“If you’re erasing parts of yourself that make you, you, then it’s not worth it.”

— Sari de la Motte

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Podcast Transcript

No I won’t, wont. No I won’t.

Stay in my lane.

I don’t, don’t. No I don’t.

Stay on my lane.

No, I won’t, wont. No I won’t.

Stay in my lane.

I don’t, don’t. No I don’t.

Da, da, da, da, da.

Stay in my lane.

Da, da, da, da, da.

Stay in my lane.

Da, da, da, da, da.

Stay in my lane.

Da, da, da, da, da.

Oh.

Would you, would you, would you take me?

Tell me, tell me, I want to know.

Don’t hit the brakes.

Hit the road.

Sari de la Motte

And if you think, “Yeah, but it’s the very people in a jury situation, those are the people that have to like me.” They don’t. Not everybody’s going to like you. And the best you can do is be authentic and real and have awesome trial skills and let the chips fall where they may. You’re listening to Sari Swear on the Sari Swears podcast. Well, welcome to another episode of Sari Swears. Today we’re talking about how to incorporate feedback. Now as trial lawyers, you are going to get a lot of feedback from mock juries, from colleagues, partners, bosses, consultants, or if you’re brave enough, from the actual jurors themselves after a trial. But the majority of you do not know how to incorporate feedback and it is hurting you. What do I mean? Well, one juror says that they hate your shoes, so you throw your shoes away. True story.

Maybe you risk something in front of a mock jury and it doesn’t work so you never try anything new again. Or maybe you deliver your opening to your trial team or colleagues and you feel really good about it, but they don’t follow all over themselves praising you for your performance so you decide it’s shit. Or maybe a consultant dresses you down and you take their word as gospel even though they’ve never fucking tried a case. Or worst, you get a defense verdict and you stop trying cases altogether. In fact, Randi McGinn talks about how most female trial attorneys, they will quit the practice of law after they lose their first case. So if I wasn’t clear already, it is very, very important that you learn how to incorporate feedback because feedback can be very, very helpful, but only if you know how to incorporate what it is that you’re getting.

Now, why are you doing these things, like I just talked about, throwing away your shoes or deciding you’ll never try a case again or whatever it may be after you get particularly “negative” feedback? Well, in terms of jury feedback, you want to eliminate any possible or every possible hindrance. If they don’t like it, you don’t want to do it, say it or wear it. And if it’s your colleagues or your team, you’re looking for that validation. So if they’re not giving it to you, then you immediately think that it’s wrong. And of course, if it’s your boss, you want to keep your job. But honestly, I think the biggest reason that you are doing these crazy ass things like quitting or throwing away your shoes or deciding that you’re shit, the number one reason is that you think that everybody else knows better than you.

Now, if you’re listening and you think, “Well, no, I don’t.” Well then why the fuck are you throwing your shoes away? Hello. And I know I’m being really hard on the person, you know who you are, and that person has come quite a bit a long way since those days. But I think this is really true. You think that if somebody offers you feedback, that it’s somehow the truth. I think we all do this. It’s like, “Well, if they took the time to give me this feedback, then I should at least give it the time of day.” And nothing could be further from the truth. Look, I get it. We all want to be better. And as I said, feedback is a part of that, but there are four components to mastery. I want you to remember this. The first one is training. You’re getting knowledge from somewhere, whether that’s a book, a DVD, a CLE, whatever, maybe a podcast.

You’re getting training from someone. Then you need to practice it. Whatever you’ve heard from a stage, for example, is not going to make it into your skill level unless you’re actually practicing it. Then you do want to get feedback on that practice to have sort of a mirror to see how it’s coming across. And then you’re going to want a community that you can collaborate with as you continue to sharpen it. Now, here’s what I don’t want to see you do, and this is what I see you doing when it comes to feedback, is that you are twisting yourself into a pretzel more and more and more, the more feedback that you get, to try to become this sanitized version of yourself that other people will accept. And that is the worst thing that can happen. Kevin and I talked about it a lot on this podcast is that the number one thing going for you is you.

There’s never going to be someone else that is amazing at being the you that you are. I know that sounds silly and it sounds simple, but it’s so true. Your best, I don’t want to say defense, but your best skill or your best attribute is your personality and who you are and fully inhabiting that. And so the reason I’m doing this podcast episode today is because I see so often that you’re getting this feedback and you are becoming more and more sanitized so that you don’t do anything that offends or wear anything that offends or be anything that offends. And it become this thing that is controlling you. And that is absolutely what I do not want for you. Again, feedback is important, but only if you know how to incorporate. So I’m going to give you, let me see, I’ve got four things here on how you can incorporate feedback and make it work for you instead of having it control everything you do and put you into a fear state.

