Manage your feelings for conflict resolution

Stephanie West Allen kind­ly alert­ed us of her impres­sive new ini­tia­tive and blog, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dr. Jef­frey M. Schwartz, titled Brains On Pur­pose. They have part­nered to bring a series of sem­i­nars on neu­ro­science and con­flict res­o­lu­tion: Port­land, Ore­gon, in Novem­ber 2007, and San Fran­cis­co Bay Area in Jan­u­ary 2008-so far. Dr. Schwartz has pre­vi­ous­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in a sim­i­lar and fruit­ful ini­tia­tive on The Neu­ro­science of Lead­er­ship with David Rock. We wish them best luck in this excit­ing initiative.

Stephanie writes a great blog post on “What are you feel­ing?” “What am I feel­ing?” These ques­tions are tools for brain tam­ing, explain­ing how “A flur­ry of arti­cles appeared this week (such as this one in Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can: “Name that feel­ing: You’ll feel bet­ter”) about the neu­ro­science research show­ing that label­ing your feel­ings can qui­et your brain and increase impulse control”

adding that…

“In our recent arti­cle “Lead Your Brain Instead Of Let­ting It Lead You,” we talk about the prac­tice of mak­ing men­tal notes (first described by Jeff in his book Dear Patrick: Life is Tough — Here’s Some Good Advice). Devel­op­ing your skill in mak­ing men­tal notes can bring relief when high con­flict occurs.” and “The more skilled you get at label­ing, the more quick­ly no mat­ter the sit­u­a­tion you can return to equa­nim­i­ty and composure.”

Check her post to learn more about the label­ing tech­nique. Devel­op­ing men­tal notes can be a very pow­er­ful way to self-reg­u­late behav­ior, not too dif­fer­ent from cog­ni­tive ther­a­py and emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­tion tech­niques.

Excit­ing to see more sci­en­tists and prac­ti­tion­ers bring­ing research into prac­tice! As we have men­tioned, Brain Fit­ness is some­thing that applies to dif­fer­ent ages and dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es, and this is a great exam­ple for lawyers.