The first task in the “just be it” journey is to quiet down, and then listen to and transcribe—verbatim—the automated, harmful, mental messages from the past that are triggered when we anticipate a law-related interpersonal exchange today. When thrust into nerve-wracking “command performance” scenarios, the brains of many introverted, shy, and socially anxious law students and lawyers immediately generate censorious “cognitive messages.” When we sense the first notion of pressure to speak or perform, the negative mental scripts start spewing forth, like paper from a court reporter’s stenotype. In a team meeting, an introvert comfortably note-taking and internally problem-solving might observe one participant after another jumping into the conversation pool, and feel an imaginary spotlight switch on, shine brighter, and burn hotter, and the walls of the room begin to close in to highlight her lack of contribution. The internal messages start: “Why won’t you speak? Everyone is going to think you have nothing to say! Why are you such a chicken? It’s just a meeting! Just do it!” In classroom, conference room, or courtroom exchanges, shy and anxious individuals can sustain repeated cognitive blows through what Flowers characterizes as over-anticipating negative events that have not happened yet,294 catastrophizing,295 self-criticizing,296 self-judging,297 and overall feeling inadequate.298 In our heads we hear: “You’re turning red. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you know the answer? Why aren’t you as quick as they are? Why are you even here?” Worst-case scenario thinking commences, and negative mental slogans begin a continuous loop, thwarting healthy reactions and responses.
To be able eventually to reject these messages, first we must recognize them. Some of us have been hearing these scripts for so long, they have become mental wallpaper we barely consciously notice. We must listen to their exact words and phrasing, write down the precise language, and then reflect on their original sources. This requires a little self-discovery voyage. Who from our pasts might have planted these untruths in our minds—inadvertently or intentionally? Strap in for the ride; this part could get a little bumpy. But this is an essential first step in the “just be it” process.
Naistadt emphasizes that a huge part of what stokes stage fright is the “[i]nhibitions that plague us on an individual basis, requiring a deeper level of commitment to resolve because they stem from fears we’ve nurtured as obstacles over time.”299 She urges that “[r]ecognizing and identifying what fuels your particular form (and degree) of stage fright so that you can move beyond or even overcome it is essential to being an effective communicator.”300 Dr. Breggin agrees that “[u]nderstanding our negative legacy emotions can help us to triumph over and to transcend them in pursuit of a life based on self-determination; resilience; higher purposes; and love for others …”301 If fear, anxiety, shame, or guilt cling to us like barnacles from our past, we must mindfully pluck them off, take one last look at them, and affirmatively chuck them away.
It is important (and OK) to recognize that our present-day self-censorship initially might have been sparked and perpetuated by people we care about, including relatives and other key influencers in our formative years.302 Everyone learns how to handle emotions—positive and negative—early in life, through reinforcement by caregivers.303 Hilliard explains that, beyond one’s genetic makeup, adult quietude, shyness, and social anxiety can germinate from environmental dynamics in childhood such as: (1) how “parents or caretakers soothed or irritated [a child’s] nervous system, training it into a state of alertness or cautiousness”; (2) positive or negative messages delivered by family or other authority figures, which either generated and nurtured feelings of “being loved, respected, and safe” or, conversely, of “being flawed, unworthy, unsafe, inhibited, or inadequate”; (3) being labeled as “shy” in a negative way as a child; (4) traumatic experiences; and (5) other life circumstances.304 When coping with distressing emotions like fear, anger, shame, or guilt, if a child learns from a guardian or caregiver that it is unsafe to express these emotions through normal outlets, the child might self-protect through quietude. For these children, a pattern of “censorship” by authority figures “can ‘prime the pump’ for social anxiety to develop at a later point.”305 Embarrassing and shaming experiences in childhood—by caregivers, teachers, coaches, siblings, or other authority or influential figures—can be, as Naistadt describes, “tremendous blows to our self-esteem that may leave considerable personal devastation in their wake. The bad news is that if [we] don’t work through the fear by pinpointing the source and clearing it away, it will very likely continue to get the better of [us].”306 As Naistadt emphasizes, this process of identifying critical messengers from our past is not intended to encourage a “blame game,”307 but it is an essential step in the transformational process to understand where negative messages originated so that they can be deleted and rewritten going forward.
