Advice & Wisdom with Doug Noll 2-16-15

Welcome to the Advice and Wisdom webinars. My name is Doug Noll, and I want to just talk for a minute or two and tell you what this is all about, because this is really more— as much for you as it is for me. My wife and I were talking some months ago about the fact that in today's society and culture, it's very difficult to find people who are trusted advisors, people who you can get to get information from that is straight and honest and based on common sense. And it's just very difficult, it seems, for some people to find places where they can go to get answers to questions that they might have about life or money or relationships or work and just talk to, get some answers from somebody who might have a little bit of experience. So we thought that it might be kind of fun to put together a free webinar series that would provide that service to people. And because of the leverage of the internet, we can reach as many people on the planet as have connections to the internet and who might be interested in getting some advice and wisdom. So that's how this all originated. And since I'm a kind of a do-it-yourself guy, I built the website which you're on right now, Advice and Wisdom. I'd really be interested in your what you think about the website. It's not quite finished out. There's still some little things that have got to be taken care of, and I've got a few little glitches here and there, but that's the way it is when you're a do-it-yourselfer on the internet. But overall, I would be very interested in your comments, and you can— I'm gonna put my email address up here right now so you can email me with— not right now, of course, but later you can email me and tell me what you think about all this and tell me what you think about this idea and whether or not you enjoyed and learned something from the webinar tonight. So the way this is going to work is that really what I want to do is answer questions. So if you have a question about just about anything— there are a few limitations— but just about anything, type it in the box below and I will answer it. Now normally I have an option of using a chat room, but because chat rooms tend to be public, I have another system in place where all of the information that you send to me is completely confidential and nobody else will see the question that you ask or that's originating from you. And what I'm going to do is try to take the questions as they come in and answer them as best I can with the knowledge I have. And if I don't know the answer to the question, then I'll tell you that I don't know, and I'll also tell you how I would go about finding the answer. Now the one limitation that I have to be careful about is that I can't give you legal advice. I'm a lawyer active in the California State Bar. I don't practice law anymore. I haven't practiced law since 2000. My professional practice is as a problem solver, a mediator, arbitrator, and also a teacher and a trainer and professor. So I have, because of my ethical responsibilities as a lawyer, I have to be very careful that I don't give legal advice and inadvertently create an attorney-client privilege. So, if I may talk generally about the law, but I'm not going to give any specific advice or answers to specific legal questions. What I'll probably do is tell you to find a lawyer, and I can give you lots of information on how to find lawyers if that's what you're interested in, the kind of lawyer that would help you. But I'm really interested in helping you find answers and get guidance to the kinds of perplexing problems that seem to be in existence in our lives. Like, what do I do with my elderly parents who are getting older, can't take care of themselves quite yet, they're not quite ready for home, but they're pretty stubborn, you know, they're not listening to me. What do I do about that? What do I do, you know, with a work situation that's not happy? What do I— if I've got a conflict in my life if you got a conflict in your life, how do you manage that conflict in a way that makes sense? Or just about any other kind of life question that you might have. How to buy a car? These days buying a car is a very different proposition than it was even 10 years ago. So how do you go about doing that to protect yourself from the car dealer? Or how do you go about buying or selling a house? Thinking about insurance or thinking about credit relationships. Any of these kinds of questions are fair game, and I'm happy to give you the benefit of almost 40 years as a lawyer and almost 65 years as a human being and give you the best advice and wisdom that I can. So that's what this is all about, and I'm hopeful that as we build these webinars, we'll post these webinars online on the— here on the website as archives. Of course they'll be free. We might even put snippets of good questions and answers up on YouTube. But as people become interested in this and if the audience grows and if you and friends of yours like what you are seeing here and find this to be educational and I hope a little bit entertaining, that we'll find more specific in-depth topics that I can go into and I actually do some homework and study stuff and then we'll set up another webinar time. It will be an advice and wisdom webinar but it will be at a, maybe at a different time, a different evening that will cover a topic that it seems like a lot of you are really interested in and go into it fairly deeply. And I'll charge for those, probably $20 to go in very deeply into a topic that might be of interest to you. So that's what this is all about. I can tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a Californian by birth and grew up in Southern California. I grew up in a family of affluence and some privilege, and then went— and that, of course, with some hard work in high school, got me into Dartmouth College where I did my undergraduate work. And I graduated in 1973. In those days, if you were an English literature major like I was and didn't want to become a doctor and didn't know what you wanted to do, you went to law school. So that's exactly what I did. I took a year off and I ended up going to law school at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California, and was there for 3 years. I did well. I was on the law review, graduated with honors, And in those days, if you were a good law student and graduated with honors and was on Law Review, your first job out of law school was normally to be working for a judge. And so I applied, they're called clerkships, and I applied for a number of clerkships around the state. And I got offers from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Central California, Fresno of all places. And I really didn't want to go back to LA. And I really didn't want to go to San Francisco, so I ended up deciding