lawyer communication skills: making our message memorable

As lawyers, we need to be deft communicators. Whether we're in front of a fact finder, client or other business associate, we survive and thrive on our ability to get our message across to people. In this post, blogger Kathy Sierra discusses the anatomy of memorable communication. Specifically, she explains, our brains more readily "convert a memory from short-term to long-term storage" when the message we're receiving evokes our emotions or passions. Sierra cautions, however, that certain emotions work against memory retention because they make us feel uncomfortable or inept. Among the memory-averse emotions are stress, anxiety and worry. Unfortunately, these often are the very emotions elicited by the typical lawyer communiqu�. But, we're not without recourse here. According to Sierra, we can boost our message and its memorability factor by linking (or infusing) it with "things the brain finds interesting," like beauty, story, surprise, music or humor.