Being Mindful with the Spiritual Litigator

In this week’s episode, I talk about “5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life” by Bill Eddy, a lawyer and a therapist.

In the book he goes into detail about high-conflict personality (“HCP”) types that are the source of many of the most intense relationship conflicts experienced by attorneys.

If you think about the people you interact with (clients, judges, arbitrators, co-workers, supervisors, adversaries), you are probably in contact with someone is a HCP.

One of the biggest sources of stress when working with difficult people is our beliefs about their behavior.

We work with difficult people all the time and we have these beliefs that “people shouldn’t act this way” “people need to act professionally at all time” and “if people are rude to me, that is terrible and it means that people think they can walk all over me.”

These beliefs cause us to experience emotions of frustration, anger, stress, resentment & anxiety, which causes us to engage in arguments with them, which results in nothing getting accomplished.

We are lawyers, not doctors and there is no way we can diagnose a difficult person with a personality disorder. And quite frankly, it does not matter whether a difficult person has one or not.

The possibility that the person has one is enough to make you take a mindful step back from unreasonable behavior, recognize that the behavior has nothing to do with you, and respond in a productive way.

So, check out the episode, read the book and let me know your thoughts.

In this week's episode, I talk about how I use routines to manage my morning anxiety. 

We have all experienced it: your alarm goes off in the morning and your body fills with dread, anxiety and worry about everything that happened yesterday and everything that is going to happen today.

This carries on throughout the day and negatively impacts your productivity, focus and mood. You leave work exhausted, spend your time at home trying to recover from the day, and find yourself awake in the middle of the night worrying about what you did not get done and then waking up with no sleep to the same anxiety every morning. 

Whenever you are experiencing negative emotions, those emotions are always caused by your beliefs.

That voice in your head that believes that you have too much work to do and you have no time to do it can be silenced by a routine that allows you to dispute those beliefs.

When you have a routine, you can tell that worrying voice in your head that you do not have time for this. And after a while of quieting that voice, you will notice better sleep, more productivity and work and more peaceful mornings. 

In this week's episode, I discuss why identifying your case as your "baby" can trigger your primal fight or flight response any time that "baby" is threatened.

99% of the time, this new case is not a special snowflake, not going to change the world and is not your "baby" to save. 

If the case is your baby, every threat to its success is a threat to you. 

When you self-identify with your cases, you give your power away.

When you make your happiness and self-worth dependent on the outcome of your cases, you start triggering beliefs that equate the potential loss of your case to danger and death.

This causes irrational responses to predictable setbacks (losing a  motion, a rogue witness at a deposition, discovery of bad facts, etc.), unnecessary stress and anxiety, and in some cases, can lead to behavior that can alienate you from your fellow attorneys. 

Here, I talk about how to dispute the beliefs and replace them with effective new beliefs that remind you that the case is not your baby, that it is just another case, and that you can still advocate for your client and work the case to the best of your ability without telling your brain that you are going to die if things go wrong. 

In this week's episode, I talk about three main reasons why criticism leads to beliefs that cause such intense negative emotion. The fear of losing your tribe, fear of failure and fear of punishment is engrained in us by our biology, traditional educational system and our respective upbringings.

I discuss how I struggled so much in the first few years of practicing law with criticism and how that spilled over into my personal life. I talk about how disputing my beliefs, having a very important conversation with my Mom, and letting go of perfection led to an astronomical reduction in stress, anxiety, defensiveness, insomnia and perfectionist paralysis. 

Practicing mindfulness can lead to an understanding that our beliefs in response to criticism are irrational and disproportionate to reality. As a result, we can dispute those beliefs and replace them with more effective beliefs. 

I am happy to report that my goal of reading one book per month has been successful so far.

Studies have shown that reading can reduce stress, increase focus and increase analytical thinking. It's a wonderful mindfulness tool and I try to set aside at least 30 minutes per day to just sit and read.

In this week's podcast episode, I talk about "Grit" by Angela Duckworth.

"Grit" is defined as the combination of passion and perseverance and the studies detailed throughout the book suggest that grit can be a better predictor of success than just IQ and talent alone.

Often, people who lack talent can make up for it through hard work. There are four components of grit: interest, practice, purpose and hope.

I think that lawyers often struggle with the "purpose" part because some of our efforts can feel unnoticed, underappreciated and thankless. It is really up to each lawyer to define his or her purpose in this profession.

We cannot rely on a pat on the back from others and we cannot let the negativity of others define our purpose. It really is something we have to find in ourselves and this book does a really good job of applying that concept to various profession.