For other quiet law students or lawyers, self-censorship in adulthood might have sparked from a single traumatic event rather than a lifelong pattern of repressing hurtful emotions. According to Drs. Markway and Markway, “[a] study conducted in 1985 by Professor Lars-Goran Ost at Stockholm University found that 58 percent of people with social phobia attributed the onset of their disorder to a traumatic experience.”308
Whatever environmental contributors originally might have forged a law student or lawyer’s reticence toward interpersonal engagement, the first step is unearthing and acknowledging these infiltrators, and then understanding and celebrating the fact that their suffocating grip can be released forever. To do so, we try to identify the original historical sources of judgment-oriented messages. We consider how such scripts might have been reinforced by other powerful figures in our lives throughout adolescence, and into adulthood, law school, and eventually law practice. And then we acknowledge that those messages no longer apply in the law context and can be silenced or rewritten. We can press “stop” on this endless loop of internal criticism, and compose fresh new maxims that encourage rather than censor our authentic thoughts, speech, and behavior.309
Help Is Available! For some law students and lawyers, this step might require the assistance of professional counseling. Personally, over a 15-year period, I sought assistance from four different professional therapists during various life phases and transitions to help me expunge my negative soundtrack. Many law schools and bar associations provide health and wellness resources and links to counseling services. The website of the American Bar Association offers mental health resources for law students and lawyers: check out www.americanbar.org and the Law Student Division’s Mental Health Initiative, the Young Lawyers Division’s Health and Wellness Initiative, and the Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs.
HEARING AND TRANSCRIBING OUR INTERNAL MONOLOGUE
Invest in the time to hear and listen to the literal language of your personal mental scripts, and to reflect on characters in your past who might have relayed to you these particularly negative lines. Naistadt explains that many of us received forcefully detrimental messages “at some point in our lives that we have internalized and nurtured over the years, bestowing upon them a hold over us in the form of inhibitions that, in most cases, they were never intended to have and do not warrant.”310 Naistadt urges us to take out our chisel, “mine” our unique history, and “identify those … messages that have become our thorniest—and stickiest—hidden obstacles. Such messages … act like red lights, signaling us to STOP! We must change that signal to a green light in order to become powerful, persuasive communicators.”311 Dr. Breggin similarly describes guilt, shame, and anxiety as “invasive weeds and vines in our minds.”312 These emotions are the culprits that are choking off our authentic voices. Let’s start bushwhacking our way to these roots so we can clear out our mental debris.
Here’s an example of how.
Envision an interpersonal scenario in the legal context that triggers anxiety: A Socratic dialogue? A mandatory oral argument exercise? An upcoming meeting with a law firm partner? A negotiation with opposing counsel?
Choose a realistic event with particular players who have names and faces, and anticipate the real-life encounter. What mental messages do you start to hear about your ability to perform? Can you quiet down and listen to the exact language? No need to act on the messages yet or try to change them. Remember, we are not “just doing it” and glossing over our internal critic to badger ourselves into toughing out an event. Instead, just be in the moment. Listen to the words. Don’t ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, or try to edit them.313 The change comes later.
Consider this law student scenario: You arrive at Civil Procedure class, and slink into a seat. You arrange your laptop and your notes from last night’s reading on your desk. Your classmates converse around you. You watch the professor stride to the podium. She gazes serenely at the class and says, “OK, let’s get started. Today, we’re going to discuss diversity jurisdiction in federal court.” The class hushes. She scans the clamshell seating chart. The microphone booms your name. You blink. Your brain has vacated the premises. Sweat beads on your neck. The professor queries, “Under what circumstances can a litigant file a claim in federal court based on diversity jurisdiction?” You prepared the answer six different ways in notes, outlines, flash cards: None of the plaintiffs can be citizens of the same state as any of the defendants, and the amount in controversy must exceed $75,000. But instead of the clear legal rule you memorized and fully understand, the following messages might flurry across your brain like a stock ticker: “Hurry up. Answer the question. Everyone will think you are clueless if you don’t get on with it. Everyone is staring at you now. You’re not as smart as they are. Your professor already seems annoyed. You’re going to fail. You’re a law school fraud. What are you even doing here? You don’t deserve to be here.”
