How much will it cost you to retire? If the first number that popped into your head was a million, then consider this: Click Here

We All See The World A Little Different

How you think of the world can be mutually exclusive from reality.  Your mental glasses create individual meaning in “what” you see in your life.  Your mental lens will color what you see, and at times distorts facts.

Let’s apply the above mentioned premise to a well known story. In the “Shawshank Redemption”, the narrator is Morgan Freeman’s character. He tells the story from his own point of view as a lifetime prison inmate.  If, on the other hand, the story was told from the viewpoint of the Warden, then narrative would be significantly different.  The corrupt warden may have seen his actions as just under the circumstances.  He probably believed he was a moral person dispute the his immoral actions.  His world view certainly distorted the facts.  His world view put a “subjective gift wrapping paper” on the elements of a story.

In a DUI trial, you usually have several characters and objects. There are police officers, the person arrested for DUI, the person who analyzed the blood, and the blood testing machine. The narrative can be told from the different characters in the story. If you ask the person arrested for DUI to tell you what happened, his narrative will sound very different from the narrative told by the arresting officer. How would the narrative sound if you told it from the viewpoint of the blood testing machine?

I have previously written that stories create other stories. When you tell a story to a juror, a client, or a complete stranger, you trigger an involuntary response.  The person listening to your story has a subjective lens that they use to filter, and give meaning to, the information they received.

The listener unconsciously filters and gives subjective meanings to the contents of your story.  Put another way, they hear your story and then tell themselves a new story that fits their pre-existing world views.

This story creation process is illustrated by the 1957 classic movie “12 Angry Men.”  The jury is made up of 12 white male jurors deliberating the fate of a African American man charged with murder.  Each juror hears the same information.  However, one juror forces the others to explore the subjective meanings they each gave to the evidence.

The graphic below shows how this process works.

Click To Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Ever feel like you’re playing a rigged game?

Here are three thoughts on Focus Groups:

 Once you take your case to a focus group, what do you do?  

Listen to them.  Hear what they have to say about whether this is “reality law” (is this viable in the real world), what the legal story might be, and did they give you leads for future discovery?

 Once you obtain information, how do you identify what you heard?  

Identify what they said about the elements of your case.  Use the information to develop persuasive themes, to drop a cause of action, seek out stronger evidence, and create powerful visuals.

Once you have identified the elements, how do you sort them out?

Sort your elements into the trial story parts.  Ask: who did what to whom, how, with what means, toward what ends, and what you want the decision-maker to do about that.

About the Author: Diane Wyzga is a professional Trial Consultant / Storyteller.

Empathy is key part of emotional intelligence.  What do you think Steinbeck means when he writes:

In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. there is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

-Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men by Susan Shillinglaw, p. vii

Now that that dust is clearing from the first round of the SOPA debate, let’s look back and address why so many people told Congress “No.” I believe Clay Shirky gets is right:

SOPA Debate

Narratives create narratives. When you hear a story, it pulls up frames from other narratives you have previously adopted. A personalized story telling process occurs in your mind. You take the new story and mold it with your preexisting deep narratives to try to give it meaning.

You subconsciously tell yourself, your own subjective story of what the facts mean to you – regardless of reality. This subconscious reality is the reason jurors always remember more than the evidence.

The difference between a narrative and a story is a debatable. Many people use the terms synonymously. Here is my view of the difference. A simple story retells events (real or fictional). A narrative is more complex and narcissistic. A narrative recounts the events from a specific view point of a character (or even an inanimate objects) in a story. The narrator telling the story frames the events from their own world view.

Who’s Job is it to make yourself happy? Here are few hints.

It’s not your significant others.

It is not your children.

It’s not your boss.

It’s not your clients.

Its not your friends.

Who is left?  It’s your job, to make yourself happy.