Transformative Emotional Strategies from the Courtroom to Home

Ever wondered how to harness your emotions to improve your life and relationships? Join us as Judge Lynn Toler, renowned for her years on Divorce Court, shares her unique insights and personal stories on the art of "Feeling on Purpose." Drawing from her experiences as a municipal judge, Judge Toler reveals how emotional mismanagement often leads to legal troubles and underscores the transformative power of empathy and understanding. Learn how her mother's wisdom and her own approach to starting where people are emotionally can guide anyone toward better decision-making and emotional intelligence.

Journey with us through Judge Toler's exploration of managing anxiety and its profound effects on both personal and professional relationships. She recounts the practical strategies she and her late husband employed, including their innovative "weather report" system to communicate moods and prevent misunderstandings. Hear about her bold transition from a secure judicial role to a television career, the challenges she faced, and the rewards she reaped. Additionally, Judge Toler opens up about her time spent at home, the creation of her book "My Mother's Rules," and the importance of staying engaged and productive during life's transitions.

In today's world, emotional intelligence is more crucial than ever. Judge Toler emphasizes the need for deliberately developing emotional management skills, akin to learning to read, to handle life's ups and downs. Through personal anecdotes, she illustrates the importance of self-awareness and continuous self-improvement. Judge Toler encourages us all to acknowledge our weaknesses and strive for personal growth with purpose and discipline. As we approach the challenges of everyday life, let's commit to acting thoughtfully and making meaningful progress, just as Judge Toler has done throughout her remarkable journey.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You know her as the longest-presiding judge on divorce court, for more than 14 years. Marriage boot camp and many other programs. A graduate of Harvard, judge Lynn Toler is the author of my Mother's Rules Making Marriage Work and Dear Sonali Letters to the Daughter I Never had, all of which are dedicated to the proper emotion, what it is and how to find it.

Speaker 2: 0:20

I want you to feel better. I really do, but when I use that term better, I'm using it as an adverb and not an adjective. Yes, I want you to feel happy. I want to feel happy, but I think it's more important that we all feel intelligently and purposely. You know, emotions aren't just something that you have to feel or fight through. They can be used as a force. You can unfurl them so you can fly. Be used as a force. You can unfurl them so you can fly. And even if you can't manage that, a well ordered emotional house will keep you from outsourcing your mood to the masses. And you know that's the last thing we need to do. Remember, under your skin is a sovereign country. Don't go passing out passports all willy-nilly to people who don't belong there. Let me help you protect your emotional borders so we can all start feeling on purpose. How y'all doing this is Judge Lennon.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Welcome to the first episode of Feeling On Purpose. The whole purpose of this podcast is to make you feel on purpose, just like I need to feel on purpose. And to feel on purpose is to be in charge of your emotional house, as opposed to your emotional house running you. And the thing about your emotional house is we never spend a lot of time training it. We fall into our emotions, we feel we do, we are all this kind of stuff, but we don't practice deciding how we want to feel, and I think it's necessary.

Speaker 2: 1:52

I came to this conclusion because before I ever was on TV, I was the judge on divorce court. For a while I was a judge in municipal court in Cleveland Heights, ohio. I took the bench at 34, got up there and was flabbergasted by all that was going on. And the first of all, let me explain to you what kind of judge I was, so you'll understand what it is I was seeing and why I think it relates to all of us, as opposed to just just people who don't know how to act. I was a municipal. Why I think it relates to all of us, as opposed to just people who don't know how to act. I was a municipal judge In a municipal court. It's where you see first-time domestic violence cases. You see when John and Bob get mad at each other and Bob hits John because John's dog pooped in his yard. I was the person that you see Negligent homicide, duis fights, a lot of domestic violence, but that's what I saw.

Speaker 2: 2:52

I got regular people who did the wrong thing on any given day, regular people just like you and me, who were just hanging about and couldn't get it right on any particular day. And when I was paying attention to it, I realized something my mother had told me was really correct, which is most people know what the right and the wrong of it is and most people want to do the right and wrong of it, do the right part of it. Not all people, but most people generally want to get it right. And I learned that on Thursdays and I'll tell you about Thursdays in a minute, because I hated Thursdays but anyway, they didn't get it right, not because they failed to assess the situation correctly. It's because they failed to accommodate their feelings correctly. They let how they felt get in front of what they were doing and they were not able to conduct business in a manner commensurate with the law. Just give you an example. Well, let me do it this way One day I was sentencing a guy for popping his wife and I gave him what a friend of mine calls the good old acid acid rain dance about how can you?