First of all, before I even go to these four things, let’s just say that every single one of you is going to somehow piss off or offend a juror, a colleague, a boss, whatever it may be, if you are being your true self. There’s nothing that I’m going to say in this podcast episode that is ever going to save you from that if you are being your true self, which I think is the only way to be in the world. Now, I don’t mean that you just get to be your obnoxious ass self and everyone just needs to fucking deal. I think I’m on the record enough that saying different situations call for different things, but that’s a far cry from twisting yourself into this sanitized version that everybody will accept. So again, we don’t want to be this black and white thinking where on one end of the spectrum is you get to be an obnoxious asshole and everyone just needs to deal with it.

And on the other end of the spectrum is you’re going to be the sanitized version of somebody who will never offend anybody. What I’m saying is when you’re in the middle, even when you are aware of your audience and you’re incorporating feedback and you are out there doing your best work, you’re still not going to be everybody’s cup of tea. You just aren’t. Let me ask you this. Do you like everyone that you work with? Do you like every person you’ve ever come in contact with in your life? No. And isn’t that great? And if you think, “Yeah, but it’s the very people in a jury situation, those are the people that have to like me.” They don’t. They don’t have to like you to vote for you, for one. But two, what a sad, horrible career you’re going to have if that’s the goal you’re chasing.

Listen, it’s much easier to accept that not everybody’s going to like you and the best you can do is be authentic and real and have awesome trial skills and let the chips fall where they may. That’s way better than trying to be this person that never offends anybody, including jurors. I have a podcast episode, whoever’s listening to this on my team, if you can put it in the show notes, something to do with how jurors don’t have, I think it’s called Jurors Don’t Have to Like Everything You Do. And it’s so true. They don’t. There are sometimes things that here at H2H I teach you to do that jurors don’t love, but it’s for their own good. They don’t know it yet, but it is. So again, before I give you these four ways to incorporate feedback, I want you to recognize that there’s no way that you can ever be or should want to be this completely sanitized thing, I’m not even going to call it a person, that never offends anybody and that everybody likes. It’s not possible.

All right. So four ways to incorporate feedback. One, and this is so important, check the source. How many of you think that your random ass Craigslist juror that got paid 50 bucks to be here is the be all end all of what is right and proper in terms of what shoes you wear to what words you say? Listen, they aren’t. I’ll tell you that much. So check the source. When we bring in our jurors from Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or whatever, it’s really just to have warm bodies for my Masterminds to practice in front of. That’s the number one reason that we do it. Warm bodies. It’s not because their feedback is so amazing. It’s not because their feedback is going to be honed and wonderful. And you might say, “But this is the same people that we have in actual juries.” Yeah, it is. And let me, again, tell you that you’re not going to be this person that everybody likes.

But if you are going to take this one random ass juror, because normally it’s just one on these feedback forms, that’s something to say and be like, “This is the person I need to be listening to.” I think you’re wrong about that. Not to mention that the jury isn’t just one person. It’s 12 people. And so you’ll get the forms back, the feedback form. I’m thinking I’m getting rid of those forms. I know my Masterminds are going to yell at me about that, but although some of my Masterminds don’t even read them yet or read them anymore because they know that they’re not going to be helpful. It was just the practice that they wanted to get in front of a group. But the people who do read them, they’ll have 11 amazing comments and they’ll focus on that one comment that wasn’t. Check the source.

It doesn’t mean that what you did didn’t land. It didn’t land with one person or maybe two people. All right? So you got to check your source. Two, check yourself. So if you don’t know how you look in front of an audience, there’s your first assignment from today’s podcast. Go and videotape yourself. Get intimately connected with how you’re showing up, both in the words that you’re saying, the gestures that you’re using, the pausing that you’re doing, all of the things, because unless you know what you look like, you can’t really incorporate other people’s feedback, because you’re just taking their word for it. You have to know how you’re showing up to then incorporate what other people are saying. But if you’re only incorporating what they’re saying and you don’t even have a sense of how you show up in front of an audience, then that’s not a complete view of how you’re showing up. There may be things that you really like about what you’re doing that, again, one or two jurors don’t or audience members don’t.

So often, and I’ve said this so often, it’s my biggest fear for you all, is that you’re having your instincts trained out of you. And so part of this advice for checking yourself is not just videotaping yourself and knowing what you look like in front of an audience, but it’s also knowing yourself, meaning there may be things that you really like. And again, I always tell you that you are the expert in your case. So there may be things that you want to keep in even if other people have said they don’t like it. Check yourself. If you do, then you get to keep it in. The end. Guess what? There’s nobody out there that’s going to come and say, “Hold on, you’re breaking some rule.” If you feel strongly about leaving it in or not putting something in that somebody thinks you should put in, that’s good enough for me. Honestly, it just is.