to take a job in Central California. And I worked for a judge for a year. He was a brilliant man. I learned a huge amount from him. And then since it turned out that I liked Fresno, and I, for a whole bunch of different reasons, but mostly because it's very close to the mountains, which I really love. And I ended up going into private practice in 1978, September of 1978. The firm that hired me groomed me to be a trial lawyer and they weren't kidding around because in November of 1978 I tried my first 3-day jury trial in Madera County, which is just to the north of Fresno County, and my second trial was defending a $36 million securities fraud case in the Southern District of California in San Diego. So I got trained fast as a trial lawyer. And over the next 22 years, that's what I did. Along the way, I took up the martial arts, and I was really lousy at that for a long time, but finally I figured it out and actually started to get pretty good at it. And eventually, by the time I was 41, that would have been 1991, I got my— I was awarded my second degree, black belt, and my Teacher called me in a couple weeks later and sat me down and said, "You're done here. You're too arrogant. You're too violent. You are going to hurt yourself. You're going to hurt somebody else. I am not going to teach you anymore until you master Tai Chi." Well, Tai Chi is the oldest of all martial arts, and it was a death sentence really because you never master Tai Chi. So like a good student, I out and I said, "All right, I will go learn Tai Chi." Well, the interesting thing about Tai Chi is that it's got two paradoxes. The first is the softer you are, the stronger you are. And the second paradox is the more powerful you are— excuse me— the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are. So soft to be strong, vulnerable to be powerful. Well, that didn't click with me too well. Third, secondary black belt, trial lawyer, Didn't compute. But I studied and I practiced, and over, over a period of years, those paradoxes sort of seeped into my soul. Until one day I was standing in the courtroom cross-examining somebody, and the thought came out of the blue, "What the heck am I doing in here?" And after that trial, I went on a river trip, and And I'm getting a question here. Somebody's saying that they have a problem seeing a black screen. Yes, it is— I'm getting a question from Alan. He's saying, "Has the webinar started? It's 8:08 PST." Actually, it is 7:08— it's 7:10 PM, Alan. If you can see me or hear me, refresh your screen and see if it'll come through because we know it is working. Anyways, so hopefully nobody else is having a problem with this either. So anyways, the long and the short of it was that after that river trip, after that trial, I decided that I wasn't going to be a trial lawyer anymore, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I came back to town and it turns out that I learned about— driving down out of the mountains that next morning, Monday morning, I learned about a new that was broadcast on the radio, a public service announcement for a new master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And I thought about that and it kind of resonated with me. And I checked it out and I decided that I would, at that time probably 47 years old, become a full-time master's degree student while maintaining a full trial practice. And at the time I was also an adjunct professor of law, but I had a 5-unit course, so I was basically half-time as a professor. And so that's what I did. I became a peacemaker and, uh, ended up leaving the practice of law, um, in 2000. And, uh, that's another story that I'll share for another day, how I left the practice. But on November 1st, 2000, without any planning, without any stress, I violated every rule that I'd given to every client for the last 22 years about planning and thinking But as a result of a dispute that was in my— between myself and the managing partner of my law firm, who was my peer, who just did not like the idea of me becoming a peacemaker, I left the practice with one week's notice, leaving a bunch of money in the law firm and deciding that I'm going to take a different path. And that was an act of It's an act of, I guess, courage on my part in faith, and my life has never been the same since. I started mediating cases, I started writing books, and I have had enormously incredible opportunities over the last 15 years, 14 and a half years, I guess 15 years now, to work with amazing people, work with people in deep conflict, help people solve really deep and intractable problems. I've had some great successes. I've of course had my share of stuff that isn't so successful either. But probably the best and most powerful project that has come through so far is Prison of Peace, which is probably part of the reason why I got into this project. The Advice and Webinar Project. So in 2009, a colleague of mine down in Los Angeles, Laurel Kaufer, got a letter from an inmate serving a life sentence without possibility of parole at the largest, most violent women's prison in the world, which was Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California, which is about an hour and a half north of where I live. And she was asking if Laurel would be willing to come in as a mediator and train the life inmates, the women who are life inmates, in mediation and peacemaking so that they could teach the women in the prison how to be less violent. When Laurel got that letter, she immediately flipped her phone open and called me from her mailbox and said, read the letter to me and said, "What do you think?" And I said, "I think we ought to do this." And so that's how the journey began. So we started training our first 17 women in March of 2000, 2010. And today we are in 3 prisons. We're in the— and in the LA County Jail. We're in the 2 California women's prisons, uh, California— Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, and we are also in the California Institute for Women in— down in Chino, California. We are also in a men's prison, Valley State Prison, which is the old women's prison in Chowchilla, and we are in the women's facility of LA County Jail. We have trained over, by now, we have trained over 200, close to 250 peacemakers and mediators ourselves, and we have a cadre of approximately 30 inmates spread out through these prisons who are also trainers themselves. We have certified them as trainers, and they are training other inmates to be peacemakers and mediators within the prison. In fact, we start tomorrow night, we're going into the women's prison And Wednesday we start Train the Trainer training in the men's prison. And that Train the Trainer training takes about a year. It'll take us about a year to get them fully trained up. But the thing about that that's so amazing is that inmate after inmate