Consider this law practice scenario: You arrive at the law office toting your Starbucks tumbler, eager to add the finishing touches to a brief to be filed by the end of the day. You settle into your desk chair, and clack away on your laptop, engrossed in final edits and proofreading. You hear one of the more pugnacious partners stomping down the hallway. He declares, “Everyone on the Penske case, conference room, now!” You grab a legal pad and a pen, and scurry to the conference room. Like a game of musical chairs, your colleagues scramble for seats. You slide into the one closest to the senior partner. He fires questions: “Where are we on document review? Who’s drafting the motions in limine? How are we doing on expert retention?” Your colleagues answer, interject, get involved. You want to say something, be seen. Everyone has spoken now, except you. You feel the spotlight. You might hear in your head: “Just speak up! He’s going to think you are useless! Just talk! Everyone else is contributing. Why can’t you?”
Maybe your script sounds like these, or maybe yours is wildly different but equally harsh. The goal of Step 1 in our seven-step process is to start spotting these noxious thoughts as soon as they appear, almost as if they pop up in bright orange “thought bubbles” above your head. Hear them. Buy yourself a shiny new journal, or tap open the Notes app on your phone, and transcribe them verbatim. You might be shocked at the actual words you hear and have been absorbing for years! Mean stuff. Nasty. Unkind. Let it come. Let those vicious voices jabber whatever they want. They’re not going to occupy the stage much longer so let them have at it. But write down their exact words. Then, label them: Hazardous.314 Negative. Unuseful. And, transient, impermanent, and forever deletable, after we identify their original sources and realize that the messages and their messengers are no longer relevant to our present-day lives in the law.
In Step 1, our initial focus is on mentally perceiving each message, and physically writing it down.315 Flowers encourages: “Noting is a way to build and nourish your ability to observe without attachment or resistance.”316 Hilliard reiterates the effectiveness of “writing these negative messages down on a piece of paper … moving them from inside your head to outside on paper, or into the air.”317 Part of the “just be it” process is learning that these toxic messages are “impermanent, very short-term visitors”318 that we later can evict. In anxiety-ridden moments, we often think in extremes and we imagine that the awful mental and physical sensations will persist forever. But they always subside, at least until the next interpersonal event. Our ultimate objective in this seven-step internal recalibration and restoration is to reprogram ourselves to get better at (1) more quickly recognizing the “red alert” messages, emotions, and feelings that normally might initiate a mental tailspin; (2) letting the thoughts flutter in; (3) realizing their transience; and (4) sending them on their way.319 “Through mindfulness awareness,” says Flowers, we “can learn to recognize these thoughts for what they are.”320
Eventually, we start to appreciate our internal power in “hav[ing] a choice about whether or not to jump on trains of thought.”321 These historically automatic responses to a twinge of anxiety—which, if left unattended, could swirl into an emotional tornado—become a conscious choice. By “just being it,” we can linger momentarily when troublesome past slogans reappear,322 and realize that they are just words that can be edited or deleted. As Flowers emphasizes, “Just finding ways to step outside of your thoughts and investigate them without identifying with them or trying to push them away is a powerful practice that can help break their spell.”323 So, instead of outright rejecting the messages or pretending they do not exist, we first let them show up and begin to run their automatic course. In Step 3, we will break the harmful reactive chain324 and replace the negativity with positive personal taglines to buoy us through each interpersonal encounter. Only by acknowledging the message first can we expel it, “no longer feeding the fear body with more fear.”325
Allowing harmful verbal messages from the past to arrive—uninvited as usual—so we can discipline them appropriately like the unruly bullies they are is a much more effective long-term solution than “just doing it.” We accomplish nothing by compartmentalizing the messages, by shoving them into mental storage bins, and by repeatedly burying them in order to brave an interpersonal interaction or a public speaking challenge. In “just do it” mode, the baggage lurks, taking up precious intellectual space. Along this new path, we permanently purge our mental rubbish. Flowers encourages:
[T]he more you try to block, avoid, control, or escape difficult emotions, the more certain they are to revisit you time and time again and become problematic. On the other hand, if you’re swept up by each passing emotion, you’ll find yourself careening from one overwhelming event to the next. But if you can learn to attend to difficult emotions with clear awareness and acceptance, you may be able to find a middle ground where you can work with your emotional states more skillfully.326
This new course of action takes practice. This is not an overnight fix, and this mental maneuvering will not become second nature until we have experienced repeated opportunities of successes and failures, with time for reflection and tweaking. Patience is essential. One of my favorite quotes from the Roman poet Ovid is Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim. It means: Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.