Speaker 2: 4:09

You can't do this, you get angry, you get angry, and it just so happens that my mother was in the courtroom watching me. And so when I got done and I went to the back, she came to the back with me. She said you know, lynn, let me tell you, tell you what you did wrong talking to that defendant. And I said well, what you mean, mama? And she says well, listen, he's going to go to jail, thinking about that bee he hit and that other bee who put him in jail and yelled at him. You did not convince him of anything. You didn't change his mind. You didn't change his ideas. You probably made him just a little bit madder and I said well, what should I do? She says you got to start where they are and slowly walk them home, lean over and tell them. I said well, what did ask him, what did he do? What'd she do? What did he do? What was going on? And that upset you didn't it, didn't it? I understand, I understand, and for the seventh time, she didn't. She just now, and once you do that because most of the time the defendants were looking at you like you don't understand. You came into the circumstance late, you don't know what you're talking about because you weren't there and you don't know how he or she is all the time and it's an ongoing problem. And who is this chick trying to decide what to do? So they don't listen to you, they just kind of float through whatever you say, and I always believed that incarceration without elucidation was a waste of time.

Speaker 2: 5:26

Why put people in jail? I mean, if we judges judged our efficacy by the recidivism rate, you know how often we keep rotating them around. We don't do so good most of the time because the recidivism rate is high. Now, in Muni court, it's an opportunity to catch them before it gets ugly. You know what I mean. The first time foolishness with the theft or the. You know the shoplifting or whatever. You come to municipal court and it's a unique opportunity, leaning towards doing the wrong thing. It's a unique opportunity to have a whisper in their ear that might make a difference.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Now, I am not a foe, so I know full well that a few words of a judge will not change how you feel about anything. I do, however, believe in being an obnoxious probationary person. Where I I put you on probation, I'll make you get a license, I'll do this, I'll do that, I'll do the other thing, but I'll keep messing with you until you get it. And I also want to talk to you in a manner that allows you, because sometimes, if you simply plant a seed, people that it will grow, but you can't plant a seed if you have flooded their field with angry, because nobody opens up underwater and says, okay, I will accept what you're saying when they're actively drowning in your anger. So I learned what worked. I learned how to talk to different people. I learned to listen, and that was the most extraordinary thing, because if you listen with somebody else's emotionality in mind, you are better able to understand why they're doing what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 7:21

People got a reason for doing everything, but behind that reason if it's a fact or a feeling, it's usually the feeling and not the facts that are. That's why we can all look at the same thing and feel so differently about it, because our feelings are so strong and so fast and they come up on us so seriously that we can't. We can't stop, wait a minute and decide whether or not what we're feeling is going to allow us to do what we need to do. So that's why I'm doing this podcast called Feeling on Purpose. I don't want your feelings to be happenstance. I certainly don't want my feelings to be a matter of happenstance. As a matter of fact, feeling on purpose is something I have had to do my entire life because I was born an anxious chick. My father was born in 1990. My mother was born in 1930. I was born in 1959. My father was bipolar, unmedicated. There was a lot going on in the house and I am his daughter. So, both both by by biology and by nature and by nurture, I am an anxious chick, just whoo.

Speaker 2: 8:32

I remember 14, I was 14 years old and my mom and my my mother and my sister were sitting there. Just call him man. Just call him, it's okay. He wants you to call. No, I can't do it. I don't know. I can't do it. I can't do it. I can't do it. Do you know who they were trying to get me to call? They were trying to get me to call the pizza man. I was so shy, I was so retiring, I couldn't call the pizza man. My mother says you know he wants you to call Lynn. That's how he makes his money. He's excited when you call. Couldn't do it, couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 2: 9:06

I was a really scary, sketchy chick all my life and when you're anxious like that, you can't go anywhere, you can't get anything done, because you spent all of your time overthinking and worrying and worrying. And the reason that I'm not just undone, sitting somewhere rocking back and forth thinking about it's not safe, it's not thinking about, it's not safe, it's not safe, it's not safe which is generally how I think things are is because my mother saw her little daughter, her little girl, for who she was and wasn't afraid to call it what it was, which was overwrought anxious anxiety, ridden a little bit of little taste of whatever daddy had has been delivered to me. And this is what she had on her hands. So she had a decision to make either she could get upset about who I was or she could help me navigate the week in me so that the rest of me can get where it's going. And she was successful at that. And what it taught me to do was is to be hyper aware of all my emotional responses and reactions. And I lost my husband not too long ago and I'm not going to talk about it now because I'll start crying and then I'll just have to stop.