after inmate has come up to me over the years and said, "If I only had some of the knowledge that you're giving to me now 20 years ago." I wouldn't be in prison today. And so that's what really got me going. And finally, it dawned on me that the stuff that we're teaching these inmates is stuff that really needs to get out. And that led me to conducting a workshop this last spring, which we videotaped and turned into the It's Pure Magic series, which is deep empathic listening. It's just part of the part of the foundational training that we give the inmates to turn them into peacemakers. And Advice and Webinar followed from that because we said, you know, we've learned a lot teaching people how to solve deep and intractable problems. We've learned a lot teaching people how to avoid violence, make better choices in really tough places like maximum security prisons. Maybe there are people out there. So maybe there are people out there who are really interested in getting some advice and learning from the experiences that I've had working in deep and intractable conflicts, working in prisons, teaching, training, writing, and thinking about life and how do we solve life problems. So that's kind of what my background is. We're doing this for free because I think knowledge should be free. And for me, other than the time invested in getting the website set up and getting this whole system set up, which is really more my time than out-of-pocket cost, it's really not a big deal for me to spend an hour chatting with you and sharing with you whatever insights I can have for questions. So if you have any questions that you'd like to ask that you might not want to ask anybody else, it's private. I mean, I won't identify who you are, unless you want me to, but I am happy to take on any questions and give you whatever wisdom I have Like I said, the only constraint that I have is that I can't give legal advice. I won't give legal advice because of my ethical constraints as a lawyer in California. But other than that, you may have a question that's been bugging you about life that you've always wanted to ask somebody and haven't had a trusted advisor, somebody who could be neutral and impartial and tell you the truth. So I invite you to I invite you to find that box there on the screen and type in a question and tell me what's on your mind. This is an interactive process. I'm not here to lecture. I'm not here to pontificate. I'm here to really share my knowledge as best I can with you in a way that is meaningful for you. And that is what gives me great joy in life—serving others. So any questions yet? I'm looking here, seeing— I don't see anything so far. So anyways, if anybody's having any technical problems with the image or with their computer, you might— you can— that box, you can not only ask questions, you can also pop in a comment or question or a statement and say that you've got technical problems. We are— this is a new system, so we're still working on— we don't think we've got any bugs, but, you know, they always pop up. So if you are having an issue either with the audio or the video, you can just put a comment in the box there where it says "ask a question." That'll come up to me just as well as a question, and I can keep track of what's going on. So, I feel like a law professor when I'm asking my students for questions where I say, "Who wants to go first?" and I get dead silence on the end. So surely you are here because you have something that would be interesting to you. So, Ah, so the question that we got is— so here's the first question of the evening. Great. Um, all right, I've got two great questions here. The first one is, um, let me start with the— this question first, and then I'll take the next one. So the question is, how does someone who has never done peace work before start to become a beacon of peace? Boy, that's a great question. So there— the answer to that is on a whole bunch of different levels. The first, you don't necessarily To become a beacon of peace, or to become a person who is really interested in peace, you have to understand a couple of things. First of all, there is never going to be an absence of human conflict. Human conflict is all around us. It's always going to be here. It would be a really boring planet to live on if we didn't have human conflict. It's conflict that makes us change. It's conflict that makes us test our values. It's conflict that makes us grow. The difference is So it's not about being peaceful as much as it is how do we approach conflict. And the question is, do we approach it constructively and use conflict as an energy to grow and develop, or do we get reactive about conflict and become destructive? So the idea, of course, is that if you want to become a beacon of peace, is to start looking at everything around your life from the constructive, positive side. So the first thing that you want to do is, of course, start working on yourself. And so what are some of the things that you can do? You can start working on emotional intelligence, and that's what the It's Pure Magic workshop is all about. I don't want to shamelessly self-promote too much, but it's puremagic.com. I'll put that up in a minute. Teaches you a foundational skill of how to actually listen to somebody who's angry or emotional and how to de-escalate them in 90 seconds or less. So you want to learn skills like that. So that when people confront you and you're in emotional situations, you don't lose control. You're able to stay centered, you maintain your equilibrium, your equanimity, and no matter what anybody says, they're not going to throw you off balance. And that's what deep empathic listening skills teach you. If you get through— and that's what we teach the inmates, that's the first skill we teach them. In fact, we spend a month teaching that skill before we teach them anything else. Once you've got that skill down, Then if you want to go on, there's all kinds of training opportunities both online and usually in most communities where you can learn some basic mediation skills. And whether you go to a restorative justice victim-offender reconciliation program that many, many counties have or you do community mediation, those are great places to go. Get basically 40 hours of mediation training and then that will teach you the basic skills. And then you start practicing. You just start practicing this stuff. And you don't try to solve every conflict, and there's some conflicts and some problems that you'll never be able to solve. But it is amazing how with a good set of tools and your desire to serve others that you really can become a beacon for peace with just a little bit of effort and a little bit of a mind shift. And of course my thinking is that it doesn't take many people to really shift a lot. We learned in the prisons that if we