Number three of incorporating feedback, check the cost. Meaning, do you want to change that thing about you? Maybe there’s a particular way that you speak. For example, I’ve had people come through that have accents and they’ve said to me, “Sari, do you think I should really work with someone to lose the accent?” And my question to them is, “Do you? Do you want to lose the accent?” And they’re like, “Well, I want to do whatever will win me cases or whatever.” And I’ll say, “I think your accent makes you, you. I wouldn’t want to change that about you.” And so there’s times where you’ll get feedback where it’s something you’re not willing to change. And again, I support you in that. What’s the cost? If you’re erasing parts of yourself that make you, you, then it’s not worth it. No matter how much feedback you get on that.

I would rather that you go through this life getting some bad feedback here and there about one thing. Because here’s the thing is there’s people who got a… And I’ll tell you this because I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years. No, over 20 years, if you include my non-lawyer years of working with speakers.

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Sean

My biggest takeaway is that I now have a new approach as to how I’m going to enter the courtroom. It’s a new energy, a new spirit, and it really gets me excited because that’s actually the more fun part of what we do, and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of everything that I learned here.

Sari de la Motte

Now, seats are limited. These are small group, high impact courtroom sessions, not an auditorium full of board attorneys and dull lectures. If you want to change the way you go to trial and turn your practice into progress, visit sariswears.com/masterclass. That’s sariswears.com/masterclass.

There are people that come and say, “This is a problem and I want you to help me fix it.” Whatever it may be. It could be an accent. It could be a way that they gesture. It could be, I don’t know, something about their presentation skills. And it sounds very serious when they’re talking about it. “This is a problem.” I say, “Well, how do you know this is a problem?” They said, “Because one person said one time.” Or maybe it’s even two people. And I’m like, “That is not a random sample.” But we get that one person in our head and then we spend the rest of our time developing ourselves as presenters and that one voice is in our head that they didn’t like the fact that I X, whatever X may be.

And so my question is, check the cost. So much of what we do here at H2H is helping you learn to love yourself. Do you love that thing about you? Then fucking keep it. Fuck the people who are telling you that they don’t like it, because unless you’re coming to me and you’re saying, “99 out of 100 people of every audience that I speak to hate this one thing.” I’m telling you in most cases it’s like, one person, maybe two have brought it up and you have now determined that that is an issue. Check the cost. Is it something you love about yourself? Then don’t fucking change it.

And number four, check the context. The verdict is not the feedback that you think it is. I don’t really want to play with this one for a minute. Meaning when you receive a defense verdict, most of you will take that as feedback and translate it as follows. One, “I suck as a trial lawyer.” Two, “I did something wrong.” Three… Well, those are really the two main ones. “I suck as a trial lawyer.” And, “I did something wrong.” Oh, maybe three would be, “I didn’t prepare enough.” Maybe those are the three that come up a lot. Maybe four is, “I should have never taken it to trial.” Here, look at me. I keep going with the things that I’ve heard. So, “I suck. I should never have even been a trial lawyer. I did something wrong. I should have prepared more. I should have never taken it to trial.” There’s four for you right there.

The verdict rarely, if ever, means those four things. Listen, it is so difficult to get a plaintiff’s verdict. Hear me and hear me well. It is so difficult to receive a verdict for the plaintiff. Why? Well, there’s all kinds of reasons why. One, defensive attribution. Jurors, when they’re hearing a story about the plaintiff and what happened and most of your cases is horrific, they immediately go and think they’re the smartest people in the world and they would’ve never put themselves in the situation that the plaintiff was in. Nevermind, the plaintiff did nothing wrong. It’s the way our brains work. Our brains are wired to keep us alive. Defensive attribution is a real thing. It is a real, true thing and it fucks us a lot of the times. There’s things that we’re doing to help with it, but sometimes it can’t be overcome. It just can’t. It doesn’t mean you’re not a good lawyer. It doesn’t mean that you did something wrong. It doesn’t mean you should have never tried the case. It doesn’t mean whatever the fourth one is, now I forgot what I meant.

