Leader Rising

I remember one Christmas , I was so excited that I woke up at 6am and ran downstairs. I patiently waited ... briefly. Then I opened my stocking and played with the toys.

When it was late enough, I put everything back (so they wouldn't know I'd tampered ), and then I woke everyone up.

I still remember the feeling the night before.

Such excitement.

What about you? Did you ever get that feeling on Christmas Eve when you couldn't wait for the next morning?

What's the opposite of that?

The opposite is that feeling where you'd be happy if the next morning didn't come for days. Where you're sitting there late at night weighing all the things you still want to do, all the things you have to do, and just going to bed.

Personally, I tried to squeeze every last drop out of every night before finally throwing in the towel and going to bed.

I call it Reverse Christmas Morning Syndrome . And I've been surprised to see how common it is.

I also think that the cure for it is not as hard as you think.

Come join us as we talk about what it means and how to actually look forward to waking up the next morning.

The worst advice I ever received came somewhat recently. Although almost a decade ago, I was already an adult and into my career.

I was on a deal, and I did something that wasn’t ideal. Not a big deal, just something that I needed to take back or redo or whatever (I don’t remember the details), and so I sent across a note to the other side saying “I’m sorry but…”

The partner gives me a call and says:

“Look Paul, a piece of advice - never apologize.”

Now this wasn’t about being a pitbull or adversarial, he still wanted me to be polite. This was about appearances.

And man do I have an issue with that. Trying to conform to this piece of advice was like trying to tie myself in knots. It means I always need to appear right. Which means everything I need to do needs to either be: i) private, or ii) perfect on the first go.

First, as you may be able to tell, that's NOT me. I’m okay with being public about certain things. I willingly talk about failings - CURRENT failings, on my blog and podcast.Second, forget perfect on the first go. Hell, I’m often not perfect ever. This is my 18th podcast episodes and I’ve never thought: “Perfect. This episode could not be improved.” I’m pretty much always thinking “This is useful, on brand, good enough, and it’s due right now. Ship it!”

The problem is that the advice stuck with me and reverberated in weird ways through my life.

It still shows up from time to time.

So, check out the episode and see if you’ve experienced any of it.

I have realized that when you zoom out enough, there’s a simple way to figure out why you’re either happy or not:

Happiness = Reality - Expectations

When things are going better than you had expected, wanted, or hoped they would, you’re generally pretty happy. When things aren’t going as well as you had expected, wanted, or hoped, you tend to be not that happy.

So, if we want to be happier, we have 3 options:

Pull on our reality lever to improve our reality.

Pull on our expectations lever to manage and tune our expectations.

Pull on both.

The thing is, our expectations normalize to our reality, so if you pull only on the reality lever you’ll never be happy. You see too many miserable senior partners to know that this is true.

And if you only pull on the expectations lever, you’re selling yourself short.

We explore this, and more on today’s call.

Chest pains again. Not quite over the heart, but close - over my sternum.

This is how I’ve come to know my anxiety.

The pain comes and I check in with my feelings. Yep, feeling frantic, just want it to go away.

Now, I know I’m lucky - I’ve never had a full blown debilitating anxiety attack, and so I know others have it worse than me. But it also hasn’t been easy; once it hurt enough that I went to the ER to make sure I wasn’t having a heart attack.

I know too that I’m not alone. So many high-performing professionals that I speak to have dealt with, or are dealing with, anxiety.

So when I started feeling it again lately, I thought that this was a great opportunity to add to the dialogue around anxiety - how it affects us, how we can perceive it, and what we can do about it.

And, in particular, viewed through my lens. So this week’s episode is how it affects me and how I perceive it, as well as setting up for my way forward.

Two bums fighting in the middle of a crowd. That’s what my buddy John saw as he walked down Spadina street in Toronto, some years back.

Fighting is a bit of a generous word. It was more of a beatdown, one of them was wailing on the other.

This is wrong, he thought.

And he stood there.

Now for context, John was in his mid/late-20s at the time, and was pretty powerfully built.

And still, he was paralyzed in the moment.

He stood there until an old man pushed his way to the centre of the circle and broke up the fight.

Years later, John’s story is still with me. And when I mentioned it to John the other day, he was surprised - he had completely forgotten about the incident.

“But,” he said, “I do remember a similar story that you told me…”

And I had totally forgot about my story until he shared it back with me.

You see, most of us like to think that we’ll rise to the occasion. Generally, we don’t.

Instead, you sink to the level of your training.

We talk about this and more in today’s podcast episode.

Last year I burnt out pretty solidly and had my business on life-support for about 6 months.

It was tough. It wasn’t quite “burn down the kitchen” burnt out, but it was certainly “everything is a crisp and needs to be thrown out” burnt out.

