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, to 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 leadership journeys, and their legal practice wisdom.
I'm Lexley 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.
Welcome to today's Mind Over Lawpodcast, where we're going to talk about how to harness the power of energy management for peak performance.
So I'm really excited about talking with you guys today about this topic because it really is my passion.
I believe that everything that success and happiness and fulfillment in our lives comes down to energy management.
So we want to know how to harness the power of your energy so that you can access peak performance, which means that if you're at a of peak performance and you're at a state of well being, which is, I think, a continuous process towards thriving across all of life's dimensions.
It's really about developing a sense of meaningfulness and purpose in all aspects of our life, not just in, if you're a lawyer, not just in your law practice, but all across, all levels of what you're engaged in in life.
And it's really important for us to be talking about well being and discussing that in the legal field.
I know that for me personally, as a young lawyer, I think I was like 30 years old when I ended up in an emergency room after a hearing thinking I was having a heart attack.
And really what it came down to was I was just overwhelmed.
I was stressed out, I was working long hours, and my body responded to that.
There's an energy drain and an overwhelm.
And my body said, oh, we're going to respond to that in a way that's going to make you stop.
And it was a wake up call for me.
And I'm sure if you're listening to this, unfortunately, I can say that I know personally three lawyers who committed suicide because of being unhappy and the stress of what they were experiencing in their profession, and it can be different, y'all.
So many lawyers come to me and they're talking about that.
They're just exhausted or they're overwhelmed, or they really don't look forward to getting out of bed in the morning.
And in fact, a lot of them dread it.
And I'm here to tell you, it can be different.
It really can.
You really could wake up and just be very excited about everything that you're doing and that what you're creating.
And it really comes down to knowing how to be a healthier person first.
And being a healthier person makes you a healthier lawyer.
I mean, we really know that as a profession, more depressed than our non lawyer counterparts.
And we are higher levels of suicide, and we are higher levels of addiction and drug problems, you know, addiction to alcohol or drugs or even overworking in some cases.
That all of those things affect our mental capacities to be really good.
They impair our executive functioning, the part of their brains that we really need to access to be good lawyers.
They impair our memory, our attention, and our problem solving.
So my goal is, it really is, my mission is to help you to be a healthier, happier lawyer in a holistic way.
And so I'm going to talk to you today about what I believe are the key steps to stepping in, to being a healthier, happier lawyer.
And that is all about energy awareness.
And I want you to think about energy as two things.
Energy as your state, which is your physical and emotional state.
And energy is your story.
And everything that we focus on, whether it's the feelings of past or present or future, we assign a meaning to that.
That meaning leads us to have an emotion.
And emotion really drives the state.
So the meaning that we assign, which is the story, drives the state, which is the physical and emotional state.
So if you think of yourself, you're really an energy being.
We wake up each day and we have a certain amount of energy.
And that is based upon several different factors, like the amount of sleep that you had or the amount of stress that you've been under.
And I want you to think about that.
You actually can take control of that when you have awareness that you are an energy being that you can bring in, and you actually can do preventive practices to help, to charge you, to help to renew you, to help to prevent leading to burnout and health challenges and diminished performance, which leads to, to malpractice and unhappy clients and loss of income and all the things that are associated with that.
So if we're basically energy systems that expend and renew energy, and we wake up each day with a certain amount of stored energy in that inner battery, how much energy you have varies from day to day.
And you can increase the amount of energy you have or accumulate or store, and you can learn how to recharge on the go so that you can have more energy and the situations that arise that cause for you to lose a lot of energy.
So that might be something very stressful in the moment, or it might be a long term stress, like preparation for trial, and then the amount of energy that you use when you're in trial.
And I just want you to think about this all makes sense, right?
Like, if I am very low energy, and then how do I respond?
Or how do you respond when there's a situation that frustrates you?
Not well, as my 16 year old always say, when I'm really anxious, he said, that's a whole lot of energy, mom.
Meaning that I'm really a lot of anxiety.
The more energy you have, the greater ability you have to maintain your composure and stay in charge of your reactions and the ability to perceive things more clearly, which helps you to be more intelligent about how to handle situations.
So energy management is all about what's the intelligence about how you use your energy and replenish your energy reserves.
The more intelligently you manage your energy expenditures and recharge your inner battery, the more energy you have and the greater energy you have to self regulate and to perform at your best.
What we often see is constant energy expenditures without the balance of adequate rest of recovery, which leads to burnout and errors and health challenges and diminished performance.
