Dr. Larry Richard | How Lawyers Can Build Greater Resilience

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of the Lawyer's Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode. Lawyers are trained to handle high pressure matters, yet research demonstrates that they're actually less equipped to bounce back from it than almost anyone else in the workforce.

Today's guest has spent decades studying why, using personality data gathered from thousands of lawyers to explain what makes the profession so hard on the people in it. His new research lays out practical evidence-based ways to rebuild that resilience. We're going to get into all of that today.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the coaching team at The Lawyer's Edge, a training and coaching firm which has been focused exclusively on lawyers and law firms since 2008. Each member of the Lawyer's Edge coaching team is a trained, certified, and experienced professional coach and either a former practicing attorney or a former law firm marketing and business development professional.

Whatever your professional objectives, our coaches can help you achieve your goals more quickly, more easily, and with significantly less stress. To get connected with your coach, just email the team at hello@thelawyersedge.com.

I am delighted to welcome my guest today, Dr. Larry Richard, someone many of you will recognize, in part since he's joined us here on The Lawyer's Edge several years ago. Larry is widely recognized as the leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior, and he has spent his career helping law firms and legal departments understand and improve performance through behavioral science.

He's a former litigator who went on to earn his PhD in psychology from Temple University, and over the years, he's collected and analyzed personality data on thousands of lawyers. Consulting with hundreds of top firms and corporate legal departments on things like building psychological resilience, developing leaders, and promoting lawyer wellbeing. He's known for taking cutting edge science and turning it into guidance lawyers can actually use.

His newest book, written with his wife, Dr. D’Arcy Lyness, is called Thin Skinned: Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience and The New Science That Can Help. It's an evidence-based field guide to managing stress and building resilience using real behavioral science. And it's exactly what we're going to dig into today. Larry, welcome back to The Lawyer's Edge.

Dr. Larry Richard: Thank you, Elise. Delighted to be here.

Elise Holtzman: I'm really excited to have you here. And as you know, I'm a huge nerd when it comes to understanding the lawyer personality and how it impacts the lawyers themselves, law firms, clients, and everybody else working with them. We know also that we're going through periods of unprecedented change in the world. I don't think anybody in the world is immune to that concept. What makes the level of unprecedented change that we're all experiencing today so psychologically challenging? It seems like people are having a rough time with all of it.

Dr. Larry Richard: People are, and there's a good reason for that. The brain, for every human being, our brain has a circuitry, which I'll just call the threat circuitry. And the purpose of that circuit is to scan our environment in the background most of the time to see if there's any sort of threat. And if there is a threat, the threat circuit will hijack, borrow, recruit cognitive resources.

It'll recruit your attention and repurpose whatever you're paying attention to the needs of the threat circuit to identify the nature of the threat, what kind of a threat is it, how serious is that threat, are there any steps I can take to mitigate it? Those are the most important cognitive questions that your threat circuitry is interested in, and it uses the exact same real estate, the same regions of the brain to answer those questions that were previously moments before being used to practice law.

So for lawyers, we're trying to do our job and our threat circuit says, "Excuse me, I need some of your lawyer brain power to answer some more important questions over here in the threat circuit." And it doesn't tell you. It's not like it says, "Excuse me. At least I'm going to borrow a pound of brain." It just takes it. And so we're all walking around feeling depleted and exhausted, irritable and distractible.

Those are the three most common reactions and we don't see any obvious link between that and uncertainty that surrounds us. But that's the trigger that causes it. Because lawyers use our cognitive resources as the main tool that we do our job with, the effect on lawyers is harder than on anyone else. And because the trigger that the threat circuit uses to detect whether a change is afoot, whether a threat is afoot, is change because change is the very trigger mechanism that our brain is sensitized to, that our brain relies on.

The increase in change increases our activity in our threat circuit to the point where that circuitry was originally designed thousands of years ago for what we call episodic threats. There's a loud noise outside your cave and you check to see if it's some sort of a predator. And if it is, you take action and hopefully five minutes later, either you're dead or you've survived and you've, you know, lived another day.