I took time off. I shrank my law job from full-time down to three days a week. I spent some time recharging.

It turns out that burning out takes a lot out of you.

It almost feels as if it takes longer to recover than it did to burn out (although who knows if that’s true - when do you actually start your path to burning out?).

Now I don’t regret burning out in 2019 - I learned a ton. … but once was enough.

So when I noticed a few weeks ago that my patience was disappearing, my confidence was dropping, and my dissatisfaction was rising, I went into high alert.

And when it started to get worse and I realized I was on the slippery slope, I started to make some changes.

Today’s episode is about me - my path to burn out and what I’m going to do about it.

You know, some times it isn’t easy. We’ve had people we’ve loved in our lives since we were kids - you’d think we’d be better at talking to them.

And yet… and yet, sometimes we just really suck at it.

We want them to feel better, and instead we make them feel worse and drive them away.

Most of the time, our intentions are good. We want to help. We want to do right by the person.

But often help is the last thing people need and trying to help is the last thing we should do.

I’ve been reading How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk (again), and it’s blowing my mind all over again. I read it three years ago before my son was born. I was only hoping to be a better parent, but immediately I became a better communicator at work, with my friends, and (most importantly) with my loved ones.

At the beginning of the book, they provide an overview of the most common responses we give to people having a tough time. I bet you’ve done all of these. I know I have (and I know I particularly have a problem with #2):

Denial of Feelings

The Philosophical Response

Advice

Questions

Defense of the Other Person

Pity

Amateur Psychoanalysis

Empathy

I found this so perspective-altering that I dedicated today’s episode to it.

In a world of deadlines, work that that pays your bills, and work that feeds your soul, we can often feel like we’d need to have 30 hours a day just to be able to handle it all. This is common for a lot of us – especially those of us that aren’t lit up by our day job.

We feel torn that we’re not spending more time on something that lights us up. Like a pebble that’s always in our shoe, we can sometimes ignore that it’s there before we feel it as soon as we go to move.

The truth is that we need to feed our soul. Whether you feed your soul with family time, with creating something, with laughing with friends, or with working on your dream, you need to be feeding your soul and putting gas into the tank.

So how do you do that in the middle of a busy life? You get:

- clear on what’s going on,

- clear on your priorities, and then

- clear on the actions you can start to take.

It isn’t always easy, but it’s pretty much always worth it.

Join us for this call with Alex as we discuss deadlines, goal setting, and balancing short term bill-paying work with longer term work soul-fueling work.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. “Your flaws at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home.” I had to pause and lean back to let it in. I had always considered home and work as separate.

An insightful piece of wisdom from Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

Interestingly, for us lawyers, it might as well be: your features at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home.

What do we do at work as lawyers?

A lot of us fight. We litigate or arbitrate. We operate in a zero-sum game where if we’re winning, someone else is losing. Being better at what we do often means being better at fighting.

And for those of us corporate lawyers, we don’t have to live in zero-sum and we can work on deals where everyone is a winner. But to do your job properly, you’ve got to think of everything that can go wrong. You’ve got to think of all the risks, how to protect against them. You’re training yourself to live in scarcity - where a good life is possible but you think you’ve got to hustle and be hyper-vigilant.

These are features for us - things that make us good at work. However, they’re not super conducive traits to a fulfilling and happy life.

For example, walking in the door and bringing up the five reasons why your partner’s suggestion for dinner wasn’t perfect. Ouch. Or holding your sleeping child in your arms and thinking of everything that could go wrong. Double ouch.

We discuss this and how to get past it in today’s episode.

Oh, and if you’re interested in the guided journalling/planning prompts to help you live authentically and milk every last bit of value and joy your of your life, visit the show notes on leaderrising.com/blog/2020/6/23/work-life-balance-what-being-a-lawyer-can-do-to-your-mindset

"It doesn't really seem sustainable to keep trying to make everyone happy." Melissa said with some frustration. A toddler at home. A demanding job. People in her life that she valued and that she wanted to be happy.

It was the classic case of being caught between a rock, a hard place, another rock, and a few other hard places. There are so many demands on us these days, and it's so easy to let yourself get drained as you try to put out all the fires.

Sometimes that's the wrong thing to do.

When you just run from fire to fire, you can end up ignoring the important things that aren't on fire in that moment. This is especially true with loved ones, who will often give you extra leeway since they want to see you succeed.

So what do you do instead? For starters, you can begin to set some boundaries. Boundaries to help you prioritize better. Boundaries to help you refill your cup. And (often more importantly) boundaries to stop your cup from draining so fast.

Check out this episode of the Leader Rising podcast. This is an on-air coaching call with Melissa as we discuss learning to set boundaries.