case?

Dr. Larry Richard (37:20.572)
So first of all, the best intervention is the one that you actually do. So

Some of them are easy and some are hard. And for some people the hard ones are challenging and they really embrace them. But for a lot of people, the easiest ones are the place to start. Secondly, when you do these, there is no right place to start, although I would say that the the self-care ones, you basically wanna assess yourself and ask the question, Am I at least getting adequate sleep, reasonable exercise, healthy diet?

And some form of stress management. If the answer is yes, check, check, check, check in all four boxes, you can wait to do those. If you're really seriously out of alignment on one of those four things, then that should be the place to start because none of the other interventions are going to be really helpful if you're not getting, if you're consistently not getting adequate sleep, or if you're eating a horrible diet, or if you're getting zero exercise. And it's it's not hard to go from zero

To you know, minimally adequate in each of those four categories of the self-care bucket. So that's the first thing that people should do. Secondly,

Each of the other categories is going to feel harder or easier to different people. So I just recommend that people read through them and ask themselves: can I picture myself doing this particular intervention? And and basically pick the ones that feel like they are meant for you. Pick the ones that are easier for you. There really is no right or wrong. For some people,

Dr. Larry Richard (39:06.692)
I find that the cognitive strategies are just absolutely impeccable and perfect for them.

They change a way that they think and they see dramatic results. For other people, it's hard to even conceptualize. They'll say things like, I don't understand what you're asking me to do, or I can't hear the words in my head. Some people don't hear their internal soundtrack. So instead of struggling with that, move on to one of the other strategies. Of all the strategies in the book, the positive emotions chapter contains probably the the

strategies that are easiest for lawyers to adopt. Most of us are deficient in that category. We we have trained our brain to do a lot of negative thinking and negative noticing. And we're we're kind of out of balance in terms of the positive. And my hope is that a lot of people, once they read the science that we've shared with them, will realize how important offsetting the negative with some positivity is.

And in that chapter, there are lots of low-hanging fruit activities that people can do. Let me name a couple of them. So, first of all, music is a really, really powerful and instantaneous way of creating some positive emotions.

I use that all the time. If I'm in a down mood or if I'm, you know, struggling with a particular work task and I just need to change my my emotional state, putting on a favorite piece of music is really game changing and very, very quickly as at that. number two, gratitude. The research on gratitude is really eye-popping. A simple thought of

Dr. Larry Richard (41:02.526)
I am grateful for what somebody did for me. They didn't have to do it, and they did it voluntarily, and I really appreciate their doing that. You don't even have to tell them. Just the thought that I really can savor the the the gratitude quality as opposed to its opposite, which is entitlement.

You know, why didn't somebody do something for me? That's the opposite of gratitude. The more we can shift from an entitlement mindset to an attitude of gratitude, the more we're going to generate positive emotions. Now, if you want extra credit and you really want to goose up the gratitude benefits, share your gratefulness with the person who is responsible for the thing you're grateful for. Not everything has a person responsible. I mean, I I'm grateful for the sunrise, I'm grateful for

Or a place to live. There's not a particular individual I'm going to thank for that. But if somebody did a nice deed for you and you haven't thanked them to their face, try doing that. It's a simple action. It also improves social connection in the bargain.

But it it produces positive emotions in its own right. So gratitude is a very powerful source of positive emotions. The third one is nature. And when you spend time in nature, it naturally produces positive emotions and positive hormones. And there's all kinds of ways to expose yourself to nature. One study last year suggested that bodies of water, especially moving bodies like an ocean or a river,

are more powerful than any other source of nature, but they all can be helpful, walking through an arboretum, having an aquarium you know, in your office,

Dr. Larry Richard (42:54.48)
Watching a David Attenborough nature video will actually cause the same benefit. Looking at a vista where you can see for a long distance, all of those are helpful and produce positive hormones. So, you know, nature can be very helpful. And then exercise, even though it's part of the self-care category, it's also a source of positive emotions and some other benefits. So

You can also stack or combine these things. So one of the things that my wife and I love to do is we'll walk together in our local arboretum, and this ticks several of the boxes. First of all, we're getting exercise. Secondly, we're connecting with each other. We're we're sharing an activity and we get the social connection. Third, we're having an experience in nature, which is itself uplifting.

And fourth, if we do it in a structured regular way, the regularity, the predictability of doing something in you know, every Tuesday at four we do this t sort of thing, that lowers the threat

Level of your brain's threat circuitry, when things are predictable and routine, like if you have a meeting in the office every Monday at nine, the regularity, the periodicity of that regular meeting is has an effect of lowering the threat circuitry on your brain. The threat circuit responds to increase in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.

So when we provide routine and regularity, we lower the threat circuit.

Stephen Seckler (44:40.494)
Okay, Larry, we're getting near the end here. There's so much more to talk about, but can you say just a quick something about what a leader can do in a law firm to help implement some of these strategies or or reinforce or or support lawyers in their building of their resilience and their well being?

Dr. Larry Richard (44:57.532)
Sure. So leaders, first of all, if lawyers are leaders, if leaders are lawyers, we have an interesting dilemma. So leaders, based on the latest scientific research about leadership, leaders need to take risks and try new things. That's what makes people follow leaders, that they're trying something new. And as lawyers, we're rewarded for not taking risks.

So what do you do if you're a lawyer leader? You have pressure to both take a risk and not take a risk.

So the key is to be willing to tolerate some discomfort in your leadership role. Basically tolerate making decisions a little bit earlier than you might fully be comfortable as a lawyer. Taking that risk despite the discomfort is going to help you be a leader and get more people to follow you. what can and and when lawyers are leaders, because we know nine out of ten lawyers are low in resilience, if you're a leader.