It just means it’s a thing and it’s tough to overcome. Two, you know better than most that half the shit that should come in that jurors should hear about, they never get to hear about. They don’t get the full picture. That’s just the way the justice system works. They do not get to hear everything they probably should hear and had they heard, would have decided for you. Judges, take on judges for a minute. There’s lots of great judges, okay? But there’s a lot, for every great judge, there’s two shitty ones. Come on now. Many judges have never even tried a case. I just recently with a couple of my Masterminds had the most crazy ass rulings that I have ever heard of in my lifetime that will absolutely get overturned on appeal, which yay, I guess, but it’s so fucking hard after you put four weeks into a trial to have a ruling come down like that.

It’s just bollocks for whatever the judge’s reason. Judges are people too. They’re afraid, they’re having a bad day, whatever, but they have power over this that’s completely out of our hands. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad lawyer, you should never have tried the case, or that you did something wrong, or that you didn’t prepare enough. That was the other one, you didn’t prepare enough. It doesn’t mean, a verdict does not absolutely mean those things. And in fact, it rarely means those things. I can’t tell you how many times I have had Mastermind clients even come to me with a defense verdict and say, “Sari, I tried the shit out of that case. There is not a thing I would’ve done differently. I mean, I looked at it honestly. I’ve had time to think about it. I wouldn’t have tried it any differently.” And I believe them because I worked the case up with them and I believe they tried it absolutely, not perfectly, but damn near, and still they got a defense verdict for one of the many reasons.

And sometimes we don’t even know the reason. In fact, sometimes when we go in and we ask jurors why they made the decision that they made, there’s so much research out there that most people can’t even tell you why they made the decision that they made. They’ll give you an answer, but it doesn’t even really translate to the actual real answer. We’re terrible as humans of telling people why we’ve made the decision that we’ve made. There’s so many things going on underneath the surface that we don’t even have access to that influence our decision making that when we even try to tell someone why we made the decision that we made, we’re not even being truthful. Not that we’re lying, it’s that we don’t have access to all the reasons why we made the decision we made in the first place. So check the context.

You are the ultimate feedback giver for yourself, and this is where my Masterminds are, and this is why I’m so proud of them, is because they are at the place now where they can come honestly and say, “I did everything the way I thought I should do it and would do it again, and I still got a defense verdict.” And do you know how freeing that is for them? They have truly learned the reason or the lesson, I guess I should say, that I’m always telling you why you should separate your job from the verdict because they’re two totally separate things. And on the days that they come together and it works out, oh my gosh, it’s a beautiful thing. But your job is not to win cases. Your job is to stand up for people. That’s the job. And if you get a verdict and it’s not one that you like and you stop taking cases to trial, you’re not doing your job.

Again, not every trial or case should be tried, but a lot of them should be, and you have to divorce the feedback in terms of the verdict. The verdict is not feedback. Let me say that again. The verdict is not feedback. The verdict is about the jurors and what they saw over trial in terms of evidence, in terms of you, in terms of opposing counsel, in terms of the things that the judge ruled, in terms of all the things they walked in the courtroom with and from the day they were born. The verdict is not feedback. It is a result made up of millions of tiny things that most of us don’t even have access to to explain why it came out the way that it came out. The same can be said of plaintiff verdicts. Y’all, we win cases we should have lost and we lose cases we should have won.

The verdict is not feedback. So how do you incorporate feedback? Check the source. Where’s it coming from? Is it just one person? Is it a Craigslist juror? I mean, come on now. Is it some colleague of yours that never even tries cases? Okay, that’s not a good source. Check yourself. Do you know how you appear in front of an audience? Do you know what you look like? Do you know? Or can you have your own back and go, “Hey, I understand you don’t like it and I can maybe tweak it so it comes out a little different, but I’m keeping it in because I believe this is important.” Check the cost. Maybe a lot of people have said they don’t like X about you, but you like X about you, so you’re going to keep it because it’s too much of a cost to let it go.

And check the context. The verdict isn’t feedback. Mock jurors, sure. Colleagues, sure. Watching a video of yourself and giving yourself feedback, sure. From a presentation coach, sure. The verdict is not one of those contexts. It’s not feedback. It just isn’t because there are tons of things that happen under the surface that are not incredibly helpful for you at that point. Most of the feedback that’s going to be great for you is going to be before you get the verdict, because again, the verdict, that’s not your job. That’s about the jurors. Well, I hope this helps. Stop throwing your shoes away and learn how to incorporate feedback so that you don’t freak out every time someone has a negative thing to say about your presentation. I love you. Talk soon.

MUSIC

Stay in my lane.

Da, da, da, da, da.

Stay in my lane.

Da, da, da, da, da.

I’m in the front seat.

I run the show.

When I accelerate.

I’m so loud.

And I don’t.

Stay in my lane.

And I don’t.

Stay in my lane.