But the point is in either case, at the end of a few minutes, the threat is over and you can resume normal breathing and normal attention, but that's not what we're dealing with today. We're dealing with threats that are ongoing, that are outside of our control, but still perceived as very, very threatening. And that not only raises the stress level, but it also means that the threat circuit's mechanism is operating nonstop, which is not what it was designed to do. And that can be exhausting and depleting itself.

And then on top of all of that, you mentioned, you alluded in your introduction to my research on the personality traits of lawyers, there are seven atypical traits that characterize lawyers which help us practice high quality law, but they come with some downsides. And one of the very, very important downsides is that these very same traits impede our ability to cope with change and to be adaptable.

Elise Holtzman: So I want to get into the seven traits in a minute because I know that those are going to be very valuable for us to hear. You talked about kind of being in this constant state of threat assessment. And I guess the way I've heard it is that we're now, everybody, not just lawyers, right, that we're in this constant state of fight or flight. And as you point out, we were never designed to be in that constant state. It was supposed to be if you were being chased down by some predator somewhere.

And you're not planning your kids' wedding when that happens, you're going to your base brain response and trying to survive. And that not only. And I guess this is part of the brain, but that when you're in that fight or flight response, you're almost constantly being bathed in the hormones like adrenaline and those kinds of things that are designed to help you get through that fight or flight moment.

So you mentioned this idea, we're not supposed to be living that way all the time. And so the adrenaline or whatever, the hormones are that are supposed to pop in when that happens can be really, really helpful, right? They power us through the crisis, but that when we're bathing in those things all the time, it actually breaks us down. And not just psychologically, but physically.

Dr. Larry Richard: No, you're absolutely right. Our brain is basically a chemistry set and it has all kinds of chemicals, including some very powerful chemicals called hormones, which are the chemicals that produce the physical feeling that we call emotions. So when you feel a negative emotion like fear or surprise, that's hormones acting in your system. When you feel delight or anticipation, those are positive hormones that are being activated.

And all hormones have a purpose, a design, and a kind of a range within which they're helpful. So negative hormones are often designed for very short-term episodic responses to threats, cortisol, adrenaline, those are two of the most common ones. Those can be both helpful and hurtful depending on the right context, but when there's a threat afoot, they make our heartbeat faster.

They send the blood flow to our core areas so, if we hurt our arm or our leg, it's not going to bleed a lot. It increases our muscle tones. We can run faster to escape a predator. All of those things happen for good when we're under threat, but the very same chemicals, if they are prolonged and if they stay in our system beyond what the shelf life was supposed to be, they start undermining normal bodily processes in a way that's not desirable.

So it's about timing and when we're always on environment, when we're pumping out those negative hormones all the time, now we're going from the effective rescuing use of those to save our life maybe, to a very toxic environment. And that's the problem.

Elise Holtzman: Now enter the lawyer, right? And so, as you say, you've identified seven personality traits on which lawyers score atypically. And so let's lay the foundation for this a little bit because my understanding of the kinds of personality traits that we're talking about is that we're talking about hardwiring, right?

Like we all know if you took, you know, you went way beyond this, Larry, but for those of us who took, you know, Psych 101 in college, and I did graduate with a BA in psychology, so I went a little further, but I'll never forget that Psych 101 class with Dr. Harvey Gleichman, if you remember him and, and his wife who were very involved in my education. The idea is that there's nature and nurture, right? We're affected by both of those things.

And so, correct me if I'm wrong, but when we're talking about seven personality traits, we're basically talking about nature, that hardwiring, how people show up in the world. And I point that out because one of the things that I talk to lawyers about, and in my anecdotal experience, I see lawyers showing up in very similar personality patterns over and over again. Law schools don't go to universities and say, "Hello, university. We are a law school. We would like to take a cross section of your seniors and invite them to come into law school."

We self-select into law school. We say, "Hey, I think law school would be a really good fit for me." And so I suspect that that's why we see very similar personality types over and over again, because you get a, a bunch of people who think similarly, feel similarly, and go to law school for varying reasons, but falling into a lot of the same categories.

So, I just want to get your take on that so that everybody knows exactly what we're talking about here. This isn't necessarily the kinds of things that people have picked up over time. Am I correct that the seven personality traits that you've identified are largely hardwired and baked into us from birth?