Chances are you're a low resilience lawyer who's a leader. Now, that's a problem because

When somebody is in a leadership role, we all know from personal experience, leaders are more visible, they're more prominent, and they're more likely to draw criticism from other people. They don't draw criticism just because people like criticizing leaders, they draw criticism because when someone sees you as a leader, they want to share their ideas with you. Can you do this? Can you do that? They want the leader to adopt their preferred way of doing things. And if you as

Dr. Larry Richard (46:41.148)
As a leader, hear that as criticism and get defensive, which low resilience people typically do, the person who's offering their ideas to you is going to react by thinking, wait a minute, you're not really hearing me. And if you don't hear me, I don't trust you. And if I don't trust you, I'm not going to follow you. So low resilience in a leader can

impede the ability to gain followership and trust from your constituents. So the first thing that any lawyer in a leadership role has to do is build their own resilience up. And everything in the book gives you strategies for how to do that.

The second issue is you have to be aware that in a law firm the constituents that you're leading are not the typical general public. You're leading people, ninety percent of whom are low in resilience. And you can't do that the same way you would lead a normally distributed group of people. When you're leading thin-skinned people, you're likely to create defensiveness and I'm not going there reactions from lawyers. So you have to

find strategies that work in low resilience environments that are not going to create what what psychologists call reactants, digging your heels in. no you don't. You know, turn in your timesheets. yeah, like hell. So leaders have to learn low resilience leadership strategies. Third, there are a lot of things that leaders can do that can create what I call a resilience-friendly environment.

So for example, when we use a performance management approach that is what I call a fix your deficiencies approach, let's find out where you're not performing well and get you up to speed, as opposed to the opposite, let's find out what you do well and give you a chance to do even more of it better. A fix your deficiencies approach versus a strengths-based approach.

Dr. Larry Richard (48:55.58)
Far and away the resilient the the deficiency fixing approach is the default in a legal profession. And that's not good news. The science tells us that that is completely backwards. People respond most well, they respond at their best when leaders use a strength-based approach.

So there's a lot of stuff that we have in the book about how you can adopt a strength-based approach to bring out the best in your people. And that's going to make you far more effective as a leader. And the last thing I'll mention, Steve, is that

Jim Coozes and Barry Posner are the leading exponents of science-based leadership, and their book, The Leadership Challenge, seventh edition, is the latest copy. Their book, Leadership Challenge, basically summarizes over 40 years of scientific research that they've done on what makes leaders effective, what makes people actually follow leaders. And they've basically discovered that there are five behaviors which, when leaders do those behaviors,

Consistently, it's very likely that other people will increase the degree to which they follow those leaders. And so leaders need to understand these five behaviors and they need to get regular feedback about how red regularly they are using these five behaviors in their work. So those are the main things. There are lots of others in the chapter we have on leadership, but I think those are the most important.

Stephen Seckler (50:34.69)
Alright, final question I'd like to ask all my guests. What is one movie, streaming television series or podcast that you would recommend? And this is for entertainment purposes.

Dr. Larry Richard (50:45.836)
that's easy. It's my favorite show that I've binge watched several times is The Good Place with Ted Danson and a and a cast of thousands. what a well done, well casted, well written, funny, engaging, innovative series. one of my faves.

Stephen Seckler (51:10.742)
All right, I'm gonna have to get back to that one. It's about the afterlife, right? Okay. Terrific. Larry, this has been a great conversation. Again, I can't even tell you how much influence you've had on my career, on the work that I do now. And I'm just so I'm grateful, speaking of gratitude, for all the work that you've done in helping all of us understand what it is what's going on in our brains and how we could sort of get past some of those roadblocks.

Dr. Larry Richard (51:13.721)
Exactly.

Stephen Seckler (51:40.192)
If anyone in our audience has follow up questions or actually where can they get your book actually, let me first ask.

Dr. Larry Richard (51:46.695)
So the book is available right now. It actually came out August twenty first. so the ABA Mark and Barr Association is now shipping copies of the book.

And you can order it at the American Bar Association website. If people want the exact link, just go to lawyerbrain.com and scroll down on the homepage. You'll see the link for the ABA website. And if you're a member of the ABA, you get a discount. And if you're a member of, I think it's the Law Practice Division, you get a further discount. And the book will eventually be available on Amazon.

Right now Amazon is showing an October date for the book being available, but that's just a placeholder. Once they get their shipment of books from the ABA, Amazon will update that to a current date. And that should be just a couple of weeks.

Stephen Seckler (52:44.622)
Okay, great. And it's it's just a terrific read and it's not just a read, it's a a workbook that you're gonna keep going back to. So if anyone in our audience has follow up questions, how can they reach you?

Dr. Larry Richard (52:56.21)
Go to lawyerbrain.com and there is a contact page and you can send us a message, an email through that contact page, or the phone number is on there as well.

Stephen Seckler (53:07.48)
Great. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please tell others and rate us on iTunes or your favorite podcast app and share it with someone who you think might be interested. And if you're watching on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button. It will help others find us. If you'd like to continue the conversation, I welcome your inquiries and invite you to set up a time to speak with me about your own career or marketing concerns. I've been coaching lawyers for almost thirty years and I'm happy to do a free 30-minute consultation.

You could sign up on my website at seckler.com. On my website, you could also find links to more episodes of Counsel to Counsel and get access to many free career marketing and leadership resources. In the meantime, thanks for listening.