...and why most people can't follow that advice

I had this thought after posting yesterday's excerpt from Matt Homann's blog. In order to determine effectively whether you are being nourished or poisoned by someone's presence, you have to be able to:

1. Establish a baseline.
2. Know what it means to feel more or less energetic, and admit same to yourself.
3. Know how to measure present feeling against past feeling, and admit same to yourself.

I don't know about you all, but this is a very difficult task for me, because I'm not at all sure I'm in touch with my emotions and feelings that way. Not to sound all sensitive or anything, but that's the limiting part of this whole advice, and similar advice asking you to trust your feelings or your gut. Lawyers are often trained, exhorted, and berated to reduce decisions to a consideration of utility, and that's precisely why they fail to act with compassion toward other people. Why they often fail to bring in clients successfully. Why they can't tell whether someone is a good or bad addition to their client roster, especially when the checkbook is there to complicate things.