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1. 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

2. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• “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.

3. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• Why do we suppress our feelings?

4. Openly Revealing Your 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.”

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

6. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• By openly revealing our feelings, we instantly
build credibility with the jury.

7. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• I realize that cynics will be quick to denounce
this as “hokey” or as “junk science.”

8. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
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.”

9. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

10. 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.

11. Twenty-Seven Spigot Rule
• 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.”

12. Twenty-Seven Spigot Rule
• 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.

13. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

14. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.”

15. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
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.

16. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

17. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

18. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
Putting Emotion into Context
• When I speak of emotion, I am not suggesting
being “big” and “melodramatic.” In fact, that
is the exact opposite of what I am referring to.
A good lawyer, like a good actor, must learn
how to work simply and truthfully. “Less is
more.”

19. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• Heightening and embellishing are the biggest
traps that actors fall into. They rear their ugly
heads when actors try to make something
happen (i.e., force things) instead of trusting that
something good will happen if they just leave
themselves alone and work from moment to
unanticipated moment. This comes from trying
too hard to be good. But overdoing it never leads
to anything positive. First, it removes any
element of truthfulness. Worse yet, the audience
feels embarrassed for the actor.

20. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• As Meisner famously said, “It’s
understandable but there’s a danger in trying
too hard to be good. That’s why the Rookie
ballplayer strikes out and the first year
associate gets slapped with a malpractice
suit.”

21. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• Emotion presents a myriad of challenges. The
biggest one is the temptation to show it.
“Look mom, see how happy I am!” “Look
audience, see how overjoyed I am!” So the
actor projects his state of being. He “plays”
what he thinks he needs to play in order to
make the audience sense his emotional
condition.

22. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• Here is an example from a scene out of an
acting class.
• Adam arrives at Beth’s door and there is a
sharp rap on the door, then another, then a
third. Beth opens the door. Adam is breathing
in an exaggerated, theatrical way.

23. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• The exercise stops and the instructor asks
Adam to describe the situation that he was
coming from. Adam replies that he was being
chased by some “crazy” guy on the subway
after stepping on the man’s foot on the way
out.

24. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• Instructor responds: Too general. Not specific.
And meaningless. You were playing what you
thought you needed to play: a melodrama.
Nothing happened to you except an assumed
fear. It was not real. Instead, it was an
indication of what you thought being
frightened and being afraid should be.

25. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• There is a certain ebb and flow when it comes to
emotion. Emotion is never linear. It resembles
that of a heart monitor. When in doubt, Meisner
always told his actors to look to real life. When a
close family member dies and you’re at the wake,
you’re not weeping and sobbing uncontrollably
the entire time. A smile might come to your face
when you hear someone tell a funny story about
this person and you might feel comforted, as if
your heart was warmed, when another family
member walks up to you and hugs you.

26. Meisner on Emotion
• As Sanford Meisner explains,
– “You cannot escape the impact of emotion. If you
have it, it infects you and the audience. If you
don’t have it, don’t bother. Just say the lines as
truthfully as you are capable of saying them.”
– “You can’t fake emotion. It immediately exposes
the fact that you don’t have it.”

27. Meisner on Emotion
– “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.”

28. Meisner on Emotion
– When it comes to emotional preparation, it
cannot be “sorta,” “kinda,” or “just.” That is too
vague.
– Emotions are specific and meaningful: joy,
sadness, happiness.
– Emotion does you. You don’t do it.
– Simplicity is essential. The more complicated it is,
the harder it is to get involved emotionally. “All I
have to say to myself is ‘Hitler’ and something is
there.” Think, “less is more.”

29. Meisner on Emotion
• By being honest, you help yourself.
• “If you’re feeling nervous, allow yourself to be
nervous. If you’re feeling excited, allow yourself
to be excited.”
• However, don’t exaggerate by attempting to
“play” an emotion that isn’t there. Intuitively, the
audience (jury) will know that something is
wrong.
• As my acting instructor so eloquently states, “I’ll
take a real 4 instead of an inflated ten any day of
the week!”

30. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

31. 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!”

32. 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?”

33. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

34. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.

35. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.”

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

37. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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?”

38. Openly Revealing Your Feelings!
• 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.”