Speaker 2: 10:20

But when we first got married I was a very, very moody chick and I would get upset and angry and he would think I was upset and angry with him when I was just upset and angry because I was anxious about things in general, and the things in general that I was so anxious and angry about were so terrifically ridiculous that he could not get next to the fact that that's why I was upset. He thought it was me. So every morning I decided after a while, when we had a couple of unproductive arguments where he just couldn't understand why I was so just going around and around and around about something he did that really didn't make any difference that if I am in a state of worry, if my fight or flight, chemicals have been dispensed, they just out there. They don't know where to go, they don't know what I'm upset about, they just out there and they meet every situation I run into, which is very inappropriate.

Speaker 2: 11:28

So what we decided to do, when we realized that I was simply a moody chick, is to give him a weather report every morning, and the weather report was a way for me to one require me to sit down and think about how I feel. How's it going today? Am I excited? Am I upset? Am I anxious, am I afraid? Am I bored, whatever it is, and then I would communicate whatever my mood was to him, not in order to tell him what to do, but A1, give him a heads up if things ain't going well and if I'm upset, and knowing that it's not him.

Speaker 2: 12:04

And two, it requires me to acknowledge how I feel him. And two, it requires me to acknowledge how I feel. So I can't just go with the feeling of the moment. If I am anxious, upset or otherwise worried or whatever, sometimes I'm just panicked, running around in a circle, I'll know that. And so don't nobody get hurt. It lets him know I'm not mad at him. And it lets me know that I'm mad and that I should make a point of not directing it at him when you have all hands. You got to have all hands on deck because marriage is a difficult thing and you both got to be working hard for the union as opposed to yourself.

Speaker 2: 12:44

But anyway, that's a whole nother podcast for another. Well, for this podcast for another day. But I was telling you about what kind of judge I was, because I got to see normal, regular people like you and me on their worst day. And when I left the bench in 2001 to go on TV that first TV show. It was so funny. I was minding my own business, minding my own business, and somebody called from Fox I was, you know and I got off the bench and I sat down and hey, hey hey, hey, stop it.

Speaker 2: 13:20

I'm a lone man here. My dogs were fighting. I had to do something about it. I apologize profusely, but anyway, what was I talking about?

Speaker 2: 13:28

So I was seeing regular folk all the time doing the wrong thing and I would be on the bench. And one day I got off the bench and my clerk, of course Maria, said hey, fox television called. I said very funny, maria, and I went in my. She said no, they really did. So I called, I looked at it and I called him and I can't remember who I called. And I told my husband and we laughed about it and stuff. Well, I was laughing, he wasn't laughing. He says, well, why don't you go talk to him? And I said, well, I'm not going to go do that.

Speaker 2: 14:00

And I did go do it and I had a show. It was power of attorney. I took over for Judge Napolitano. It lasted four months and I had to step off the bench and I had just won reelection. So I had a six year, no cut contract with the city of Cleveland Heights to have a job for the next six years, and I walked off for a job that lasts four months, happily, though I was concerned about that very thing. So I was concerned about that very thing. So when I negotiated my contract, I negotiated a section that said if the show goes and I was slowly descending down the counter because I had never just like lost a gig before and it was just like I just felt so foolish I stepped away from the bench.

Speaker 2: 15:01

And then the checks kept coming and I was at home for five years with my children getting paid a judicial salary, and then, because I would get a little bored, I would do, I would sit by assignment, like when other judges got sick or something. I would sit by assignment. So I would have something to do, but otherwise and I stayed home. And the last thing I did to keep me from being bored was I wrote a book called my Mother's Rules. It. I was a better salesman. I would have had the picture in frame the whole time, but apparently I'm not.

Speaker 2: 15:35

Being on the bench in Cleveland Heights gave me pause. It made me worry about how we were doing as a people and how we were doing emotionally, and I always considered my mother an emotional genius. She had the ability to see herself. She called it her second set of eyes, that she was allowed to watch herself from outside herself so she could understand how she's feeling and, deeper still still, take her own emotionality out of any situation and focus on how the other person is feeling. And that gives you power, because if you know what they're feeling and why they're feeling that way and they don't, maybe they will and maybe they don't, but a lot of times they don't If you meet the need they think they have, you can get them to meet your needs. Otherwise not always, but sometimes.

Speaker 2: 16:33

But she had that ability and let me tell you, the best compliment I ever got from that woman from anybody was she came again like a couple years later to court and when we went back in the back and she says you have them too, and I said, what's that? He goes, your second set of eyes. That meant I was listening to the defendants in a matter in a manner that allowed me to understand them and to convince them of things. Sometimes, if you get a cat to laugh, you got him to listen. But anyway and I know it works a little bit, doesn't work grandly, but it's it's better than nothing. It's better than nothing. But anyway, based on what I was seeing back in 2001 through 2006, which is while I was writing this book. This is what I wrote.

