Welcome to The Mind Over Law Podcast, where we break the traditional rules of practicing law.
Our focus is helping you first to become a better, happier person, which in turn will make you a better, happier lawyer both in and out of the courtroom.
We will combine mindset and energy practices grounded in ancient wisdom, along with cutting edge neuroscience give you those skills.
Plus, I'll have deep conversations with some of the most thoughtful leaders that will share their life stories, their leadership journeys, and their legal practice wisdom.
I'm Lexlee Overton, and my promise is that each episode will offer practical insights and strategies to empower your law practice, your leadership skills, and most of all, your personal well being.
Join me and I promise you'll become a better you, lawyer and leader.
I'm Lexlee Overton, and I'm known as the people coach for lawyers and their teams.
As a peak performance expert, I couldn't be more excited about the launch of this brand new podcast as my followers have been asking for more audio content.
And I'm really looking forward to connecting and growing with you.
For those of you who are new to my work, allow me to tell you a little bit about myself.
I specialize in helping lawyers and their legal teams excel in and out of the courtroom, and I work with leaders and law firms all over the world.
I'm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
I've been an attorney for 30 years, and I've worked in and led legal teams for the first 20 years of my career.
I owned a law practice in Baton Rouge and at the same time taught some of the nation's leading trial skill programs.
So how did I get here?
And why is this first premier podcast called breaking the rules?
When I was about two years out of law school, I was practicing law with my father in Baton Rouge, and we had a personal injury law practice, and he really wanted me to go to a conference that was happening in Robert, Louisiana, right outside of New Orleans, because Gerry Spence was going to be there.
And it was Gerry Spence's trial lawyers program.
And at that time, and they still do, they did what we would call regional workshops in different places in the country.
And I, as a young lawyer, didn't really know who Gerry Spence was, but he was one of my father's idols and I what a legend of a man.
And I had no idea how much meeting him would change the path of my life in so many ways.
So I was at this conference, and I was on the first morning sitting at breakfast, and there was an empty chair next to me.
And all of a sudden, Gerry Spence walks up and sits down next to me, and I'm going to tell you, my heart started beating really fast.
And, you know, the blood starts pumping in my ears.
And I was thinking, oh, my goodness, I hope he doesn't talk to me, because I don't know if I have something clever to say, and I don't want to say something that would make me seem like what in the world I was doing there.
And he began to talk to other people at the table.
So I have a moment just to breathe.
And then all of a sudden, he turned, and he looked at me with these eyes that are very piercing.
And he said in a booming voice, do you break the rules?
And I thought, what?
What does he mean, do I break the rules?
And if you remember, at that time, I'm a young lawyer, southern woman.
I've always been taught not to break the rules.
I'd just come out of an institution called law school.
That was all about following the rules.
And if you wanted to win, you followed the rules.
And learning law was about problem solving and legal reasoning.
Having the rule of law to determine the substantive rights of the parties comes regulations, et cetera.
Follow the rules.
That's what I'd been taught in my life.
Part of me knew the answer should be, yes.
Yes, sir, I break the rules.
But instead, I replied, no, sir.
And he paused for a moment, and he looked at me, and he said, if you don't break the rules, you will never win.
And unbeknownst to me at that time, very recently, there had been a New York Times article about Jerry that opened with a sentence that talked about that Gerry Spence and his adversaries agreed on at least one thing, that there were normal boundaries of acceptable trial conduct.
And then there are Gerry Spence's.
And I have spent the last 25 years since that first meeting with Jerry, figuring out how not following the rules was the key to success.
But the southern part of me would say, I like to think that I'm thinking outside the box, or, as a good friend of mine says, changing the conversation.
But it took me a while to get there.
And the fact that I was a slow learner about breaking the rules in this profession came at a cost to me, personally, mentally, emotionally, and physically, and really started to steal my joy and my fulfillment and my meaning and my purpose and my passion.
And I'm not alone.
One study shows that the majority of lawyers polled, if they had a chance, would not become lawyers again.
And well over half said that they would not recommend for their children to go to law school.
I wonder how many of you agree.
In this profession, we're four times as depressed as non lawyers and twice as likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
One study showed that out of 105 different professions that lawyers lead in the incidence of depression among members.
It's scary what happens to us in this business.
I know two lawyers personally who have committed suicide, and I know many who have alcohol and drug dependency.
So we think about it.
We come into the practice of law, and usually there's some kind of calling into that.
There's a hunger.
Some of us want to help people.
Some of us believe that we can really help in healing others and do that through the law, in speaking up and advocating and fighting for the underdog.
But there are a lot of unspoken, unwritten rules in this profession.
As our training started in law school, without us even really being aware of what was happening.
Year one, we're told to erase everything we know.
Second year, they teach you how to advocate for any position, regardless of what you think about it or feel about it personally.