Check out the episode, read the book and let me know your thoughts!

https://buff.ly/2FwXhsP

In this week's podcast episode, I discuss how to use mindfulness to change the beliefs that cause lawyers to panic when working on a legal writing assignment or project such as a brief or memo.

Sometimes we can turn a brief into a monster of an assignment.

We associate our overall self-worth with the outcome of the underlying motion.

We start to panic about all the work we need to do to finish it and panic over how we don't have time to do any of it.

We lose sleep while we panic.

None of it is necessary.

But how do you stop all of those feelings of stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and dread that inevitably creep up when a deadline is looming ahead?

By mindfully identifying your beliefs, understanding the consequences of those beliefs, disputing those beliefs, and adopting effective new beliefs you can break the panic cycle.

Mindfulness can lead to an acceptance that your beliefs about the writing assignment, and not the writing assignment itself, cause of all your negative emotion, panic-looping and procrastination.

Then, you can come to the realization that you have the power to just let all of those negative beliefs go.

My fellow litigators: sometimes you will be so sure that your case strategy will work and that someone else’s suggestion will not. And sometimes you will be completely and utterly wrong. If you do not accept that, you will experience the unnecessary emotional and physical consequences of failing to manage your mind.

In this week’s podcast episode I talk about an employment case I worked on a few years ago where, based on statutory and case law, I thought the employer’s defenses were weak and disagreed with the partner’s stubborn insistence that we tender a final unreasonable settlement offer I believed was doomed for rejection.

If it was not accepted, I was responsible for handling the trial. I was so irritated and frustrated and had anxiety about trying a case I did not believe in.

In the two weeks of settlement negotiations, I started experiencing stomach cramps, waking up in the middle of the night worrying and becoming less productive at work as a result.

When I communicated the final offer to my adversary, I silently listened to and internally agreed with the adversary’s frustration with the stubbornness of my client and the partner.

Two days later, to my surprise and relief, the adversary called me and told me that the client had accepted the offer. What?! It was over. Now I didn’t need to try the case. Now all I needed to do was draw up the settlement that the partner and employer were completely right about and move on with my life.

Although I was practicing mindfulness throughout the entirety of this ordeal, I was mindfully surviving instead of mindfully identifying, disputing and changing my beliefs. My failure to manage my mind led to unnecessary anxiety, physical pain and sleepless nights.

We do this to ourselves all the time. We project out a future that hasn’t even happened yet and we put our bodies through the fight or flight response as if we are going to die. 

Listen to this episode to see how you can effectively use mindfulness to manage your attorney mind, to accept that you could be wrong, and to just let go and let things happen.

While doing some research on the intersection of mindfulness and psychology in preparation for a mindfulness seminar, I found something that clicked with me: the cognitive model by psychologist Albert Ellis that has been the backbone of cognitive behavioral science for decades and is extremely simple. 

A – Activating Event;

B- Beliefs; and

C- Consequences (Emotions, Actions & Results).

Once you realize that you have a belief system that is causing negative consequences, you have a choice to

D- Dispute your beliefs and create

E – Effective new beliefs.

Using mindfulness to apply this to my life has been extremely effective because it really helped me to have an understanding of how my brain works and identify the beliefs that lead me to the negative emotions actions or results within my legal practice and within my life.

Check out this episode to mindfully make the ABCs work for you.

In this week’s podcast episode, I discuss being a present lawyer.

My fellow litigators: do you often emotionally cry wolf every time you promise yourself that you will feel better when you [insert future event here]?

Do you tell your family, friends or significant other that when you finish this case, trial or project, you will be less stressed out and more available, when in fact you’re going to finish that case and move on to another one that you will stress you out as much and take up as much time as the last one?

When you learn how to be in the present moment, you learn that you don’t need things in the future to make you feel successful, happy or fulfilled. You can make a choice to feel that way now.

When you are in the present moment, you learn that the way that you feel now is exactly how you are going to feel in the future and that you have the power to control how you feel right now.

To get started, check out a meditation for being in the present moment here: http://www.thespirituallitigator.com/meditations

In this week’s podcast episode, I discuss setting realistic boundaries in your law practice. If you do not set boundaries with your clients, adversaries, or partners, your productivity and motivation can suffer. Additionally, if you don’t set boundaries in your personal relationships, you may end up with less of them. This episode gives some examples of how to set realistic boundaries and what to do when your boundaries are breached.