IDENTIFYING SOUNDTRACK SOURCES
After hearing and transcribing the messages, the next pivotal step is to reflect on our personal history, and to try to identify the earliest sources of the destructive words and phrasing. Again, we are not engaging in a “blame game”327 or deflecting personal responsibility. Instead, by seeking to identify the original envoy of the critical text playing on automatic loop in our minds, we can realize that those dialogues took place in the past, are outdated, and therefore, are no longer relevant in our present lives in the law. In Step 3, we’ll overwrite that negative language with productive taglines to use in future law-related interpersonal engagements.
SOME OF MY HISTORICAL SOURCES
As the daughter of an introverted Episcopal minister and an extroverted singer and piano teacher, my childhood reflected a peculiar intersection of public display, community-image consciousness, humility, and modesty. Always emphasizing education, my parents enrolled me in an all-girls, private school. I meandered fourth through 12th grades with relatively the same cadre of 49 girls. Scrawny, nerdy, freckly, a year younger than most of my cohorts, and sporting a gap between my front teeth wide enough for a Mack truck, I was not cool by any stretch. My best friend was the daughter of a World Bank executive; being one of few minority students in the late 1980s in our predominantly white suburban private school, she was not in the cool cliques either, but she was a rambunctious extrovert and was unafraid to speak her mind.
I was a straight A student, but generally I tried to duck the limelight outside of academics. I abhorred conflict and I was a pleaser and a rule-follower. The church was our family’s solar axis. My parents toted my younger brother and me along to sing with choirs at nursing homes, perform live holiday nativity scenes, and smile at parishioners after Dad’s sermons on Sundays. In lulls between church services, my brother and I played “communion” in Dad’s office, reverently serving each other dry wafers, viscous grape juice, and Chips Ahoy cookies pilfered from the coffee-hour stash.
In mining my personal history, my earliest memories of losing trust in my voice flash me back to middle school. One new science teacher didn’t seem to like my voice. At all. I recall one fall day, our class convened outside on a sliver of the carpool roundabout’s blacktop to conduct an experiment with paper, a magnifying glass, and sunlight. I marveled out loud, “Oh! If you catch the sunlight in the glass, the paper catches fire!” I was thrilled at our collective superpowers and unusually verbal about it. My teacher swooped in, hovered over me in a shadow, snatched my magnifying glass, and snapped, “You just ruined the experiment for everyone.” Dazed and unaccustomed to being rebuked by teachers, I turned purple and clammed up.
