module 16: unleash the beast: openly revealing your feelings

Openly Revealing Your Feelings!

IV. Unleash the Beast: Openly Revealing Your Feelings!

“When you bait the hook with your heart, the fish always bite.”

- John Burroughs


• “I wish I had the courage to express my feelings” is number three on the list of the “Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware.


• Why do we suppress our feelings?


• According to Bronnie, “Many people suppress their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settle for a mediocre existence and never become who they are truly capable of becoming.”

• “Many develop illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carry as a result.”


• You’re probably thinking, “Well that’s all good and dandy, but what can I, as a lawyer, gain by expressing my feelings?”


• By openly revealing our feelings, we instantly build credibility with the jury.


• I realize that cynics will be quick to denounce this as “hokey” or as “junk science.”


But consider the famous words of the legendary Gerry Spence: “The most powerful person in the courtroom is the vulnerable person, the lawyer who is aware of his feelings and can

share them honestly with the jurors.”


• The same is true for actors. Beginning on day one, the young actor is taught that vulnerability – the ability to be affected by things both real and imaginary – is his greatest strength.

Twenty-Seven Spigot Rule

• Your inner life – including your emotional experiences – doesn’t run on twenty-seven spigots. Instead, it’s a single pipe called, “feeling.”

• If you turn off just one feeling, then you turn off all of you feelings.

• In other words, if you turn off sadness, then you’ll turn off happiness.


• Example: Your grandparents were married for nearly sixty years. Then your grandfather passed away. Your grandmother was absolutely heart-broken and cried herself to sleep every night for almost six months. Then she woke up one morning and said, “I’ve shed my last tear. I can’t continue to grieve like this. I have to move on.”


• You’re at grandma’s house and her favorite TV show is on. You say, “Grandma. It’s your favorite show.” Grandma doesn’t respond. She has a blank, deadpan look on her face as she stares off into space. By suppressing sadness, she has suppressed joy. By divorcing herself from her feelings, she doesn’t even recognize that she has fallen into despair. She is numb to everything.


• Sometimes we are asked not to speak out of our own feelings but to understand and express the feelings of another.

• I can think of no time when this calling is any greater than when we are defending a client accused of a crime.


• How can we tell our client’s story so genuinely that it touches them in that soft place where their decisions are made – their hearts?

• The question is better phrased, “How do we express out of our own hearts the feelings of another?”

• Before we can express the feelings of another, we have to open ourselves up to our own feelings. Being devoid of emotion is like saying to the jury, “I want you to do what I can’t do myself – care for John.”


If you cannot connect to your own feelings of rejection, anger, betrayal, isolation, and

abandonment, then how can you get the jury to feel how trapped, helpless, and tortured Johnny

felt? How he felt like a caged animal. How he wants to shout out his innocence but how he

fears that his cries will be rejected by the jury as a cheap attempt by a felon trying to escape his

well-deserved fate.


• The case takes on an entirely new meaning when the attorney genuinely marries his emotions to his client’s well-being. Slowly he begins to care and as he does, he acquires the power to cause others to care.

• I realize that the idea of allowing yourself to feel, let alone express what is going on inside of you is downright frightening.


• It requires getting in touch with your deepest emotions – taking a journey into the deepest recesses of your being to find that chest where your innermost fears and experiences are buried, opening it up, pulling them out and exclaiming, “Here! Here’s who I am!”

• For me, it’s like standing on stage before an audience of complete strangers, tearing open my chest cavity, and allowing the audience to see my pounding heart.


Putting Emotion into Context

• When I speak of emotion, I am not suggesting that you have to be “big” and “melodramatic.”

• In fact, heightening, elevating, and amplifying are the biggest traps that actors fall into. This causes actors to push too hard and to force what should otherwise come naturally.


• There is a certain ebb and flow when it comes to emotions.

Meisner on Emotion

• As Sanford Meisner explains,

– “One of the things about emotion is that it has a way of coloring your behavior and that you can’t hide it. You simply can’t hide it.”

– “… ,but you don’t need three tons of it in order to color your behavior properly. It’s just that you must not be empty.”

Meisner on Emotion

• “If you’re nervous, you have to allow yourself to be nervous. If you’re excited, you have to allow yourself to be excited.”

• As my acting instructor so eloquently states, “I’ll take a real 4 instead of an inflated ten any day of the week!”


• To say that as lawyers, we tend to live in our own heads is a complete understatement. We are so accustomed to thinking, to the abstract, to the intellectual expression of every experience, that we have lost touch with what makes us attractive people – our feelings.

• As a result, we think, but we don’t feel.

Openly Revealing Your Feelings!• I did not realize how dominant my left brain had become and

how my ability to feel had become completely supplanted by my intellect until my first day of acting class.

• My acting instructor asked me, “Mike, when was the last time you took a shower?” I was mortified. At the same time, I knew that I had showered that morning and that I was clean.

• Insulted, I answered, “This morning!”

Openly Revealing Your Feelings!• The instructor said, “No, that’s not what I

meant. When was the last time that you actually felt the drops of water hitting your skin, the shampoo suds in your hair, and your fingers massaging your scalp?”

• I remember having an inner dialogue with myself right about now that went something like this: “I am a grown intelligent man. Enough of this foolishness. What will people think?”


• But then my instructor said, “Be honest with yourself.”

• And so I did. And a valuable lesson was learned. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I hadn’t taken a “shower” in over a decade. No doubt I was physically in the shower every time, but my mind wasn’t. It was in other places.


• Whenever I get discouraged with my inability to feel, I take comfort in the fact that everyone, myself included, was born with a complete set of feelings.

• Instinctively, we knew how to cry when we were hurt, to shout when we were angry, to run when we were afraid, and to jump with joy when we were excited.

• The challenge is to rediscover these feelings and be brave enough to express them openly and freely.


• This is where we can draw inspiration from the world of acting. Believe it or not, actors struggle with this very same thing.

• In acting, there is an implicit agreement that actors have with the audience that they are going to let them see what’s going on on the inside.

• As one of my acting friends observed: “It’s upsetting to see how our lives inhibit us. It seems horrible that we’re so conditioned to keep everything in. Now, all of a sudden, it’s our job to let everything out.”


• Tip: It takes more effort to suppress the emotions that are welling up inside of you than to let them out. It’s cathartic.


• Just to take a small digression, I’d like to debunk a common myth that people have about acting: that acting is pretending. As both an actor and a trial lawyer, there is one question that I get asked more often than any other, “When you’re in court, do you act?”

• The question really is, “Can we trust you? Or are you attempting to fool us by pulling the wool over our eyes?”


• True acting is never pretending. As Harrison Ford once said: “Acting is being – it’s revealing the truth of the character in the situation in which he finds himself.”

• To take a page out of the playbook of a popular acting instructor, “you can’t act insecure – you must feel insecure to be insecure.”

module 16: unleash the beast: openly revealing your feelings

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