on

my raft, thinking about how many people I'd really served as a trial lawyer.

And I could only count five people that I felt that I'd really helped as a trial lawyer over 20 plus years.

And I said, I just can't do this anymore.

So when I came back and was driving down out of the mountains to my office, I heard a new public service announcement for a master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies.

and I enrolled.

And for three years, I was a full-time master's degree student, a three-quarters-time law professor, and a full-time trial lawyer.

I know it would be easy to say it's right for everybody, but I don't actually buy that.

... okay

So two years later, after that, after that mediation, the science finally ke- caught up to what I had observed in a, a brain scanning study came out of n- Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCL A, and I learned that the, what I had discovered is called affect labeling, A-F-F-E-C-T labeling, basically naming what somebody feels.

And what the brain scanning study showed was that when you name emotions, the centers of the brain associated with negative emotion deactivate.

They calm down.

And at the same time, the part of the brain responsible for self-regulation, the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, activates, and you literally help somebody regulate themselves out of emotion, out of anger, into calm in about 90 to 120 seconds.

And so I started teaching this, and, and, uh, I was getting a lot of pushback.

What do you mean name emotions? That'll never work.

Right