Dr. Larry Richard: So yes and no. It's a little more complicated, , but you're on the right track. So we used to say every personality trait is half nature, half nurture. And we said that because we knew that, that something had to be hereditary and something had to also be affected by life experience. We didn't know the actual, you know, combination statistically.

But over the last 30 plus years, there's been an amazing set of scientific studies where they identified twins who were separated at birth and then scientists chased them down, and before they could be reunited, they gave them personality tests among other things. And because there's genetics involved and because there's no cross-fertilization, these were people who did not know each other as adults, the scientists could make some fairly precise calculations about the contribution of heredity and the contribution of environment.

And now it's generally 75% genetic. Most personality traits are 75% genetic and 25% learned. In other words, largely genetic. And because it's largely genetic, the traits tend to be very stable over time and they're very hard to change because that rubber band of the genetics is always pulling you back to the, to the preferred comfort zone. However, the test that I use to measure these traits actually has a total of 21 traits.

18 of those traits follow the pattern that I just described. 75% or more, one trait is actually 95% genetic, and that's extroversion. But most traits, 18 of the 21 traits are largely genetic. Three of the personality traits among these 21 are more learned, dramatically so, more learned. And it turns out that all three of those learned traits are among the seven outlier traits that characterize lawyers.

So, three out of seven traits are more learned, four are genetic. The genetic ones, pretty much when someone enters law school, they have elevated or depressed, depending on the the trait, levels of this outlier trait. They're either lower than average or higher than average, but they're not in the middle of the pack like you expect. And three of the traits specifically, I'll do a deeper dive in a sec, but skepticism, empathy and resilience are all about 80% or more learned with a little bit of a genetic set point that regulates them.

There's an important distinction. When a trait is mostly learned, two very important things happen. One is an environment that favors that trait is going to really bring out that particular trait. So if you live in a skeptical environment, you're going to increase your skepticism, and that's exactly what happens to lawyers. It starts in law school where we're trained to quote, "think like a lawyer," which is skeptical thinking.

And then we get practice using skeptical thinking in the Socratic method used in law school. And then we get into practice and we're using it every day of our career, and we're getting rewarded for it both socially and economically. So we're really reinforcing skepticism, and that's why it rises from about 10% higher than the public when first year law students start to 90%, instead of the average for the public, which is 50%.

We get a 90% skepticism score by the time we measure lawyers 10 years into practice. The empathy and resilience, what happens is we start with normal or slightly below normal with empathy. It's a special case. It's actually dropping in the whole population. But resilience, we start, you know, maybe normal or a little below normal, but the jackhammer of skeptical negative thinking is one of the main factors that drives resilience down.

And so you can see if we're getting so good at skeptical thinking, we're also getting really good at low resilience. So low resilience, because it's a learned trait, over time, goes down and down and down and down and down, and there's no rubber band to make it pop back up to where it used to be. Unlike genetic traits where, so I have high urgency, that's one of the seven outlier traits, I'm always going to be urgent.

I can regulate it in brief periods, but my biological predisposition is going to always, as soon as I stop being vigilant, bam, I'm going to be back to my high urgent self. By contrast resilience, if you raise somebody's resilience, it stays raised if you keep doing the things that raise it. So what are these seven traits? The highest most outlierish trait is skepticism.

And skepticism is the calling card of practicing law. And it is super, super effective for being a high quality lawyer because it allows us to ask questions like what could go wrong and what's the exception to the assertion that someone just made and what are all the bad things that could happen? And why should I accept this person's assertion? Maybe I should question their motives.

Is there a hidden agenda? These are good questions that competent lawyers ask. But the downside of getting your brain really efficient at asking those negative questions is it makes your brain more efficient at finding fault, more efficient at looking for problems, more efficient at asking what's wrong. And imagine what that does to your success in having a sustainable relationship.

Imagine what that does when you encounter some sort of a setback in your life and now your brain starts going, "How can I explain what just happened to me?" Well, the easiest explanation, the one that's more efficient for the brain to find is going to that internal voice that we all have, but that voice for lawyers is negative. And so, we make negative explanations to ourselves.

