How To Stop Treating Conversation Like Cross-Examination

Conversation around my family's dinner table was less of a relaxing chat and more like a practice session for a particularly aggressive college debate club.

law firm fight

I grew up in a family of lawyers. Out of the five of us – myself, my parents, and my two brothers – four of us have gone to law school. The result is that conversation around the family dinner table is less of a relaxing chat and more like a practice session for a particularly aggressive college debate club.

Growing up, I just thought that was how conversation works: that dialogue is best understood as a sparring match during which you try to beat your partner into submission, and then you have dessert. So the rhetorical style of law school seemed totally normal and familiar to me.

There’s a reason that we’re taught to think and argue in this manner in law school, of course. You have to zealously represent your client, you have to look for holes in ideas and assertions, and you want to separate the most logically air-tight theories from the faulty ones when you think about how to argue your case. Soon, this method of interaction becomes second-nature.

It may not seem on first inspection like this is a problem. After all, if your romantic partner told you that you had hurt their feelings, you’d never respond that they were collaterally stopped from asserting any emotional pain because they had hurt your feelings first, right? Because that would be weird and insensitive, and you know that.

But as it turns out, lawyer brain causes you to engage in more subtle versions of this extreme all the time.

To take one example: Fixating on logical errors in someone’s statement like a bloodhound on the scent is a natural lawyer brain reaction in the moment. But it actually doesn’t prove anything or move the dialogue forward. People say inconsistent things sometimes – pointing it out scores you points in a legal argument, but if you do it when someone is trying to express their feelings for you, all you’re demonstrating is that you value logic more than their lived experience and the rapport they are trying to build with you.

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Have your friends, family, or romantic partners ever told you to stop “arguing like a lawyer?” This is what they mean.

Or let’s take another example: Comparing what someone says now to something they said two years ago in a different fight feels to you like it’s producing illuminating evidence. But a personal conversation isn’t actually analysis of a historical record, and the effect is that your conversational partner feels like you don’t take their current feelings or experience seriously.

This isn’t to blame you or your lawyer brain. This is just how mental conditioning works: You practice this way of thinking and engaging with ideas, statements, or assertions, and it becomes second nature. You may feel like you have to be right or win the argument and not even really know why that’s so important to you.

So here’s something to try: The next time a colleague, a family member, or a romantic partner approaches you with a disagreement or even just a claim or assertion about their feelings or experience, take a breath. Consciously take that switch in your brain that is stuck in “look for how to disagree” and flip it, on purpose, to “look for reasons to agree.”

It will feel awkward at first, for sure. Your brain will keep scanning for openings for attack. That’s fine. When you notice it, just bring it back to looking for every possible opportunity to agree or see the merit in the other person’s point of view.

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If you can’t go that far, try looking for a compromise solution. For instance, what would your mental attitude be if your thought during the conversation was: How can we both “win” this argument? How could we both come out of it happy? The fact that the lawyer joke about negotiation is that both parties should come away unhappy is very revealing of the way that we think compromise works and what we think we should feel if we don’t get our way 100%.

But what if the goal was that both people would be happy with an outcome, because they would both be looking for a solution that worked for both of them? How much would that change your mental perspective? Spoiler alert: A lot.

So that’s your experiment for this week. Put that evidence-gathering lawyer brain to work looking for all the ways that your sparring partner has a good idea, a useful example, or is suggesting a productive outcome. Flex a different mental muscle, and see how it changes your conversations for the better.

Kara Loewentheil is a former litigator and academic who now runs a boutique life coaching practice for law students and lawyers. Intimately acquainted with the unique challenges lawyers face in their professional careers and personal lives, Kara teaches her clients cognitive-based techniques for dealing with stress, anxiety, and lawyer brain so that they can build the lives and careers they want.  Kara works with individuals, law schools, and law firms to improve productivity, efficiency, job satisfaction, and professional development at all stages of a legal career. You can find out more – and download a free guide to dealing with lawyer stress – at her website, www.redesignyourmind.com. She is also the host of a new podcast, The Lawyer Stress Solution, which will be available on iTunes in April 2017.