So what I want to talk about today is looking at the big picture of yourself as an individual, as a leader, and then looking at managing energy.
And energy state affects the performance of teams, of anyone that you're working with.
So we're going to start with just this big picture idea of life, of looking at.
If we say that energy is about where we put our focus, it's the motivating force that drives everything.
And there's the physical, there's a visible energy, which is like the things that you can see, taste, hear, feel, right?
And then there's the invisible, which are the things that you're thinking, and the emotions that you have.
Those thoughts and those emotions are very, very powerful energy, even if they are invisible.
We can learn to shift both of those.
So it starts the very first step, and there's going to be two steps here, but I'm going to talk about how that applies to you as an individual and to you as a leader when you're working with a team or working with your client.
I think of leader as every role in our lives we are a leader in.
I'm a leader as a mother, I'm a leader as a sister, I'm a leader as a daughter, I'm a leader as a leader of my team, I'm a leader in my role as a teacher, I'm a leader in my role as a consultant.
So it's not just about leading a team you're a leader in and I'm a leader in any role that I have with a client.
Client.
So big picture awareness first.
So energy awareness.
So who are you and where are you going?
I want you to know and what your magnetic north is, what's your compass, and what that really comes down to when we know is to be very fulfilled and to feel like your life has meaning.
And that gives you more energy and inspiration and motivation.
It's important to really know what is your purpose, what's your why.
When you know this, it gives your life direction.
This involves self discovery and introspection and understanding what truly matters to you.
If you've heard of my story in the very first podcast that we put out, this is something that I think is a continuing learning journey.
The self discovery of who we are and where we want to go and what's the impact we want to have in the world.
But it's very necessary.
If you don't have a clear life vision, it's like you're just taking action, you're just passing time, can be very aimless, susceptible to being led by others, and you can become really feeling unsettled and restless and anxious right to the point where you get to a crisis point.
So you want to think about what really matters to you and what are you optimizing your life for?
If I said I want you to be a better, healthier lawyer, a better, healthier human, what is that for?
What's the point?
The point is not about making money, y'all, by the way.
It's about having a richer life.
And money is just a tool to help with that so we can really think about an exercise.
And how do you find that magnetic north is really understanding what your values are?
And I think core values are really the compass to everything.
It helps you to define the direction by helping you to know what you want to say yes to, what you should say no to, because it's not in alignment with who you are and who you want to be.
So your values will drive your behavior, and they'll reflect the energy of your deepest dreams.
They will include what matters most how you want to live, and they become your personal guidance code for everything that you do.
So by gaining clarity about your values, you gain clarity about yourself and really about the priorities, and you can stay focused in alignment.
So, an example is a question that's really important is what do you want to stand for?
What's most important in your life?
If I said to you, what is something that is a personal value to you that you must honor or else a part of you dies, what would that be?
As your values will become the underlying force in your life that magnetic north.
So I'll give you an example.
I've spent some time and I do this exercise with any client that works with me and definitely within our leadership group, because we're always thinking about how we're leading our lives and values, the core that can help to be the direction of that.
And so one of my core values words is to have connection.
The word connection for me, for my value definition.
And yours would be different if that was your word.
For me, it's first living in a way that I honor my connection with everything else that I know, that my thoughts and my words and my actions have an impact upon other people.
And so I want to live in integrity.
And my second part of what's valuable to me and connection, it's very important to me to build spaces where people are connected, have communities where we support one another.
The practice of law is lonely.
I really want, and I am in my work, creating communities where we are supporting one another, whether that's reflecting and holding space for what needs to shift and or cheering each other on.
So that's one of my core value words.
Another one is learning.
And I have a hyphen there.
It's learning, teaching.
So I always want to be thinking about the next thing that I can learn.
How can I expand?
How can I grow?
That also helps me to put a lens on what's happening in my life.
I'm always asking, what am I learning from this?
What am I gaining from this?
How am I growing in this?
How am I healing in this challenge?
And then whatever I learn, it's a part of my values to really what's important to me in my life and how I want to make an impact is to teach that.
And that's one of the reasons I'm doing this podcast.
It gives me an opportunity to teach more about what I know are powerful practices to help us to be healthier and happier.
So it's important to really think about your purpose and your why, because you can't reach your full potential without it.
And you want to think about this, just not as an individual, but as a leader.
So to really inspire others is what we want to do when we lead and you're in your business, it could be your mission statement, your core focus.
It's the why you do what you do.
People don't follow you because of what you do.
They follow you because of why you do it.