We're self-critical more than the average person because we're so good at hunting up negative explanations for our own behavior, as well as negative things that we see out in the world around us. That alone could explain low resilience for lawyers. My data on resilience shows that nine out of 10 lawyers are low, that is below the midpoint compared to 50% of the public.

Elise Holtzman: When we're talking about resilience, let's just define what that is. Is it simply the ability to bounce back from exhaustion, stress, burnout, those sorts of things?

Dr. Larry Richard: It's the ability to bounce back. And another way of thinking of it is adaptability. Resilience is the capacity to roll with the punches, to experience the bumps that life serve up to us, and to get around them, overcome them or in the first instance to resist them. So as a psychological trait, resilience is tricky because it also, the same word refers to a psychological trait, a personality trait.

And it also refers to the process that's a larger process that we describe when somebody recovers from some sort of a challenge, whether it's a trauma or a setback of some sort, you know, a divorce, long COVID, fire, house fire or little everyday quotidian things like somebody criticizing you or forgetting your birthday. All of those things from the micro to the macro are setbacks.

And when we see somebody recover from a setback, we say they're resilient. The process of being resilient includes both the personality response, which is the adaptability, but it also can include marshaling help, getting, you know, relying on a support system, getting funding from somebody, you know, a GoFundMe page, getting some government support, getting cheerleading from the sidelines.

There are lots of things beside our personality that can help somebody be resilient. So part of it is dependent on the situation you find yourself in, what kind of, you know, friends you have, what kind of support you have at the workplace, what kind of job you have. And part of it is a respect of your personality. I'm looking in my research at the personality portion of that. And so that's what the caliper is measuring.

It's measuring the contribution that your personality makes in terms of your adaptability and people who are lower in that personality trait just find it much harder to resist setbacks in the first place and harder to recover. And the most simple example is criticism. It's one of the most common triggers for a low resilience person. If I criticize a high resilience person, either it doesn't penetrate or if it does, they're over in a minute or two and they're back to whatever they were working on.

If I criticize a low resilience person, three things happen. First, we feel hurt or wounded or insecure or worried and we start ruminating about the criticism. Secondly, it takes us a long time to bounce back from it. We're like, "Oh God, I wonder what they meant by that." And two weeks later, we're going, "Oh, you know, I still haven't gotten over that thing. I wonder what they meant." And then the third thing is it distorts our perceptions.

So I've, I think I even mentioned this in our original dialogue a couple years ago. When you make a compliment to a low resilience person, let's say my favorite example is, "Elise, look at that beautiful clothing boutique. There's a very professional looking outfit in their store window, and I think you look very professional yourself in that outfit." And a high resilience person would take that as a pure compliment and say, "Thank you."

But a low resilience person distorts it and hears what they hear. "Elise, I don't like what you're currently wearing. You should consider that thing in the window instead. " And so, they get bent out of shape that there's an indictment of their current clothing when that has nothing at all to do with what the complimenter was meaning. So resilience can be a bear.

Anyway, the other traits, lawyers are high in abstract reasoning, which means we like solving problems intellectually. We like using our strong intellect and our higher IQ. And we also like to argue. Lawyers are high in urgency like I am. We're impatient. We want to move matters along, which is good for the client, but it also is terrible for relationships and terrible for leadership because people, leaders need to establish trust.

And if you're really dismissing other people quickly and making them, feel like you haven't heard them, which is what urgent people often do, you're not going to get buy-in. We're high in autonomy. We don't like being told what to do. Again, law firms are really, really good places for high autonomy people because there's almost never somebody breathing down your neck like there is in a corporate hierarchy.

But how's that play out for your relationship? You know, could you please take out the trash? What are you talking to me about taking out the trash for? Who do you think I am? Why don't you take it out yourself, right? That's not going to sustain a relationship if you're constantly, you know, reacting like somebody's trying to tell you what to do instead of hearing it as a polite request for something needed.

And why is that important? Because in addition to negativity, guess what the other force is that keeps resilience low? Loneliness and isolation. So when people are lonely, when people don't have connections, their resilience drops. When they have support systems and they have close, intimate connections, their resilience is very strong and it can tolerate lots of criticism and setbacks.