And by the third year, they have you thinking like a lawyer.
Job well done.
You're learning to make airtight arguments in doing that.
Sometimes we're marginalizing the human experience.
You think a certain way when you start practice, at least what I did in southern Louisiana 30 years ago, you definitely had to dress a certain way.
We all look a certain way.
We walk into the courtroom.
We act a certain way when we're there.
And there's one unwritten rule that you learn in law school, and it becomes concrete pretty quickly.
It's about winning and what that means that you really have to understand that practicing law is about being in a battle.
Every time you have a client, you're going to battle for them.
You become the warrior.
It can be a brutal competition with long work hours.
The stress becomes something that is very normal beginning in law school and continuing to the practice.
I can remember the first round of finals in law school that I had to start taking sleeping pills months before because I couldn't sleep.
And the message came across that this is about you don't admit in this practice that you are weak.
You don't let that weakness show.
You don't even acknowledge it to yourself so that it doesn't seep out.
You develop a mask that suggests a certainty, an aggressiveness, a strength which you can really become confused with who you really are.
It's a conformity about not breaking the rules in this profession, a conformity masquerading is individuality and the rules of professionalism.
All these things add up with what we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to work and how we're supposed to show up.
And in the battle, it's, if you have a law practice, then it's about the survival of your business, it's the survival of your cases, it's the survival of you.
And it comes at a cost of keeping the game faced and hiding the fear.
Yet lawyers are imprisoned by their fear.
Every day I'm working with lawyers that we're really afraid.
We're afraid that our cases are going to get out of control.
We're afraid of looking foolish.
We're fearful of appearing weak.
Even continuing legal education courses can contribute by making lawyers more fearful that they are not up to date on the current practices or the myriad of number of things that can go wrong.
Feeling that our offices or cases are out of control is just part of it.
Right?
There's so many.
There was a list of fears that came from a survey that was done by the ABA in the profession.
And those sound things like I don't want to look foolish by asking certain questions.
I don't want to give my client bad news.
I'm really intimidated by the superiors in my firm, or seeming too nice, or being blamed for getting it wrong, or lacking the skill and the confidence due to limited trial experience, or afraid that our clients are going to really screw up and give false testimony or not testify.
Well, the failure to locate the smoking gun, these are all fears that were listed in this survey, and they're just the tip of the iceberg.
There's deadlines and billing pressures and client demands and long hours and changing laws and all other demands that combine to make the practice of law one of the most stressful jobs on the planet.
Throw in the rising business pressures and involving legal technologies, and if you had law school debts, there's just no wonder why.
Lawyers are stressed.
But we don't talk about it.
It stays hidden.
I actually had a male client of mine say, some of my best friends are lawyers, but I'm not going to sit down and talk to them about how I'm afraid or what I'm worried about, or that I'm going to lose this case and that I'm going to look foolish or I'm going to humiliate myself.
And that's stressful.
And what does that mean?
It means we feel anxiety.
Stress is the modern day predator.
It is killing us.
The fight or flight response that we stay in on a chronic basis is literally tearing us down.
The body dumps acid into the digestive system.
It shuts it down.
Heart rate increases.
Blood is shun it for spaces in your mind where you need to react to run or fight.
And today we see that the fight or flight response.
Again, let's hope we're not going to run out of the courtroom or hit our opposing counsel.
We stay in it, and we don't get out of it right.
It comes across that the modern fight is really aggressiveness, and the flight can be self sabotage.
And the freeze part of this is procrastination and withdrawal.
And the problem is that we don't go home at night and get out of it.
We've spent the day in some type of fight or flight response, and our bodies have dumped in an absorbed cortisol.
That makes it very difficult to sleep well.
And then we get up and we start it all over again the next day.
Being lawyers is not what we thought it would be when we went to law school.
Through the fear, we become disconnected.
So we become separated from our clients.
Lawyers lose touch with their hearts and their minds, and what happens is then we don't see our clients as whole people.
When we feel really a lot of fear and stress that we can't talk about, then we are separated from our family and our friends.
The stresses of law create a great deal of inner turmoil.
And an inability to express what is going on internally causes a painful sense of separation from the people that we care most about.
So the unspoken effects can be not only fatigue, but self doubt, inability to focus, that social withdrawal, loss of control, emotional exhaustion.
Under this, we have forgotten who we are under the mask, under the battle, the rule.
To win, to think a certain way, to look a certain way, to feel a certain way, is something we don't admit, but we all feel the pressure to follow it.
But if you really want to win, if you want to thrive instead of just surviving, you have to be outside the box.
You have to break the rules.
You have to learn to quiet the mind and the chaos and tune into the heart, to follow the heart, to become who you are, to get out of the jet lag of life and catch up with who you want to become, to cultivate an inner life, to connect with yourself and to find the meaning in what you do and know who you are and where you want to go.