And so it's really important to know what that core focus is and the work that you do and use that as an internal guiding mechanism to keep you really laser focused on where you want to go, which is also, again, way beyond money.
And you want to build your dreams so big that your team's dreams and goals can fit with inside of it.
So the second part of energy awareness and a practice that I think is very important, and I try to do this at least twice a year, definitely do it with my clients twice a year, is, I believe that energy awareness is role awareness.
So what I mean by role is that's the ways that we spend our energy and the labels that we put on that.
So I have a role as a mother.
I have a role as a daughter.
I have a role as a sister.
I have a role as a leader.
I have as a role as a teacher.
I have a role as a consultant.
All of these are ways that I choose to spend my energy, and we evaluate.
We.
I want you to think about the rules that you're in because there's some unusual ones, right?
Not unusual, but there are other ones that.
I'm also the chef in my house.
For a long time, I was the homework queen managing homework and the grocery shopper, which I don't do that anymore cause I don't like to do it.
So I, you know, I do it in a way that makes it more efficient for me by ordering groceries.
But we want to look at the roles that we're in because we can really get caught in them.
We can get trapped by them if we're not careful.
They can become our identity.
And we really want to decide whether a role is empowering or disempowering.
Remember, this is all about energy.
Is it fuel your energy, or does it drain your energy?
So what roles are you playing?
Are they still serving you?
Are you in them because of expectations of others?
What roles are you in that are draining, that you want to shift, that you want to stay in and make them more empowering?
What roles do you want to get rid of that they are draining?
They are not for you, you want to delegate them, you want to eliminate them.
Your energy is finite.
Now we have practices and we're going to talk about it.
One of them is this awareness practice of constantly reflecting where you're putting your energy and deciding if that's where it needs to be is very, very important.
So think about those questions.
And then I want to move into.
If we think about that, we're talking about state, which is how we physically and emotionally feel.
And then the story, which is story is the thoughts that drive the emotions, that drives the state that we live in.
We know that emotions are the primary drivers of activity in our major body systems, and they also determine the engagement and our life's events, what motivates us and what we care about.
Our emotions have a powerful effect on our systems, meaning there's a really strong physiological response, including activity in the nervous and hormonal systems.
We typically experience a wide range of emotions every day that can have a significant effect on our physiology, our health and our performance, including emotions that we're not really conscious of.
So, for example, emotions such as impatience or frustration or anger set into motion a cascade of over 1400 biochemical and hormonal changes that accelerate the aging process, impair your memory and mental function, diminish your performance, and you deplete your resilience.
On the other hand, emotions such as patience and calm and collaboration and gratitude set into motion a different cascade of biochemical and hormonal changes that lead to increased longevity and vitality and improved memory and enhanced performance and creativity and increased resilience.
So what I want you to think about is what is your emotional home?
We all have one.
There's usually three or four emotions that are our home base that are familiar.
So if I said to you in the last week, what are some of the emotions that you've had, which one seem the ones that you keep repeating?
Because we have a home base, I would imagine that most of you would have some kind of emotion that is similar to anxiety or maybe even frustration, fear in some way that brings in that anxiety.
And there also may also be a home base of gratitude or joy.
Right?
So for me, I'm very aware.
I tried to be very aware on a daily basis, thinking about my energy and where I am and how I can increase that.
And am I in the best state to handle certain challenges in my life and trying to be in the best state for that?
I want to go into conversations that could be challenging and my best mental, emotional, physical state so that I can handle that better.
And I would say, in the last six months.
So we're halfway into this year in 2024, when we're recording this podcast that I've had a lot of emotions that have to do with anxiety and the feeling of things being out of control.
And that's not normally my home base, but the challenges right now in my life, I have a.
A family member who is really struggling with health.
And for me it's very ungrounding and brings in a lot of anxiety.
So I've really had to fight to be in a space of seeing that in a different way and keeping my state more positive, keeping my state in a place where I want to be that's not draining or disempowering.
And one of the things I did to do that was I decided to take a break from my life for two weeks and went to Peru and had some time in the outdoor to ground and remember and reflect.
And you might not need to do something so drastic.
I'm just giving you where I am.
And one of the things that I did to recognize what I was struggling with.
But at the same time, I will tell you that although anxiety has been present, at the same time, I really do have that my home base, and it's my home base that's very familiar, that I've worked to be, that space is the emotional state of gratitude.
And I really want my internal voice to be ruled by gratitude.
Some days I get it better than others.
And they're definitely practices that can help all of us to do that.
