LEONARD RISKIN: NORTHWESTERN PRITZKER SCHOOL OF LAW, VISITING PROFESSOR OF DISPUTE RESOLUTION
MINDFUL LEADERS IN THE LAW: AN INTERVIEW WITH LEONARD RISKIN
After a brief hiatus, we continue this month with the Mindful Leaders in the Law interview series. Our goal, through this series, is not only to strengthen our community by sharing interesting conversations with some of the amazing individuals who make-up and lead MILS. We hope, by spotlighting the paths and practices of others, to also inspire and empower our members to build their mindfulness practices in creative ways that are uniquely satisfying to them.
This month I talked to MILS Emeritus Board Member, Leonard Riskin. Len is a visiting professor of dispute resolution at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. I had a chance to ask Len about his work as a mediation, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution teacher and writer. We also talked about his newly published book, Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think.
Q: I start each interview with the same question: how did you first start practicing mindfulness and meditation?
A: When I moved to Houston in 1974 for my first law school teaching job, I took the basic of course in Transcendental Meditation. I liked TM a great deal and practiced it on and off until about 1984, when we moved to Columbia MO. There I joined a Zen meditation group that met weekly in a non-denominational Chapel at Stevens college. I practiced regularly with that group for several years. At some point in the late 1980s, I attended a vipassana retreat in Kansas City, led by Howard Cohen of Spirit Rock. There, I quickly realized that vipassana/mindfulness suited me better than the Zen practices to that I had learned.
Shortly after that a local mindfulness/vipassana practice group was created in Columbia by Ginny Morgan and Phil Jones. It attracted a good number of members and gradually developed a core of teachers and programs for the community. I joined as a member and soon began to teach regularly as part of that organization, now known as Mid-Missouri Dharma; it is still very vibrant.
Q: You have been a proponent of mindfulness since before it was a mainstream concept in our profession. Do you think the legal profession is heading in the right direction in beginning to recognize the value and importance of mindfulness and other well-being practices?
A: I began teaching mindfulness in 1999 in a course called Understanding Conflict, which I created for a new LL.M. in dispute resolution program at the University of Missouri School of Law. At that time, only three or four other U.S. law schools offered something on meditation. From my perspective, mindfulness practice and awareness has grown enormously and far beyond what I anticipated. Although we still have a long way to go, nearly everyone in the law school world recognizes the term mindfulness even if they are not sure what it means. An enormous variety of inventive uses of mindfulness now appear in law schools, law firms, government agencies, and courts. I don’t know how institutionalized these efforts will become, and I worry about that.
Q: As a law professor and author who teaches and writes about mediation, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution, in what ways do you see mindfulness intersect with the more traditional approaches to alternative dispute resolution?
A: Mindfulness is not an approach to dispute resolution in the same sense that negotiation and mediation are. Generally speaking, mindfulness can help people who are in conflict or dealing with conflict to perform more effectively and with more compassion, wisdom, awareness, and satisfaction. Similarly it can help people avoid or limit the development of conflict. My recently released book, which we will discuss later, focuses extensively on this issue.
Q: Do you teach your students and dispute resolution professionals tools to integrate mindfulness into their practices?
A: Yes. I regularly teach people how to develop and deploy mindfulness in connection with their work as well as other activities. In the classroom and in my writing, I concentrate on building understanding and stillness in dispute resolution and in mindfulness and how to integrate the two. I integrate these sorts of activities into simulations of negotiations or other difficult situations. Also I ask students to keep track of their mindfulness activities and to submit journals about their experiences
Q: Can you talk a little bit about how mindfulness can benefit the success of a negotiation by shining a light on an important part of the process - the emotional dimension of the participants?
A: Sure. Mindfulness can, among other things, help us be more aware of our emotions and more able to avoid being controlled by them. Similarly, mindfulness can help us understand the emotions of others and to “forgive” ourselves and others for experiencing unpleasant emotions and sometimes manifesting these emotions in unskillful ways. Doing this becomes more possible if we learn to be present with difficult emotions—a basic goal of mindfulness, which none of us can fulfill consistently.
Q: You have a new book out, named Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think. Can you tell us briefly what it’s about and what audience you wrote it for?
A: The book begins with the idea that all of us, including renowned leaders and people from every walk of life, regularly make significant errors, or poor decisions, when engaged in conflict or other problematic situations. Sometimes this is because they do not know how and when to negotiate. But it also happens to experienced and well-trained negotiators. Such cases sometimes result from certain obstacles to negotiating well, such as excessively self-centered thoughts, emotions, and behaviors; cognitive biases; and inability to focus. Much of the book deals with how to overcome such barriers and proposes a new framework for doing that called “Mindful Conflict management,” which integrates three domains of theory and practice: negotiation, mindfulness, and a model of the mind and an approach to psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems, which is based on the idea that our psyches are composed of “Parts” or “Subpersonalities” that interact as a system and a “Self”.
I wrote this book for a broad and diverse audience. I hope it will be useful in some professional and graduate schools, such as law, psychology, business, and management, as well as for academics and professionals in such fields. I also hope that it will attract people who are interested, for their own reasons. Everything in the book applies equally to our work and our personal lives and professional lives and to ordinary difficult situations as well as formal negotiations.
The book Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Leonard Riskin is published by West Academic and is available in digital and paper editions through West Academic and through Amazon Kindle.
Q: Do you have a favorite quote or expression that reminds you of why mindfulness and well-being are priorities in your life?
A: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Jon Kabat-Zinn