A few months later, as winter break approached, our class engaged in a Secret Santa gift exchange. I arrived in homeroom one morning, elated to discover that the largest polychromatic package under the tree bore my name. Truth be told, I was accustomed to receiving Christmas presents from my frugal and pious grandparents in a gray Hefty trash bag with a stapled nametag, because “giftwrapping is a media conspiracy.” (As were greeting cards and cut flowers.) This time, I felt so lucky to be the beneficiary of a preppie classmate’s good taste and generosity (I coveted their authentic Guess jeans and Pappagallo purses), and pointed out the enormity of my Secret Santa package to my best friend. The same teacher overheard me and hissed loudly, “The best things in life come in small packages.” I turned magenta and zipped it.
The year I turned 10, Ronald Reagan ran for president against Jimmy Carter. My conservative parents and grandparents were devoted Republicans. I learned at school, and from my Democrat carpool drivers whom we knew from church, that Mr. Reagan was a dynamic guy and a popular Hollywood actor, but apparently was hell-bent on launching a nuclear war. So, at our weekly Sunday dinner, as my parents and grandparents discussed their upcoming uniform vote, I announced, with all the fervor of my 10 years, that Mr. Reagan was itching for Armageddon and that, if I could vote, I would cast my ballot to re-elect President Carter. My horrified grandmother scolded, “Do not disrespect your family just to be rebellious.” Confused and stone-quiet thereafter, I avoided my blueberry pie.
Just as I hit the height of pubescent awkwardness, my father became the chaplain of an Episcopalian boys’ boarding school. We moved into a house positioned like a fishbowl in the middle of a sprawling suburban campus. Is it every adolescent girl’s dream to be surrounded by 300 boys dressed in seersucker and madras, who were living in dorms, studying in libraries, and playing football and soccer in fields mere steps away from her TV room? Well, not exactly. Puberty was not my friend. I boasted a mouthful of braces to finally close the monstrous gap. My best friend had dubbed me “Stork,” thanks to my stick legs and bony knees. Every morning before high school, I donned makeup to appease my fashionable mother before we walked as a family out our front door, across a brick pathway, and into the boarding school dining hall for breakfast of institutional eggs and chipped beef on toast with the 300 boys. Then, on the way to school, I smeared off all traces of blush and eyeliner to avert my best friend’s ridicule for pandering to my mother and trying to lure attention from the boarding school boys. Each night, my family reconvened in the boarding school dining hall, sharing our days’ events over plates of veal parmesan and Pepperidge Farm three-layer cake. We sat at the other end of the headmaster’s table, with different groups of male students rotating through assigned seats each week. A new terrarium of family life. The makeup went back on. At church and at the boarding school, being messy, bored, grumpy, upset, or antisocial wasn’t really an option for my brother and me. (It didn’t go over great when he got caught smoking and I got caught with pierced ears.)
I longed for a robust gaggle of cheery girlfriends and a high school boyfriend, but daily shuttled between (a) my closest friend who mocked me mercilessly for wearing makeup and knockoff preppie clothes, and (b) an untouchable bonanza of 300 boys, many of whom were either afraid to talk to the chaplain’s daughter or pretended I didn’t exist. One varsity basketball player approached me in the dining hall after dinner one evening and asked me to “hang out,” which I believed for a nanosecond was the turning point in my love life. It wasn’t. A week later at school, I overheard the popular field hockey players laughing about how the boy had been restricted to campus for curfew violations and had asked me—the only female teenager available—out solely based on a very public “dare.” Rather humiliating.
After graduating from high school with salutatorian and cum laude honors, I scampered off to The University of Virginia, double-majoring in foreign affairs, and French language and literature. I pledged a sorority, was voted rush chair, had plenty of friends, and finally, by some miracle, had a gorgeous serious boyfriend. In my French and Italian classes, I spoke loquaciously—to the vast annoyance of my classmates. While speaking in a foreign language felt natural, my regular English-speaking voice faltered. In Foreign Affairs lecture classes about the Middle East conflict and the art of warfare, I hid in the sea of faces, letting eager extroverted classmates carry the debate.