So one question is to ask yourself, what's your emotional base?
What's your home base?
What three or four emotions do you live in?
And start to look at how you can shift those, if those are disempowering.
And then we look at what are the thoughts that are our home base.
It is said that we have somewhere between 60 to 70,000, maybe a little bit more, depending on how much your mind is racing thoughts a day, and that those thoughts that you have today will, 80% of those, about 85% will repeat tomorrow.
So what's your story?
What's your most repeated thought?
Because whatever that is, that's the thing that's driving your state and the familiarity of the emotional home base that you have.
So my most repeated thought around the anxiety that I've had is just the idea of loss of this loved one that would bring in sadness and it would bring in anxiety and.
Or I could change that thought and be where I do some practices of being in the present moment with that loved one.
And being in gratitude, which puts me in a totally different state.
So what's your most repeated thought with the story?
That's your home story right now.
And now I'm going to go into some of the tips that I'm going to help you with that are going to be the energy practices that you can do to shift that.
I always want you to walk away from listening to me with some very practical daily practices that you can do.
So the two steps, the overall two steps for well being, one is awareness, and then two are practices.
It takes practice to train our system to be in a different state.
It takes practice to train our systems and our minds to be in a different story.
We are creatures of habit, and we are creatures of what is familiar.
So it takes intention, it takes discipline.
When people come to work with me and they want to change, I say, I know that if you have the intention that you really want to do something different with your life and you want to feel different, as long as you will instill some practices into your daily life, that you will have massive change.
And I can say that with great confidence.
I've lived it, but I've also taught thousands of people how to do it.
So I want you to think about that.
Our minds are the most powerful weapon that we have at our disposal.
It's our greatest tool, but it also can stand in the way of us overcoming adversity and achieving extraordinary accomplishments.
If we're not careful and disciplined and learn to control our minds, if we don't control our minds, we'll forever be limited, a slave to its limitations.
So what are some of the energy practices that you can do to shift your state, to manage your state and to shift your story?
And I want to just tie this into if you work with other people.
So in all the work that we do in team trainings, we know to have high performing teams, we have to hive high performing individuals and high performing individuals or individuals who are coherent, they know how to manage their state.
We know that if I am a team member and I come in and I am in a very incoherent, anxious, frustrated, aggravated, angry state, that I will affect everybody else that I encounter.
That's that whole connection, value of living.
But recognizing that if I can manage my state, that I can actually help and have an impact on the people around me, my team, my clients.
So I think of these daily practices.
It's preventive.
They're the things that will charge your battery.
They're the things that will help you to have more resilience so the first is just having, using your breath, because your breath is with you wherever you go.
So what we know is that if we take long, slow, deep breaths, we actually change the physical state.
We change the physical state from that fight or flight, from those hormonal and physiological changes that are happening that are actually depleting us.
And it simply is by breathing deeply.
So I would give you a practice.
The simplest that I can teach is a boxed form of breathing where you breathe in for a count.
I do it account of seven.
Breathe in for a count of seven.
You hold it in for a count of seven.
You breathe out for a count of seven.
And you hold your breath out for count of seven.
And you repeat.
If you do that ten times, you will feel different.
And so when I say a count of seven, just do it with me right now, wherever you are.
You could be anywhere doing anything.
And do this breath practice that can shift you instantly.
So we can breathe in.
123-4567.
Hold 234567.
Exhale 234567.
Hold 234567.
And then you would repeat even three times can shift you into a more coherent state.
Second, I want you to think about empowering your mornings and your evenings.
The morning is the time that you set the intention, you set the state, you set the story for the day.
The evening is a way to have reflection in an evening practice, reflection, but also to restore your state at the end of the day so that you wake up the next day with more energy in that battery.
So in a morning practice, one of the things I think is most important is to have some reflection time to ask yourself, first off, what are you grateful for if you do nothing else but had a morning practice that just said, what am I grateful for in the last 24 hours?
Because that makes you be more minute in your thinking.
So to be grateful for the little things that have happened in the last 24 hours is very powerful.
We know that research shows us that gratitude has a range of benefits that improve your mental health, build stronger relationships, that we have greater life satisfaction.
There's one study that just the simple practice of writing a letter of gratitude to someone lifted increased happiness and life satisfaction for participants for weeks after they did it.
So if you just would take a time to do a gratitude practice in the morning, it will increase your motivation and your productivity in the day.
It has a profound effect on how we approach our work.
We know that participants who regularly engage in a journaling practice of expressing gratitude for their work are more likely to be motivated and get engaged in the task than those that don't.
