“May it please the court.”

The words are enough to strike terror into the hearts of most attorneys I know.  They are the first words you speak when you address the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an oral argument.  The words are ritual, as standardized and formulaic as Kabuki theater.  And I was about to say them myself . . . if I just didn’t faint.

I have a framed photo on my desk at work.  It dates from perhaps a year before I started law school at the age of forty, and only a few months before I would break my back in a riding accident, spend three painful months in a body cast, and have the world as I knew it divide into “before” and “after.”

In the photo, I’m standing in a winter woods, with my four children gathered around me.  They range, in that picture, from about three years old to thirteen.  We are surrounded by pristine snow and bare trees, and framed in a pretty fieldstone archway.  I am beaming, and my entire universe revolves around keeping them safe and warm and out of harm’s way.  If you had walked up to me then and told me that in just a few short years I would not only be a criminal prosecutor but find myself arguing cases before the state supreme court, I would have given you the same stare as if you’d told me a genealogical search had just revealed that I was really the Queen of England, and a Lear jet was standing by to whisk me back across the pond.  Oh, and the roof at Buckingham Palace needs fixing.

I might have smiled pleasantly, rolled my eyes . . . and then called the police.

Throughout these blogs, we have been asking the question: What causes people to be successful in their careers? The answer we provided was the achievement of people skills. We showed evidence of this position through research from leading universities. This research showed that much more than half of job success comes from people skills. We also noted that much of what we call people skills is effective communication.

Communication as a Premier People Skill

In our first blog, we used the model developed by Robert Bolton in People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts to show that certain attitudes support a person’s successful efforts at effective communication, attitudes that produce good relationships before formal communication even starts. These attitudes are genuineness, respect, and empathy.[1] We will refer to this paradigm as the “Bolton Model.”