3.1 Communicating about difficult issues

If you aren’t able to take on a role or task, or cannot agree to something else that is asked of you, for whatever reason, it can have a significant emotional impact. It can lead to feelings of guilt, worry and anxiety, as well as a sense of embarrassment. For example, imagine you are a legal executive in a personal injury department and your manager asks you to undertake a residential conveyance for a client as a personal favour. You may feel anxious that refusing will affect your annual appraisal or promotion prospects or you may feel guilty about “letting down” a colleague. You may even feel that admitting you don’t know your leasehold from your elbow (!) is a sign of weakness.

There is evidence from legal professionals that admitting to issues around mental health and wellbeing, or indicating that these may affect your work, can also lead to a strong sense of stigma and shame or be interpreted as a sign of weakness.

It is important to identify and understand these emotional responses and to assess whether these are grounded in reality or whether they are being magnified or skewed because admitting issues or limitations is something that you find difficult, or that your legal training has led you to believe it is not something that legal professionals do. When you have had time to reflect on this, it can also be very useful to plan your communication strategy carefully. The following questions (adapted from Holmes, 2015, based on the Giving Voice to Values curriculum) can help with this:

• What factors/approaches have enabled you to communicate issues or limitations in the past?
• Whose interests are affected (and how) by what you are going to say?
• Who are you going to communicate with, how and in what context?
• What is putting you off communicating your issues or limitations?
• How might you reframe the issue so that you feel more likely to act (bearing in mind the factors/approaches that have helped in the past)?
• What might happen if you do not communicate this information?
• How might not communicating affect you and any other parties involved?
• What are the possible responses of the person you are communicating with, and what would the motivation be for these?
• What are the most powerful and persuasive responses you can think of to use?

When you have thought about these questions, take any opportunity you can to practice what you want to say with family, friends or a supportive work colleague. This will give you confidence that you can communicate clearly and also help you to regulate your emotional responses to the situation. This video of Senior Lecturer in Mental Health, Dr Mathijs Lucassen, provides you with some practical tips on regulating your responses.

Regulating your emotional responses

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MATHIJS LUCASSE

There are a few practical tips that you can employ in terms of managing your emotional responses in a face-to-face situation, there will be times when you'll be stressed or overwhelmed. Maybe emotions will be running high, and that's normal. What's a bit difficult in a face-to-face context is that people can read your cues. People can read your reactions, and you may want to manage those in a way that comes across in the most professional manner.

And the first tip I'd give is about breathing and being able to slow down your breathing. I know it sounds quite straightforward because people are breathing all the time, but when you're stressed or overwhelmed and having emotional feelings that are quite intense, your breathing is usually more superficial and is faster. And so it's just physically slowing it down and breathing in through your nose, and then holding that breath, and slowly breathing out through your mouth. This is something you can't really do when you're speaking, because I just did it now, and it sort of looks a bit strange. So it's one of the things to be doing and being really careful about in the gaps in the conversation, when you're not speaking.

And another is about your body, and how you position your body, and your awareness of your body, because grounding yourself in a particular situation can be really helpful. So physical strategies that you can employ are things like just wiggling your toes, being aware of where your body is in relation to your seat, if you're sitting down noticing where you're bearing the weight if you're standing up, if you're sitting down, it's just physically being present in the actual space in the room.

And the other is to be mindful about things like volume. And if you're talking louder and louder, that's usually a sign that you're getting distressed about something. Plus, also, the speed of your speech. Your speech will get quicker, generally, if you're more distressed. And so it's being aware of those and just consciously trying to slow things down.

And the last tip I would give is things that you can tell yourself, important messages, mantras that you can employ that will help you get through. So they'll be personally meaningful. They can be things like, you know, I'm a good person, I've been able to cope with challenging times before, and, this time will pass. I mean, it's true because this challenging moment that you might be in right now, or a challenging moment that you foresee in the future, it won't last forever.

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Dealing with this type of situation effectively will also help develop your professional resilience as you begin to become more comfortable with communicating in this way and ensuring your needs are acknowledged.