And studies show that employees who receive gratitude from their supervisors have higher levels of job satisfaction and productivity.
So a few ideas for gratitude practice in the morning and or the evening.
You could do this.
In either part, it will shift your story to build what you step into for the day.
It also shifts the story of what happened for the day, so that the day is more of replenishing, that is then draining and looking at what went wrong, what went right today, and what could go right today.
So you can start with a gratitude journal.
That's a great way.
What if you made an intention of saying thank you to ten people a day in some way?
Expressing gratitude over an email or a text or a phone call or a handwritten note?
One of the most powerful practice I can think of is when you get really stressed out, is just stopping what you're doing.
The very first thing I would do is do a breathing practice, because we need to shift the physiological state.
When we do that, then we can shift the mental state with gratitude.
And if you stop and make yourself be grateful for something, it shifts the anxiety.
It cannot be in both.
It cannot be an anxiety and gratitude at the same time.
There's a simple ways to build that in, in the morning.
I think that what's very, very empowerful is knowing how to train your mind in other ways.
And the most life changing for me has been meditation practice.
And don't run away.
If you've tried meditation and you're like, no way, that's not for me.
I have taught thousands of people how to meditate.
What I want you to know is, if you've tried, you've only tried one way or two ways.
I want you to think about.
Meditation is like the word athletics.
Underneath athletics, there are many different types of sports.
There are many, many different types of meditation.
And meditation is perhaps the most important tool we have to harness the power of the mind, to cultivate peace and well being and to increase our productivity.
The breathing practice that we just did of counting to seven and breathing in and holding your breath and breathing out is a meditative practice.
So it's not just about sitting and thinking that you have to have yourself without thoughts.
It's the job of your mind to think.
What we want to do is to have awareness of those thoughts.
And are those thoughts empowering or disempowering?
What's the story?
When you start to listen and be a witness to your thoughts, you start to realize the story that you're living in.
You start to realize the story home base, the emotion home base that you're in, and you definitely find the most repeated thought.
So meditation practice can look very different.
And maybe that there's a mindfulness practice like following the breath is an easy one.
Even doing gratitude can be a meditative experience.
I want you to think about that.
If you walked outside and walked mindfully and really took in just your five senses of what you were seeing, what you were feeling with physical touch, what are the colors?
What are the smells?
What are the sounds?
That is a meditative practice that brings you into the present moment.
That is very, very powerful in shifting you out of anxiety.
I'll link in the show notes for you, a series of links to audios that you can listen to, and also some written meditative practices, practices that are journaling practices that can help you to start to train your mind, to manage and empower your state, and manage and empower your story.
Finally, I would say that in a morning practice, it's very important to set very clear goals for the day.
And I'm not talking about a to do list that is a thousand items long that brings in nothing but anxiety but asking yourself, what is the most important thing to accomplish today?
Or the top three things, or what are the things that are the must dos?
Because there are appointments or there are commitments.
When you look at your actual to do list, today is your must dos.
That there is an appointment or commitment or a deadline.
And that's the definition of what must be done today.
You'll find that that list is usually about three items, and that helps the brain to relax and not be in anxiety.
Before you begin, I think the questions that we ask ourself in the morning are very powerful in stepping up into how we see the day.
So I can look at today as a day full of challenges, or I could look at today's day full of opportunities.
I also think that when it comes to our work, that we can shift the power of our motivation intrinsically by looking at the gratitude for the opportunity.
Today.
I get to work with people.
I get to connect with people.
I get to make an impact.
I get to help.
I get to serve as opposed to I have to do.
This story is so powerful.
The way that you shape the questions that you ask yourself can be empowering or disempowering.
Why do I have to do this today?
And instead of what do I get to do today?
What am I going to learn today?
Instead of what am I going to be burdened with today?
What opportunities are here instead of what obstacles are here.
So practicing building in awareness of the questions that you can ask yourself in the morning.
One of the ones that I love in a morning practice is how am I winning?
Huh?
And I love what am I going to learn today?
And I like the question also of how will I connect today?
What connections will I build?
And that could be connection with myself, in connection with others.
All right, so I hope this is helpful for you in getting you to think about what is some of the big pictures of looking at the driving forces underneath that can help you to really be fine tuned and having clear direction and really defining the story that you want to live, living it in a healthier, happier way.
Thanks for listening thanks for listening to today's episode of mind over law.
We hope that you're walking away inspired and ready to embrace your life and law practice in a more holistic, healthier, happier way.
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