Empathy I already mentioned is a little bit of an outlier because empathy has been dropping in the general population all around the world in every occupation, mainly in people under 40, people who were raised on social media.

Elise Holtzman:Well, and the loneliness and isolation that you mentioned is also increasing for similar reasons probably, and also COVID and everything else.

Dr. Larry Richard: That's right. And for lawyers, we've always been low in that to begin with. We weren't as low in empathy, hurting us in a way it didn't before. From the very first moment that I studied lawyer personalities, sociability, a trait that measures our comfort with intimacy and vulnerability was super, super low, 12 and a half percent where you expect the public to be at 50%.

So we're really awkward around revealing anything private or personal. We want to keep the conversation at a superficial or intellectual level because we have such a low sociability score. And then all of those six traits, skepticism, abstract reasoning, high urgency, high autonomy, low empathy, low sociability, all of them in different ways reduce our resilience and keep it low.

Elise Holtzman: What I'm hearing, and it just strikes me as really interesting, is that some of the traits that lawyers naturally have or have developed over time, primarily the ones that we naturally have, as you say, are where we derive our strengths. They're our strengths. We're so good at this lawyering thing. We're so good at executing, getting things done, solving the problem, taking care of the client.

And so our strengths are in our personality, but at the same time, our blind spots are there as well, and the things that can cause us stress and cause other people around us some dissatisfaction and unhappiness are in our personalities as well. And so I think being aware of all of this stuff is so important. You know, I work a lot with lawyers on business development and leadership.

And so, we know that while it's not exclusively the case, the number one aspect of successful business developers and rainmakers' successful leaders is relationship development. And so, I can have these very well-meaning, kindhearted lawyers who are sort of baffled by how to develop friendly professional relationships with people. As you say, it feels awkward, it feels unseemly, it feels uncomfortable.

And so, they sometimes keep people at arm's length. Another thing that you said that I find interesting is this idea of constantly being intense about the work and being on all the time and being, you know, stressed out about the work. And as you know, I use a tool called Type Coach. One of the founders, co-founders of Type Coach, Rob Toomey, is a former practicing lawyer, and he is different from the classic lawyer personality type.

And he describes learning as a fairly junior associate to fake being stressed out because the other lawyers, he perceived that the partners in the firm with whom he was working didn't think he cared enough because he wasn't stressed out enough for their liking. And if he were taking it seriously, he would be more stressed out. So hearing you talk about this, I just find fascinating based on some of the experiences I've had and some of the things that I've seen with my clients.

Dr. Larry Richard: It is, you're describing this two-edged sword quality of these traits. They're traits that help you practice law, but at the very same moment, they're interfering with a lot of things. They're interfering with your ability to cope with change. They're also making lawyers more vulnerable to loneliness, depression, substance abuse sleep disturbances, eating disorders, anxiety, and a whole bunch of other things.

As we speak, the ABA and Patrick Krill just came out with another one of their stunning pieces of research, the largest one that Patrick's done to date. And the statistics on lawyer distress of all sorts are alarming. I mean, they're absolutely alarming. And the good news, in a way, delighted to see this report because it's going to, you know, I think get people's attention.

And fortunately, what we try to do in this book is to look through the behavioral science and the neuroscience literature and identify practical evidence-based strategies that people can use to prevent some of the stuff that's in Patrick's report, and if you've already suffered it, to remediate.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah. I think that's a really important point. I mean, Patrick Krill and his colleagues have done amazing work on this, and I also think that over the past several years, the legal profession generally is taking it more seriously and paying more attention. We still have a very long way to go, but those kinds of studies are very helpful because lawyers like to see evidence of this stuff.

And, you know, I just remember years ago, I mean, there were things going on in my law firms that I worked for. And, you know, it all got swept under the rug. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And certainly, your generation, my generation, we didn't talk about these sorts of things. You know, we didn't talk about mental health, and all of these things were talked about in hushed tones.

It was considered an embarrassment and now people are talking about it more openly than they have before. But I like your approach when it comes to strategies to, to build resilience and promote wellbeing. Let's talk about some of that. And I like your emphasis on the prevention first, right? Like we don't want to just assume, okay, we'll wait until everybody's stressed out and falling apart and then we'll use some of these strategies to help them get out of it.