could get 10 or 15 really committed inmates to doing the work, it would shift the entire prison. And that's exactly what's happened in every prison we've been in. So it doesn't take many people in a community to become a beacon of peace. Somebody else asked me, has put in a question, "How do you have a conversation with someone when you disagree?" So, It depends on how extreme the disagreement is. I get into arguments with my mother politically, and I should know better. I should really know better. But you know, around Thanksgiving or Christmas, you have too many glasses of wine, and you know, I make the mistake like everybody does of getting into topics around politics that just is not going to work for my mother. So So first of all, if the relationship is important, perhaps what you have to do is just agree to disagree and stay away from those topics that cause a lot of upset. If it is somebody where the disagreement is important and you have to work on it, there are a couple of ways of dealing with it. Let me tell you a story that illustrates one approach to this. A friend of mine, Dave Joseph, in Massachusetts, tells a story of many years ago of when— many people will remember that the pro-life peop— there was a radical element of the pro-life movement that was going around bombing clinics and killing doctors and that sort of thing. And the word had come out through the grapevine that they were going to come into Boston and blow up the clinics in Boston. And so Dave, as part of his group, the Public Conversations Contract— uh, Public Conversations Group— brought together a group of pro-life and pro-choice women and sat them around the table. And he basically asked one question. He said, um, what is it that happened in your life that caused you to form the beliefs that you have today? And every woman around the table had an opportunity to speak about What was it that caused her to believe the way she did? And when they got all the way around the circle, Dave made this observation. He said, "You know, there is one— you all have very strong, deeply held beliefs, and obviously they're very divergent, but there is one value that you all hold sacred. Do you know what that value is?" And they were totally blown away that they could agree on anything. And he said, "No, no, really, you have one value. Every single one of you holds this value as absolutely sacred." And they looked at him quizzically, and finally they couldn't say anything else. Isaac couldn't stand the silence, and he said, "You all value the sanctity of life. Now, how you define life, and what life is and what it isn't, is obviously a matter of bitter contention between you, but you all value the sanctity of life. How does that inform you in how you want to respond to the possibility that terrorists will be coming into Boston to blow up clinics? And so they had a really robust discussion around that, and they unanimously agreed that no matter what their sharp differences were around the pro-life, pro-choice issues, uh, that they were absolutely adamant that they did not want violence in Boston. And so the word got out to the, basically, the terrorists: don't come here. And they never had any problems. And I learned from that lesson when Dave told me that story one night. I learned from that lesson that when you have sharp disagreements with somebody, one of the things that you can do if you're not too emotional and you're not too escalated is you can try to find out if there are any underlying values that you can both agree on. And sometimes it takes a little bit of probing to do that, but you can ask people, why is it that— what is it in your life that causes you to believe the way that you do? What is it in your life that has caused you to come to this? And if you share those stories, sometimes you can find some common ground that you otherwise would not have found. So that's one way you can deal with a disagreement. The other way you can deal with a disagreement is to think of it as the disagreements sometimes are what we call positional statements. So a position is nothing more than a solution to a problem that is trying to be solved. So let me give you an example. In the context of the law, you have a party who's been injured, we call them a plaintiff. You have a party who may have caused the injury, who's claimed to have caused the injury, call that person or party the defendant. And the plaintiff makes a demand on the defendant, "Pay me $10,000 for my injury." And the defendant says, "You are crazy. Your case is worth maybe $1 dripping wet." So now we have two positions, a plaintiff's demand for $10,000 versus the defendant's counteroffer of $1. Now you would think, how would you ever— you can negotiate that. They can compromise, and for all kinds of reasons other than money, they will compromise and come to a solution. But if you're dealing with something that's not money and it's more difficult than that, then you look at that as being a position because the $10,000 is a solution to a problem and the $1 is a solution to a problem. What I'm really interested in and where you are seeking to find agreement is to say, if you got everything that you wanted, if you were absolutely right in all of your arguments, if every single thing you said was absolutely accepted by the whole world, what would be all the good things that would happen to you in your life? And you write those things down. What are they? Oh, I'm going to be happy. I'm going to have more money. I'm going to have security. My wife's going to love me. My dog's going to lick my face. Whatever it might be. You write down all the things that if your argument is, or your point of contention is accepted, what are all the good things that are going to happen to you? And then you do the same for yourself. If my points are taken, what are all the good things that are going to happen to me? And if you look at that list and put them together, that tells you what the real problem is. Because the disagreement is almost always about something that's fairly superficial, and underneath there are unmet needs. That haven't been identified that need to be satisfied. And if you can find a way to satisfy those needs, then oftentimes you can get through your disagreement. And in fact, that's exactly the process that I use in a little bit more of a sophisticated version, but essentially that's the process I use in deep intractable conflicts like family business conflicts or estate conflicts, conflicts where relationships are important but people are in very sharp disagreement. We, um, We work on trying to find out what are the underlying interests, needs, goals, and desires that are underneath the disagreements, underneath the polarization that people are expressing that have got them maybe into a lawsuit or gotten them into an estranged relationship