Speaker 2: 17:28

I said given the way emotional meltdowns have become a regular feature of our society from parents killing each other at hockey games to every known rage in the book air rage, road rage, you know, work rage I contend that people's lack of emotional know-how has become an urgent concern In a day and age when cutting someone off on the road can get you killed. I say teaching people, the deliberate and purposeful development of emotional skills is as important as teaching them to read, and I do believe that's true. Ain't no way in the world I could have predicted social media. Ain't no way in the world I would could have said oh, there's going to be things out there called rage bait and people being paid to fight Just craziness. Out there, people are becoming undone at McDonald's because their order was wrong Launching. It wasn't that bad. Then it has gotten worse, and I think that the purposeful management of emotion is an urgent concern, and it is the point. The point of this podcast is to get you to. I don't want you to believe me, I don't want you. I ain't going to tell you what to do. I just want to give you some more information about the processes and procedures you can use to develop your own second set of eyes and be your own best emotional manager.

Speaker 2: 18:59

You know I want to have what I call a steep emotional angle of repose, and I know I was going to call this angle of repose, but everybody got tired of this. I just love this, though, angle of repose. And I know I was gonna call this angle of repose. Everybody got tired of this. I just love this, though. Angle of repose is the steeple angles which loose material will remain static on a slanted surface. So think sand on a sliding board. If at 45 degrees the sand will stay there, but at 46 degrees the sand slides to the bottom 45 degrees of its angle of repose. It's the steepest angle it can be on without slipping.

Speaker 2: 19:30

I want to have a steep emotional angle of repose. I want to be able to uh, bob and weave through my emotional day where everybody else is upset and wired and carried on I'm. I want to be able to manage how I feel and so that the vicissitudes of this life, the ups and downs of this world, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune aren't so demanding, so I could live and be calm and be cool. This is a chick who was afraid to call the pizza man, who now lives a very public life, who now lives a very public life. I've got you know.

Speaker 2: 20:12

I remember a girlfriend of mine from high school when she saw me on TV. She just she found me. She said, lynn, I can see lawyer, I can see judge, but what in the world? You were the shyest, most uncomfortable person. I said I know, but you should never let the least of you stand between the world and the rest of you, which is the best of you. So in order to keep that together, I got to keep the least of me together, and I know people aren't excited about looking at themselves in the harsh light of a mirror like the bathroom mirror.

Speaker 2: 20:44

Man. You got to look at yourself in the mirror and all the nicks and divots and nooks and crannies and all the things that ain't quite right with you. You got to be able to look it right in the face in the bright sunlight and say I see you. And it's not something that most of us like to do. We all like to put our best foot forward and everybody tells you to do that, but I like to focus on the one dragon behind because that's the sucker that's going to trip me up. Should I have to break out into a run? And every once in a while you got to break out into a run of some sort or another. So if you know where you're weak, if you know what you don't do, well, if you know where people have you have. Have a soft spot, a chink in your armor, you can, you know, cover it up, get some, you know, get some kind of something to help get it together.

Speaker 2: 21:38

You don't become a different person all at once, but you evolve. That's one of the best compliment I ever got from my husband was we were in his office one day and something had happened and it wasn't cool. And I said, yeah, this happened. And he says, well, what are you going to do? And I said this. And he goes. And I said, well, what do you think? And he said this is what I think. And then he said and then I said we were sitting there and we looked at each other. He says you know, a few years ago that would have sent you into orbit. And I said, I know I handled that so calmly, didn't I? He said, baby, you have evolved. Then, with the brother 35 years. He told me I evolved, I've become a better version of me and I want us all to become.

Speaker 2: 22:23

My big thing is, if you see me today and then you meet me a year from now, I'll be a different person I'll be. I will have read more books, I will have gone more places, I would have made more decisions, I would have figured out different things that are wrong with me and just bit by bit, day by day, elevate a little bit and there's a whole lot wrong with me, whole lot. But I'm not going to let it stop me. And A because I call it what it is, and I know what it is and I'm not afraid of it, and I know what situations implicate my week. I'll work on it and I'm going to tell you what my week is. And let me say this I wrote another book, dear Sonali Letters to a Daughter I Never had, which I don't know where it is.