So, let's talk about some of those, Larry. What are some of the, the strategies that you think are most valuable for preventing these sorts of challenges that we're seeing among lawyers?

Dr. Larry Richard: So D’Arcy and I divide our book into, or at least a portion on the strategies into four categories, four chapters. These are arbitrary chapters because the, many of the interventions carry over into multiple categories, but it's a useful way to organize the information. So I mentioned earlier that there are two main factors that regulate our resilience. Our positive or negative, think of optimistic or pessimistic thinking.

People, and when I use optimism, people often go, "Oh, you're talking about rainbows and unicorns, right? And balloons and all of that." No, I'm talking about realistic optimism, which is when something happens to a person when you try to think about what it means to you, do you catastrophize?

So somebody makes a mistake at work and then the next thing you know, they're thinking, "Oh my God, no one will give me work anymore. I'll have to go to another firm, but they all talk. No one at another firm will hire me. I don't know any other occupation. Oh my God, I'll be living in a park in a tent." Right?

It could happen, but that's not realistic. That's, that's a catastrophizing pessimistic look. Optimism doesn't mean you have to say, "Oh, I'll bet somebody who I never met is going to sweep in and give me $10 million." That's obviously unrealistic, but what you could say is, "Hey, I made a mistake. A lot of other people in my position have made those mistakes and gone on to become very successful in their firms. Maybe I could learn something from the mistake." That's a form of realistic optimism.

Elise Holtzman: One of the questions, I've talked about this in coaching. One of the questions that people will offer as a way to get past some of this stuff, you know, things are going wrong or you're having a hard time and people will say, "Well, what's the worst thing that could happen?" And I think that's a horrible question, right? I don't want to talk about what's the worst thing that could happen. I'd much prefer to talk about what's the most likely outcome here? And I think that's what you're getting at.

Dr. Larry Richard: Exactly. If we think about the worst outcome, it's going to stimulate the release of negative hormones, which will actually make us less able to be accurate in our perceptions, less able to be responsive, less able to be adaptable. So asking that question is a terrible idea. You're right, looking for the most likely outcome is the most sensible and healthy way to respond. So the basic idea is that you have these two major forces operating on resilience. One is the negativity or the pessimism.

The second one is the connections that you have. And to organize the interventions about raising resilience and managing against stress and building wellbeing, the first bucket we put is reducing negative thinking. To understand how that relates to the second one, which is raising positive emotions, we explain in the book the cognitive model, which is basically research going back 50 years showing that unlike Descartes originally said, you know, years and years ago, thoughts and feelings are not separate, unrelated phenomena.

In fact, neuroscience is suggesting it's just one continuum. Thoughts and feelings interact with each other. So if you change your thinking, it changes your feelings. And if you change your feelings, it changes your thinking. And both of them influence your actions. And vice versa, if you change your actions, it changes your feelings and your thoughts. So each of those three legs of the stool, thoughts, feelings, and actions, are two-way streets.

They all affect the other two, and you can therefore intervene on any of them. So the first bucket is reducing negative thinking because it will eventually generate positive emotions when you do that. And there are lots of ways that we describe in that chapter for doing that, but you gave a good example of shifting from a catastrophic way of reacting to something as a thought pattern to shifting to a what's likely outcome.

And we have a whole algorithm in there based on some interesting research at University of Pennsylvania where they developed a particular strategy that's been field tested for how you do that. That's chapter number, I think, five. So chapter number six is about raising positive emotions. That's another leg of the three-legged stool. If you raise positive emotions, it will of necessity, you know, raise your thinking to more positive.

And why is that important? Because lawyers are specialists in the negative. And that's significant because human beings are already specialists in the negative. Human beings have a negativity bias. We pay attention to threats and problems more than opportunities, because if you miss a threat, you could be dead. And if you miss an opportunity, it's no big deal. Maybe it'll come along again.

So we're biased in favor of the negative and the problem, but lawyers take that to an extreme. So we need to offset the negative with a lot of positive just to break even. And there are luckily lots of things that can raise your positive emotions. Now, if your listeners are lawyers, I know what they're thinking. They're thinking eyeball roll, positivity, positive emotions, here we go, it's touchy-feely time.