or gotten them really upset and angry with each other. What's underneath all of that that needs to be satisfied for these people to say, "Yes, we can have peace." And then once you've identified all of that, then you move into a problem-solving process to say, "Okay, so how do we satisfy all of these needs?" And the thing that's most remarkable about this process is that in the beginning people see themselves as being highly polarized. And there's no possibility of anybody making— reaching agreement without a huge concession, which nobody wants to make. And yet when they start looking at satisfying their needs, they find all kinds of interesting ways of satisfying their needs that does not require them to compromise their positions. And in these kinds of situations, I tell people, if you're compromising, you're making a big mistake. Work on identifying and satisfying your needs and the other side's needs, and you will get what you need. And the art is in learning how to do that. And a quick story. Many years ago, I had a mediation. I had 4 siblings who were fighting over a house. They were African Americans, and they were fighting over a house that they had all grown up in, that their parents had had. And it was really kind of a dumpy little place, probably not even worth $40,000, you know, on the market. But they had gotten into a big lawsuit with each other about what's going to happen to this house, and they'd spent far more money with their lawyers than the house was worth. So I took them through this process of identifying what their interests were, and at the end of the day, what they— what resonated with them was doing a memorial for their parents at the church that they had all grown up with. And so the decision they made was to donate the house to the church, have the church sell the house for whatever it could get, and take that money and use it to improve the church and build a memorial in the church for their parents. And that's what happened, and that's how they solved the conflict. They would have— they had never thought of the idea of that they all wanted to memorialize their parents and the time they'd spent in that church together. And when they finally figured that out, they completely reconciled. And I mean, there's a lot of crying and hugging and stuff like that that happens when you have these successful reconciliations. And they found the solution, and it wasn't at all about, you know, who's going to get the money of the house, or it was about underlying needs that could be met that would allow them to get past the conflict. So those are some ideas about how to disagree. When I find people who are disagreeing with me, I'm always You're gonna go dig a little deeper. Now, if the disagreement is really sharp and there's a lot of emotion, then my job is to de-escalate them before, because here's another important rule, especially as it relates to disagreements. You cannot solve an emotional problem with logic alone. If you're facing somebody who's really upset, really angry, very emotional, you are not going to be able to persuade them or talk them off the rooftop. Not with logic, not with advice, not with emotional invalidation. Emotional invalidation are those statements where we diminish somebody or we say, "Oh, get over it, it's not that big a deal." None of that works. The only thing that works is to deeply listen to somebody, listen to their emotions, not to their words, and reflect back their emotional experience. That works. And once you have de-escalated somebody, then they're in a position to solve the problem. And the way you confront that problem is by saying, "All right, I'm here to solve problems. What do we really need to do here?" And ask people, you know, "If you got your way, what would be all the good things that would happen to you?" And start the discussion that way and try to move into problem-solving mode. Now there are going to be those people, of course, who absolutely refuse to— they like being stubborn, they like being angry, and there's nothing you can do with them, so you just have to make the decision, "Do I have to have this person in my life or not?" and try to figure out a way to coexist with them if you have to have them. So that's how we deal with disagreements. I got another question up here, let's see. Okay. I've been asked to teach an hour class at a trade convention, so— and I've got a little bit of knowledge about the topic, but I'm not a big talker and I have no idea how to do this. Also, speaking in front of people makes me very nervous. Any advice? Yeah. Okay. So first, the first thing to do is to become an absolute expert world-class expert in the topic, which means you have to spend a lot of time reading and preparing. Whenever I teach something, I'm gonna generally only teach about 1% of what I really know, and because I have so much confidence in my knowledge base that anybody can ask me a question and I'm able to pull out of my knowledge an answer that's gonna make sense. One of the things that I learned as a trial lawyer many years ago was to prepare, prepare, prepare, and prepare. And I even prepared for— I even had— I always ask myself the question when I was preparing for trial: what do I do if something happens that was completely unexpected, that I had no clue that this was going to happen? What do I do with the unexpected surprise that I'm not prepared for? What am I going to do in that situation? So I even had Plan Bs for when I was totally surprised. And of course With that thorough preparation, I was never surprised. But here's the thing that's interesting. Even if you're really well prepared, if you don't practice and talk to people, practice and rehearse, having all the knowledge in the world won't work. And I'll give you a perfect example. I'm here in this webinar. I got 100 people or so watching, and tomorrow I'm giving a talk at 7:30 in the morning to another 50 people, and I'm going to the prison on Wednesday all day talking to another 30 people, and you know, I could be talking to 1,000 people. It really doesn't matter to me. I can get up and talk about what I know and what I'm passionate about, and I can be very good at it. But I'm also studying jazz violin, and the one thing that I cannot do, and I know I can't do, is get up on a stage right now and take my violin and blow everybody away with how great a jazz violin player I am. I probably would freeze. In fact, I know I would freeze because I freeze in front of my teacher. And here is, you know, here's the great Doug Noll, who's this confident guy who can do all kinds of stuff, and you put a— ask him to perform in front of somebody with a jazz violin, with his violin, and he becomes a shaking, mumbling, crazy guy who can't do anything. And that's the kind of fear, the anxiety and the fear of failure and the fear of