Home on seasonal breaks, though, I still itched to share my blossoming opinions about issues I was studying in national and world affairs with my parents and grandparents. I craved unconditional love from my grandmother, a strong, independent, hard-working woman who taught me to read at the age of three, co-read Judy Blume books with me, and ignited my desire to travel the world someday. I yearned to connect with her during the robust dinner table debates about politics or religion, but suffered stints of isolation when I said the wrong thing. Once, over a rainbow-marbleized pot roast, I gushed about my admiration for two UVA students who had launched a Post-Conviction Assistance Program and were recruiting younger students to do research for defendants facing Virginia’s death penalty. My grandmother sent me back to school with a care package of Top Ramen and boxes of macaroni and cheese but avoided eye contact and her usual hug.
I now understand that these and other snippets of what I perceived (whether incorrectly or correctly) as criticism, censorship, or discouragement from weighty influencers—teachers, my best friend, revered caregivers, and eventually long-term boyfriends whose love I desperately feared losing—contributed to internal confusion and a feeling of isolation in an upbringing situated somewhat amidst public scrutiny (a challenging dynamic for self-critical individuals even on a small community scale). Verbalizing nascent views and experimenting in natural adolescent and early adult self-expression often led to public mocking or shaming and private withdrawal of affection or attention. In public, I felt I had to smile and pretend everything was perfect, but my insides hurt and I felt nervous, afraid, and lonely. I certainly realize that none of these experiences equated to childhood trauma; I received a solid upper-middle-class American upbringing from faithful parents and two sets of grandparents grounded within the strongest marriages I’ve ever witnessed. I thrived in a top-notch education. I loved living at the boarding school and the other wacky housing experiences we had (one was a haunted “mansion” with a rickety elevator, which the church rented from the city for a dollar). But later, studying my introversion and anxiety toward forced public interaction, and further reflecting upon my life vignettes, it makes sense why law school Socratic exchange and my early combative law practice experiences plagued me. Wait, you want me to express (and be excited about) an opinion that differs from my professors, peers, and colleagues, and that isn’t fully fleshed-out and perfect? The messages I replayed in my head from ages 21 to 40 were: “You’re not allowed to be yourself. Your opinions are not valuable. Your opinions are wrong. You should be ashamed of your opinions. Look perfect. Act perfect. Be perfect. Look, act, feel, and think how others want you to look, act, feel, and think. Don’t disagree with anyone. Agree with everyone. Don’t let anyone down. Don’t disappoint.” Even today, if I make a mistake, my absolute first knee-jerk thought is, “You’re an idiot.” No, I’m not an idiot. And please get out of my head.
My science teacher quipped those words, probably without even thinking, around 37 years ago, in a tiny classroom, five states away from where I live now. I have no idea where she is, or if she is even still on this planet. My high school best friend and I completely lost touch 30 years ago when we matriculated in colleges on opposite coasts. My grandmother—whom I adore (and whose personality my own mirrors in countless ways)—passed away. So why does the wounding timbre of their statements ages ago warrant an iota of power over me now? Do these messages and many exceedingly more traumatic ones from other deeply influential characters in my past still sting at times? Yes. But now I understand how useless those ancient scripts are. In Step 1 of my “just be it” journey, I realized it was time to eject the valueless soundtrack whirring in my head.
Exercise #2
In Step 1 of your “just be it” process, it’s time to hear and transcribe the negative historical messages replaying in your mind that are hindering your quiet strengths in the present. Your goal is to capture the exact words, write them down, identify their original sources, and hopefully realize that the words no longer have relevance to your lawyer persona today and that the original sources no longer have a grasp on you. Later in Step 3, we will edit or delete the useless scripts and craft priceless new personal lyrics that will empower your authentic lawyer voice.
Grab your new journal, or access your preferred note-taking feature or app on your electronic device. Now, envision an interpersonal interaction, a command performance, or a public speaking scenario in the legal context. Be specific: Is it a classroom dialogue or exercise? A law office presentation? A meeting with opposing counsel? A conference call? A negotiation? An argument or speech?
Imagine you are a detective on a stakeout noting every nuance of your target’s behavior.