Well, guess what? Number one, positive emotions are not touchy-feely at all. The neuroscience tells us, remember what I said earlier, every emotion produces hormones and those hormones affect you. The negative hormones you produce from practicing law long-term are toxic. Here's the amazing thing we discovered in our research for this book.

There's strong scientific evidence that the hormones produced by positive emotions not only make you feel good, but they chemically neutralize the negative emotions that negativity produce, that stress produces. And given that we as lawyers are under stress more and more and more and have fewer and fewer coping skills to deal with those stressors, producing more positive emotions is not a feel-good strategy.

It is a chemical reversal strategy. It is a mitigation strategy. It allows us to chemically protect ourselves from the toxicity of negative emotions. So that second chapter is all about different ways of raising positive emotions.

Elise Holtzman: But you're saying it's concrete and it's practical, which we know lawyers love.

Dr. Larry Richard: Yeah, it is concrete.

Elise Holtzman: I love that. I love hearing that.

Dr. Larry Richard: And how do you raise positive emotions? I'll mention three quick ways. We cover lots of them in the book, but the most common one is nature. When you expose yourself to nature, we are designed as human beings to generate positive emotions when we're exposed to nature, whether it's walking through a woods, an arboretum, looking at a vista looking at a water feature, especially moving water.

There's a study that came out last year that showed that water, of all the types of nature we can be exposed to, water has the most satisfying and soothing, calming effect on human beings. You could have an aquarium or a terrarium in your office, or you could even watch nature videos by the British naturalist, David Attenborough, and those videos will produce the same positive hormones that walks in nature will do. So that's thing one.

A second way to produce positive emotions is by expressing or even just thinking gratitude. Gratitude is a profound emotion that basically says to yourself, "I have enough. I am grateful for what I have, and I'm not entitled. I'm satisfied with what I have. And if I got something I didn't expect,,, that's a plus."

And the attitude of gratitude, while it may seem silly or touchy-feely or I've heard other negative things that lawyers have labeled gratitude, the research shows that, again, there is a chemical signature to gratitude and is one of the most powerful positive emotions in neutralized negativity. It's also one of the most useful ways of thinking to produce all kinds of other benefits.

And there's a book called Thanks by Robert Emmons, E-M-M-O-N-S. He's a leading scientific authority on the emotion of gratitude, and he outlines some of his own experiments and studies that other people have done. And in this book, you cannot believe it. It's like page after page after page of positive benefits that gratitude produces. Things like improving relationships, people sleep better, people have less physical ailments.

They tend to be more optimistic about the week that's coming next week and so forth and so on. It's just idea after idea after idea about how just a simple shift in our mind about being grateful produces very measurable positive outcomes for people and offsets the negativity that we generate. The third positive emotion strategy is music. And everybody has a piece of music that generates positive emotions.

It's different for each person, but if you know what your music is, you know, just play it. I used this strategy just the other day. I forget what it was. Something got me in a sour mood and I thought, "I don't have to sit and take this." And I put on one of my favorite jazz pieces, which is Lee Morgan's Sidewinder. And in five minutes, I was just in a completely different psychological state.

It's magical what music can do to shift your mood. The third bucket is simple. It's prioritize relationships. And we give lots of tips in the book that are, again, based on evidence about how you can increase connections with people and deepen connections that you already have. In the first category, there's marvelous research showing that when you interact with strangers using common sense, of course, when you interact with strangers, most people assume it will be a negative experience for you and for the stranger.

But in studies by Nick Effley in Chicago, he repeatedly found that when people approach strangers and strike up a conversation with them, that both the stranger and the initiator report it was one of the most positive parts of their day. So it tends to generate positive emotions. For people that you already know, presence is what matters.

By presence, I mean, when somebody's talking to you, especially when they're talking to you about something that they're happy about or proud about or something that they achieved, giving them your 100% undivided attention is a huge, huge relationship booster. If you compromise that, if you set your phone on the table without even turning it on, that alone, one study shows, reduces the quality of the relationship.