looking stupid that we all have to overcome. And the way that I'm approaching the violin is the same way that I've approached my work as a trial lawyer and my work in public speaking, and that is to become so thoroughly conversant in the instrument and to have it so deeply patterned into me that I can play anything to anybody at any time and not worry about the fact that I'll make a mistake, because I know I won't, because I'm so good. And I know that I'm just not there yet, and with the violin it takes hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice to not only technically master the instrument but also to take all of the rules of jazz, of which there are hundreds if not thousands, and totally put them into my soul so that I don't have to think about it. And that's just— there's no simple solution to that except for hardcore work, hour after hour after hour preparation. So what I suggest is that if you're going to teach an hour class, first of all Spend as much time as you can becoming an absolute world expert. Then outline your talk. You might even PowerPoint it, although— and don't PowerPoint it by putting your talk up in words. Go to the— Google "the Zen of PowerPoint" and there's a great— couple of great books and a guy who does a great blog on how to really do PowerPoints effectively. And do a Zen kind of PowerPoint and then just start practicing the PowerPoint over and over again. Try to find some colleagues who will listen to you, watch you. The talk I'm giving tomorrow I rehearsed last Thursday. In front of colleagues to make sure that I had all the elements in. So there is no substitute for rehearsal, and then just get up and do it, and you'll have a ball. So that's how I do it. Um, there's no way to overcome performance anxiety except to be so thoroughly prepared that anxiety is not an issue. You're a master of the universe when you walk out on that stage, and that only comes with absolute total concentration and preparation ahead of time. It doesn't happen magically. When you watch these people get up on a stage and talk effortlessly, or you watch a great musician get up, if it looks like they're breathing, they are breathing, because to them it's as natural as can be. The people who struggle are the people who have not quite gotten to that level of mastery. And the only negative of all this is that— is how you would find the time to practice and really get the mastery and get the experience. So that's probably how I would deal with it and how I would recommend that you go about overcoming your stage fright. But I really commend you for doing that, and I think once you've done it a couple of times and you've gotten some great feedback, it becomes so self-reinforcing. There's nothing more fun than getting up in front of a group of people and giving a talk and having people come up at the end and say, "That was magnificent. That was really great. Best talk I've ever heard." I mean, that is really gratifying and satisfying when that happens. So go out and go for it and grab it. Okay, let's see, we've got another question here. Let me check this one out. This is kind of a— let's see— okay, P-circle groups. Okay, so this is really cool. This is actually— I'm not going to go through this whole question, but the gist of the question is, how do we go about bringing people together, especially around Black History Month? And we've had a very difficult winter and with Ferguson and New York City and, you know, all these issues with that keep arising between police and the Black community and other communities of color. And, you know, it just seems like the issues are not getting resolved. How do we build more solidarity amongst people? What can we do to build more awareness? What can we do to build more sensitivity? I'm going to go back to the Prison Project because that really provides a good answer for all of this. In the Prison Project, what we— and if you go look at prisonofpeace.org, which is the website, you'll see the, the, the ethnicity that we work with. We teach the foundational listening skills, how to be a deep empathic listener. And then the next thing we teach our inmates are peace circles. Peace circles are very simple, elegant, powerful group communication tools. And basically what happens in a peace circle is you gather a group of We like to use about 10 people. They can be 8 to 10. A larger circle is going to take more time than a smaller circle. And we train our inmates to be circle keepers. And what they do is they convene inmates and they ask questions. So, for example, they might— and I'm sure they are asking these questions this month— what is racism? How does racism manifest itself in this prison? And then our last question is always, how, what, what am I going to do next week if I see racism manifest itself around here? What am I going to do? So basically the piece, the circle keeper has a talking stick, which is some object, a ritualistic object, like that can be passed around. And the rule is that you can't speak without the talking stick. There's usually a centerpiece that focuses people on the topic. So in this case, it might be a picture of Martin Luther King, for example. And they start the process of going around the circle. And as the first person to the left speaks, that inmate or a person might have 90 to 120 seconds to just reflect on what is racism, what does it mean, what does it feel like, and how have I experienced it. Then in our process, the inmate will then hand the stick to the next person to the left, who then must summarize back, reflect back, both the core message and the emotions that the original speaker had in speaking. Then as soon as that person has earned his or her turn to speak, then it goes to— the talking stick stays there and she or he reflects for 90 to 120 seconds. And it goes all the way around the circle. And what we have found is that this process, which is really rooted in ancient indigenous cultures, not only here in North America but also around the world, is that it's the only time when people are doing more listening than they are talking. And it's the only time when people feel like they're being deeply heard and that they can talk for a minute and a half or 2 minutes on something that's deeply meaningful to them and really share from their hearts what they're experiencing. It's not difficult to do. It's not difficult to organize. There are all kinds of places where you can learn how to be a circle keeper. I would really suggest, if you're really interested in getting some literature on this, look at Google Kay Pranis. K-A-Y P-R-A-N-I-S. Kay was on my radio show last week or the week before— I do a radio show every Thursday night from 7 to 8 at wsradio.com. For the last 10 years I've been doing the Doug Noll Show, and I give peacemakers around the world a voice that the mainstream