This is what I have been spending the last 25 years figuring out and then helping others to do the same.
I was really fortunate, a couple of years after that first meeting with Gerry Spence, to be a part of the class of 2002 at the trial lawyers college.
And that experience changed my life forever.
And one of the things it did was it helped me to look at who I was.
And I really didn't know I was successful on the outside if you were looking at me.
I think at that point, I was probably about seven years into practicing law.
Like I said, I got to practice with my dad.
So I was very lucky because he threw me in the courtroom right away.
I was in the courtroom within the first month of practicing with him, and it was really scary.
And there was an extra pressure that I had practicing with my dad.
Right.
I wanted him to be proud of me.
I wanted to succeed, and I did.
I became a very good trial lawyer, and I have some amazing memories of trying cases with him.
That will always be some of the most fondest things, memories that I have.
But about seven years into my practice, I was tired.
A year before, I'd ended up in the emergency room after in a hearing, thinking I had a heart attack.
I wasn't, I didn't have, but my body was responding to stress in a way that I didn't understand.
And I was married, and I had a young child, and all of that added into it.
So I found myself in Wyoming, at the child Lawyers College, at the ranch in the middle of beautiful Wyoming, where the skies are endless.
And there's a reason that program, the reason that Jerry built that program there.
And it was so disconnected, right when I went to Chaw Lawyers College.
And I know there are many people who probably listened to this, lawyers that I've known for years, that I work with and still teach with in some ways, who all had life changing experiences there and will know part of this story, and it will be a different, you know, all of our stories a little different of walking away from there.
But part of the power was the disconnection that happened when you went there.
When I went there, there was no cell phones.
And if you wanted to call home, you used a pay phone, and you were there for almost three and a half weeks and really disconnected from the world.
And what you were exposed to was about discovering who you were.
And one of the exercises that really changed me, that is now something that I do on a regular basis, was to.
We got up really early in the morning, before daylight, well before daylight.
And on the ranch, there's a main barn, and downstairs were dormitory style rooms, and upstairs was a huge meeting room of this barna.
And everybody was instructed the night before that we were going to wake up at a certain time, and everybody would be in silence.
There'd be no talking.
And you just heard people stirring in the room, getting up.
I had a roommate.
We got dressed in silence, and then we all walked through the hall of the downstairs barn outside to take the staircase upstairs to the upstairs part of the barn, where the main meeting room is.
And it's cold and it's dark and it's quiet.
And all you hear are people shuffling through the gravel and then stomping up the steps, which are wooden, and into the main meeting space.
And then we all stand in a circle.
And Jerry talked to us about going out and to meet Mother Nature.
And he said something along the lines of, that we should go into the silence and listen to her and see what, if anything, she has to say to us.
And he talked about how we are harassed by noise in our lives, that we are attacked by its pollution in the cities.
We cannot escape it.
The sound of gasoline engines, the vibrations of airplanes whining, the incessant chatter of radio and television.
And even when you're outside at night, you hear people's air conditions, right?
Even in the house, there are sounds that never stop.
From maybe the voices of your family members to the noise of the machines that are in the house.
There's no way to escape all the noise in our lives.
And of course, it's not all about the noise on the external.
But he also was talking about all the noise that's in our heads, the incessant voices, that fear voice that we can never express.
And so he said that.
He instructs lawyers, and he calls them warriors.
It isn't that true?
Right.
We just talked about being in the battle.
He says that.
He calls them warriors, for they are warriors.
They fight for the rights of people against power.
And he instructed us that we should go into the hills that surround the ranch and to find a place that was ours, that could be ours.
Our place where you could see no other person and find a place to sit down and listen to the earth.
And he said, nothing here will harm you.
There are wild animals, the deer, the antelope, the coyotes.
He said they were all friendly.
But to find a place and to lie down on the earth and listen, and perhaps there will be a message.
Perhaps the warrior has something to say to mother earth.
And perhaps the warrior will ask questions like, what is the history of my life?
Who am I?
Where have I been all these years?
And when you hear the answers, perhaps he or she would have a better idea of the road ahead.
So the exercise was to ask the questions.
Who are you?
And where are you going to?
And I walked out of that barn with all of my other classmates, who were amazing trial lawyers from all over the country in the dark.
And I moved through the land until I found the place that I wanted to be.
Next to the wind river.
And the river, oh, gosh, the sound of the river will always speak to me from this memory.
Anytime I hear water, I think of this.
And I sat and I listened to the water and I listened to the wind and I closed my eyes and I had this incredible vision.
And in this vision there was this woman who was tired and old.
I was maybe 30 at this time, 31, somewhere around in there.
And I wasn't old, but in this vision I was old.
And this woman was tired and she looked at me and she said, help me.