It's not like you're gaining, "Oh, I'm still getting a little benefit from giving you most of my attention." You completely turn a positive situation into a negative one by putting your phone on the table, and even worse, if you interrupt a conversation or multitask a conversation.

Elise Holtzman: I mean, they're all incredibly powerful, but for the world that we're living in now, this one in particular sounds incredibly powerful to me because how many of us, you know, the two of us, people listening on the call, can really say that we are regularly giving people our full focus and attention rather than having something else going on. I think that the percentage would be unbelievably low, almost approaching zero.

Dr. Larry Richard: Yeah. I think that's accurate. I mean, we've all been on conversations where we say something and the person on the other end is trying to fake it and they say something and you know they have no idea what you're talking about, right? When you give 100% of your attention, people can actually feel it physically. There's something that happens when someone is entirely focused that makes you feel it physically and psychologically.

And that, again, has a chemical signature and you get the benefits of it. The last category is about self-care, about adequate sleep, good diet, exercise, and stress management. All of those things are important. All four of those are things that remarkable, very useful science has advanced in the last couple of years. And when we follow the precepts of these four self-care habits, we pave the way for the interventions I've already talked about to be at their maximum effectiveness.

Conversely, when we eat a lousy diet, when we don't exercise, when we have a lot of stress that we don't manage, when we don't get adequate sleep, you can use the interventions I've already mentioned, and you're not going to get nearly the benefit that you would if you had, you know, the self-care habits nailed down.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah. That's the foundation.

Dr. Larry Richard: That's right.

Elise Holtzman: Larry, this is so valuable. And for me, who, you know, based on your research from many, many years ago, I am almost the poster child for the lawyer personality, as I've said many years ago. I know you use the Myers-Briggs, I use TypeCoach, which is based on a similar model. And hearing about some of these strategies really resonates with me.

I am what can only be charitably described as naturally indoorsy, and yet what I have found is that going out into nature and having a lake house and even looking at the water as you. It was so interesting that you mentioned the water, because my joke is that when I go to my lake house and I just look at the water, I immediately go from type A plus to at least type A.

And it does make a difference. So, you know, the hiking and the kayaking and just looking at the water, but I think that everyone can identify with some or all of these strategies and know the truth that this really is so helpful to us. Making the time for it, I think that people are, because of the intensity of the work that lawyers do, they're not always making the time for it.

And I hope that people will buy your book and use these strategies. So as we wrap up our time here together today, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

And there's no question that you are the leading expert on this issue. When it comes to building resilience in the face of stress and setbacks and intensity, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but is really important for other people, especially lawyers, to hear?

Dr. Larry Richard: There are a couple of takeaways that I would commend to your listeners. One is that resilience is improvable. It's not a fixed thing. It's not like you're either in luck or out of luck. It's something that you can improve. The second thing is, the personality traits that make you a good lawyer are also the same personality traits that challenge your resilience.

And if you can learn to compartmentalize, use those traits to their full effect when you're practicing law, and learn how to dial them back in other situations so that you don't suffer the negative consequences that are long-term, short bursts of use in these things, great, but learn to compartmentalize, learn to segregate so the traits are useful in one role that you're playing and you turn them off or dial them back in another role that you're playing.

And then the third thing is what I said in this interview about positive emotions having a strong chemical benefit to us by neutralizing the negative emotions. For me personally, that was the most significant thing that I learned in writing this book. And I think it's profound because it gives us suddenly control over something at a biochemical level that we just thought was touchy-feely pleasantness. So that's really important for people to take away.

Elise Holtzman: Yes, such important information. And I think it's just becoming more and more important every day. It's not this stress and this, the constant bombardment with all the things that we're doing in social media and the 24-hour news cycle and the craziness going on in the world. At the moment, it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. And so I think that what we can all do for ourselves and the people around us is to work on some of these things.

You know, I think everybody deserves it, right? We're talking about good, hardworking people here who deserve to not only be able to knock it out of the park for their clients, but to live the kind of lives that they're meant to be living. So, thank you so much for being here today with me, Larry. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. It energizes me so much and I always learn something really profound. Thank you so much.

Dr. Larry Richard: Delightful being here. Thank you.

Elise Holtzman: I'm going to thank our listeners for tuning in as well. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.