media exists. So it was either— it was the week before last, Kay was on my show, and she has devoted her life to peace circles and has written a bunch of beautiful books on how to conduct P-Circles. So if you Google her, Kay Pranis, K-A-Y-P-R-A-N-I-S, or look her up on Amazon, you'll get— you can find her books, and those can give you guidance in the basics of circle keeping. We've added some twists to it in the work that we do in the prisons, which you are free to steal and use for yourself. I think that Starting with a circle, especially if you can get, get a community together of people who may have some divergent views around racism. Some people, some white people for example, might be in denial that racism still exists because the anxiety is too great for them to handle. Some Black or African American people might be really, really angry deep inside because they continue to experience this horrible thing. And there could be people on the continuum of feelings up and down on racism. It would be very interesting to get those people into a circle, whether it's a church group or a school group or a work group, and just have them reflect on some of these questions and share with each other what their perspectives are. It is a really, really powerful, powerful way to build community. And the question here, of course, is, you know, how do you sponsor an activity like this? If you are really interested in getting this started and you need some more resources, feel free to email me at Doug@AdviceandWisdom.com. And if I know where you— what community you live in, I might know people there who I can get you in touch with. There are almost people in every community who are able to do circles, who have some restorative justice background, who might be able to help you as a resource. And even if that's not true, you know, this is something that's so easy you can teach yourself how to do it pretty simply. And after you've done it a couple of times, it becomes really, really, really beautiful and effortless. I'll tell you one quick story about a circle that was reported to us in the women's prison in the early years. There was a woman in the prison who had not spoken to anybody in 20 years. She'd been absolutely silent. And after we trained the women, our people, our inmates, how to be circle keepers and peacemakers, they went out and one woman convened a circle. And this woman who had never said anything came into the circle and sat down in the chair. And the first time around the circle she passed, didn't say anything. And the second time around the circle she talked. And it was the first time anybody had ever heard her say a word in the 20 years that she had been in prison. And she felt that the safety of the circle was so powerful, and the topic was such that she was able to feel finally a place where she could really be heard and opened up. And it changed her life and it changed the lives of everybody else in the circle. So even though circles are very simple, they are one of the most powerful tools of human communication that I've ever come across. And so I strongly encourage you, especially during Black History Month, if you have the opportunity to learn about circles, get into a circle, to work with people in your community in circles around these issues. It would be time well worth spent, and you will find that the circle process is one of the most powerful processes you've ever experienced if you have never been in one before. So I hope that gives you some sense of how we can deal with racism and build community in a very simple peacemaking way. Pretty cool. Okay, any other questions? So, a couple of places to go to check out information. The Prison Project, prisonofpeace.org, O-R-G. That will tell you about the Prison Project, its origins, and the work that we're doing. This is a pro bono project that Laurel and I have been doing, as I said, for the last 5 years. And there may be an opportunity for us to expand into a couple more prisons. Men's prisons this summer. There might be some money available for us, but right now it's totally pro bono, so we can only do the work that we're doing. We would be very interested in talking to people if they would like to start a Prison of Peace project in their state or locality. We would be interested in having a conversation with you about how to do that. We have all the curriculum, all the materials. It's really just a function of getting enough money together to have us come to where you are and teach you how to do it. But I'm always up for a conversation around that. What else can I tell you about that's kind of exciting and fun? The It's Pure Magic workshop, I told you about that online. I do that workshop live too. And the last time I taught it, I think was in November in New Jersey, and I taught it to a bunch of professional mediators. People just loved it. I went— it's amazing, I'll do these workshops and come back years later and maybe teach some other material, and invariably people will come up to me and say, you know that listening stuff you taught? I really didn't think that it was going to work, and I had my back into a corner in a mediation, and I did exactly what you said to do, and it worked. It was pure magic. Like, it was pure magic. Which is how the term "It's Pure Magic" came up. I didn't make that up. That was words that other people have used in describing the technique of how to create a deep empathic connection with another human being so that you can de-escalate them in 90 seconds or less. Here on the adviceandwisdom.com, you'll see a link to that course if you're interested in learning more about that. What else? Ah, is there anybody doing peace work with the gangs in Fresno? Boy, talk about a timely question. Um, yes, there is. There's a group called Fresno Street Saints, and they operate out of the Sunset Community Center down in West Fresno, which is just south of Chandler Airport. And it turns out that I have been working with the Fresno Street Saints, and just last Wednesday we started a conversation about me taking the Prison of Peace material and teaching it to the West Fresno community. And for those of you that don't know about Fresno, it is the poorest congressional district in the United States. We have some of the deepest poverty in the United States, and like other mid-sized cities where there is deep poverty, we have obviously a lot of gang violence. And a lot of problems. But what we are talking about doing is actually going in and teaching people in the West Fresno community, which is the traditional Black community of Fresno, how to do peace circles and how to mediate in exactly the same way that we are teaching, that we taught the inmates. And my thinking is that if I can teach a murderer to be a peacemaker, surely I can teach people who are really interested in the community