And then I looked around in my mind and I saw her and I saw a little girl running and playing and I saw another woman who was loving and kind.
And what I knew was that they were all me.
But the one that was desperate was this old woman that was looking at me who said, help me.
And I remember it was so powerful that I didn't have a journal.
And I went back to the barna, my room, to get the journal and I went back and I wrote it all down and I didn't really have to because it's been 25 years and I can, er, let's see, 23, I guess, going on about 23 years ago.
And I can still see it vividly in my mind and feel what it felt like in my heart to look into her eyes.
And what it did was help me to recognize that I was losing myself and I needed to do something different and to discover and to connect and to listen and define who I was.
Who did I want to be?
I knew I couldn't continue down the path that I was doing.
I wasn't going to survive.
And so I began to search for ways to know myself, to become me ever since.
And connecting in with this inner part, with my heart.
We think, as lawyers that our most powerful weapon, as our mind, it is definitely a weapon we want to keep fine tuned, which we cannot do if we are always in chronic stress.
I know this now after spending years studying neuroscience and all types of psychology, of what the power of the mind and how to tap into it.
You cannot do it from that state.
But what's more powerful is learning to connect in and follow your heart.
And from the heart we connect in with others.
And learning to find myself that way and to follow the heart meant that I learned to know myself more.
And it made me a better lawyer, it made me a better mother, it made me a better sister, daughter.
It made me a better leader, because I believe that we lead in every one of the roles that we hold in life.
And when you learn to have a vibrant connection, like a vibrant inner life that nourishes you, it begins to nourish everything you do.
And you become everything you do is more of an expression of who you really are.
The most important work that we can do is to learn to show up as ourselves, when to learn who we are authentically and what makes us come alive.
And I've spent a lot of time studying this, y'all, a lot of time.
And I've spent a lot of time teaching.
And I've done everything from diving into psychodrama, which is one of the tools that is used in the trial lawyers college program, to studying, like I said, psychology, neuroscience, the power of the mind, but the power of the heart, that's even bigger.
And how our heart is always talking to our minds and understanding the power of the connection between the two.
And I've broken a lot of rules.
I've done things in a way that people around me were like, what are you doing?
And then people started to say, can you teach me to?
So that's what my work is about, is for learning how to break the rules of what society expects you to be, of what others expect you to be, of whatever profession that you're in, the roles that you can get trapped in, and to learn to step out of that and to be powerful in who you uniquely are.
One of my teachers talks about that.
We each have medicine to bring into the world.
And even if we do the same thing, if you practice the same law as somebody else or beef outside of the profession of law, it could be that two people are accountants or someone who takes care of a maintenance on a building.
It doesn't matter.
We all are called to something into the world.
We each have medicine to offer.
And even if I do the same thing as you, my medicine will not be the same as yours because I am uniquely me and you are uniquely you.
And we each have this as our gift to the world.
And so I want to help people to discover their own unique calling and their own passion and their expression of who they are and to step in and to be healthier, happier human beings having this experience in this beautiful planet called Earth.
So here's my tip for you and what I want you to think about as you walk away today from listening to this.
First, when was the last time that you really got disconnected?
When was the last time that you went out and sat on the earth and said, why am I here?
Where have I been?
Where do I want to go?
This is the practice that I keep going back to.
And every time I disconnect from the world and tap in and listen, something new springs up and a new adventure happens and a new direction and a certainty.
And why I'm here, I want that for you.
So I'm going to challenge you to find a way to disconnect and ask the questions about where have you been?
Where do you want to go?
Who are you?
What will be your impact and your legacy in the world?
What's your medicine?
Second, I want you to think about what rules are you following that really aren't serving you?
Are there things that you're saying yes to out of expectations from others?
Are you saying yes to something because it's just something you've always done.
It's a role that you're in.
Oh, I said yes to this.
People expect it.
I don't know how to get out of it because I agreed to it.
Where can you say, you know, this doesn't serve me anymore and I'm going to step out of this.
I'm going to break this rule.
I'm going to say no.
I challenge you to find that.
Because I think even after 25 years of doing this work, of digging deep, I still find places where I might be following a rule that isn't really what my heart says I'm called to be.
So what rule can you break today?
There's a quote by Rumi that says, forget safety.
Live where you fear to live, destroy your reputation, and be notorious.
And I say, do it mindfully, following your heart.
So I'm really looking forward to sharing with you in upcoming episodes some of the practices that I use and teach, but also some of the amazing people that I've crossed paths with who are doing things differently, who are breaking the rules, and who are thriving and changing the world and leaving an impact and a legacy in a different way.
I really look forward to the next step with you.
Thanks for listening in.
And if you want to know more about what we do to help lawyers and their teams because we're all about the people and helping people to be holistically healthier and happier, then check out Mind Over Law, and I'll see you soon.
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