Speaker 2: 23:17

I'm terrible about that, but it was a book designed to talk to young women who are in their 20s and the first chapter I said is about my lean and I tell you all the stuff that is odd about me, and I never take advice from anybody who doesn't know what's wrong with them, because there's something wrong with all of us. You know, I'm anxious, I worry, I am impulsive, I'm not impulsive, I am panicky, I'm panicking. I tend not to have. I don't believe in like these epiphanies and all these kind of stuff. I'm not. I've never had like a light bulb moment. I just gorilla fight house to house. I still don't know if I'm doing a job or I am in a profession that I should be. I just don't know because I've done so many things.

Speaker 2: 24:14

I wanted to be an anesthesiologist when I was a little kid, but you know well, I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. Now I realize it was just our parents whispering doctor, doctor, doctor to me and my sister's ears my sister. She in fact became a doctor. I, however, went to school intending to become an anesthesiologist, because that was the doctor that put people to sleep and because I don't like I didn't like dealing with people because I was so shy I thought that would be the best thing for me to do is just have all my clients out and they don't see me, and I got to talk to them.

Speaker 2: 24:48

And then I got to college, didn't go to get, didn't, didn't, didn't, didn't go to class. If you don't go to class, you can't pass your math class. So I changed my major, became something else and I was growing around and then senior year rolled up and I said what's happening here? And daddy said, yeah, what is happening here? Because he paid for the whole ride and he says if you don't go to a graduate school, you got to get a job ran my little brown behind over, took the LSAT, went to law school, never had any desire to be a lawyer. I don't like conflict, but hey, you know you do what you do. But anyway, the whole thing is I was thought I was watching from the bench a return to rumple room. I mean it was like the retitlerization of America. I mean, smaller and smaller issues were bigger and bigger problems, and what I saw as alarming then is really just the tip of the iceberg, because what technology has done is it has amped up all of that.

Speaker 2: 25:51

Social media is where you're instigating emotion because it gets us views. You have a rage bait and all this kind of stuff. People are jacking you up to get views, to get money, and if you're not emotionally aware of where you are and what you're doing your feel can get in front of your do, and then you end up doing something that'll get you in front of somebody like me, which you don't want to do. You don't want to do that at all. We want to have a steep emotional angle of repulse. We're going to let the fools, the clowns, the idiots just run about us. We're going to smile, but we're going to be okay with it.

Speaker 2: 26:33

And part of this podcast is, on a personal level, an opportunity to find out who I am again. I was married when I was 29 years old to met him at 27. Never been with another brother since then, in 1987. Married him in 89, lost him in 22. I got to figure out who I am. You know, I got to figure it out and it's easier to do when you're, I know, like I mourned all the way through on Instagram. You know, every day I would. It was like a journal of distress and just like I don't want to live no more. I don't believe it, but anyway I didn't want to live no more, I don't believe it, but anyway. I didn't mean to get into all that today. I just want to tell you what I'm trying to do.

Speaker 2: 27:25

What I'm trying to give you is not tell you what to do. If you ask me a question and I'd love to answer questions is I'm not going to necessarily say okay, this is what you want to do, because men do this and women do that, and men should and women should. I ain't doing all of that. First of all, I've read too many books to be certain about anything, and I know there's so many more books I haven't read to be certain about anything. But I probably ask you a lot of questions because I don't know you. You give me advice Any advice you give me. My mother told me this once. My sister give me advice, any advice you give me. My mother you told me this once.

Speaker 2: 27:57

My sister was very outgoing. She's a neurologist. Now she's a doctor. She went to school, she did what she was supposed to do. I did not, however, and she would, she would tell me say anything. I told your sister who, who was my sister, is one of the most outgoing, engaging people I've ever met in my life. She is just you know, she was just you know. But anyway, everybody just loves Kathy because she's just dynamic.

Speaker 2: 28:22

And I was so shy and reclusive. My mother said I spent everything, anything I told her. I told you exactly the opposite. I was spending my time pulling her back in the house and trying to push you out. So any advice that I gave one was not applicable to the other. And I found with my own children the two that I made from scratch with Big E same thing. I never tell them the same thing. Whatever I would tell one would put the other one in jail, and what I would tell the other one would put the other one in a loony bin.

Speaker 2: 28:50

So, not knowing you, I won't give definitive answers. I will ask you to walk through a process of thought with me. I'll tell you some stories about what I've done and some assessments based upon what you've said to me. But it's about process and procedure. It's not about this is what you ought to do. It's like figuring out what works for you, but that's what I want to do. It's like figuring out what works for you, but that's what I want to do. But, above all, I want everybody to start feeling on purpose. November's coming. We can't just cut up. Oh, we can, but let's not. We have to practice, and that's what I want to do here. So listen y'all, get out there and act like you have some sense. I'm going to try to do that myself and hopefully we can all start feeling on purpose. Take care, see you next time.