how to do the same thing. And what I think is going to happen if it goes the way that it's gone in the prisons is that we don't stop the gang violence, but what happens is we create a community of peace where people who are violent are no longer comfortable and they move out. There are going to be people who choose to resolve conflict through violence just because. But they only can operate in a community that allows that to happen. If there is a community of peace where people are peaceful and resolving conflicts peacefully, that is without violence, and constructively, that is a very different energy than an energy that supports violence. And as we have witnessed in prison after prison after we have trained a small number of inmates, usually less than, way less than 1% of the total population, and turn, cut them loose to do their work in the population, there is major, there's been a major reduction in violence in the prison populations. I don't have any reason to believe that when we get this project started in West Fresno that we're not going to see the same thing happen. So yes, there are people who are working with the to stop gang violence, not necessarily with the gangs themselves, although the Fresno Street Saints is working with them, but to build a community of people with the skills to choose how to respond to conflict. Violence is nothing more than a response to conflict, and it's typically because people don't have the tools or the knowledge to know that there are other ways to respond to conflict other than through violence. And if we can teach people these tools and spread it out through the community, then I'm hopeful that we will create a community of peace and make it an uncomfortable place for violence to thrive. And I think that, to me, is going to be the secret. So we'll see. Stay tuned. I'll have more to say on that as the months unfold, if this project takes place. So we've got about 5 minutes left. I got time. I can handle a couple more questions. Let me scroll down here and see what we got. Ah, great question. Let me read this question to you because it's very powerful. Do you find that you have to teach vulnerability in the prison program, or does it come naturally from people once they feel they are deeply heard and are in a safe place? Yes. The answer is it scares the crap out of everybody, and it scared the crap out of me. In the beginning, especially with the women, we learned that as we taught them how to listen, in order to listen to somebody else's emotions you have to learn how to pay attention to your own emotions. And if you've been emotionally shut down your whole life, when you start paying attention to somebody else's emotional experiences and all those emotions start coming up for you, it gets very scary very fast. And in fact, we got a lot of resistance. And here's what we found. We found that if we provided a safe, supportive environment for the inmates to practice the work— this is true for both men and women— As we, as we allow them to practice in a safe environment and they got used to it, they learned that although they, they seem to be vulnerable in the sense that they were not getting defensive either physically or emotionally with somebody who is confronting them, that they were actually— in the Tai Chi paradox, and I teach this paradox— to be vulnerable, they were actually more powerful. And the reason for that is because when you are deeply listening to another human being, you are so ego— you are not ego-involved, and there's nothing there for another person to grab a hold of. And they can say anything they want to say to you, and it's not going to bother you in the least. So what happened was, over a period of time, as they— as the inmates practiced this deep empathic listening, they did become softer, they did become more vulnerable. And then another amazing thing happened. They started calming down themselves because what they reported back to us is some guy would piss me off and I just affect label myself. I said, I'm really pissed off at myself, right? I'm really pissed off. I'm really angry. And the more I affect label myself, the calmer I got. So they were actually able to develop emotional intelligence by learning how first how to connect with somebody empathically and then learning how to deal with themselves empathically so that they could they calm themselves down. And that is what the inmates experienced, and over a much longer period of time, that's exactly how I learned how to be more vulnerable. It didn't come easy, and it didn't come fast, but it did come. So I think the key to learning emotional intelligence is learning this empathic form of communication, of learning how to listen to another person's emotions in a deep way to teach you the skills of how to do that for yourself. Very, very powerful stuff. And my life is transformed as a result of it. And I've seen the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of other inmates transformed as a result of this too. And now school teachers. I'm teaching this in the Fresno schools. I'm working in 3 middle— 2 middle schools and a high school teaching the teachers how to de-escalate an angry student in 90 seconds or less. And it's working there just exactly the same way that it's worked in the prisons. No surprise. So it's really, really powerful stuff. Really cool stuff. Okay, so we are coming up on 2 minutes. I think that I can take, maybe take one more quick question. I'm really interested in your feedback, and so please email me at Doug@adviceandwisdom.com. I think the email is up there on the screen still. I'm really interested in whether or not this is something that we should We want to turn it into a series and do it every 3 weeks or so. I'm really interested in what resonates with you. Is this something that's really useful for you? Are there other people you know who might be interested in a little bit of advice and wisdom about life? Is this something that we should continue to put effort into? I welcome your emails and comments. We will take this video and it will be posted on the website probably in the next couple of days. It will be free for anybody who wants to register and view it. And I'm hopeful that if there's sufficient interest over the months ahead, that we will build an archive of videos, and I will sort of catalog on each webinar sort of the basic questions that were asked and what we talked about so that people can kind of scan through the videos and see what interests them and what doesn't. And I hope in that way to provide a little bit more solace and soothing and safety and wisdom and knowledge to people in life to help them navigate their lives in a more graceful, peaceful, gentle way. And I think we have come to the end of my time, and thank you so much for being here, and I hope to see you next time.