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 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 Law podcast. I'm going to talk to you today about people and we're going to start first with looking at the idea of people, our energies. Right?
Who I am, what state I'm in, how I show up in the world affects other people. We are energy beings. So we're always talking about how we can be higher performing at the next level.
And today I want you to consider that one of the things that you really should look at auditing in your life are the people that you are around, the people that you allow to influence you. There is the quote. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
And I like to edit that and think about you are the average of the five people that you allow to influence you the most. They are a part of your environment. And your environment is very important to your energy.
They are the energy in your environment and your environment. People can really shape your growth or inhibit it. Right?
If you want to level up, we have to audit the people around us. So I'm in my birthday month of November as I record this and I always try to take the month of my birthday to really look at where have I been this year, what experiences have I had? How do I want to do things differently next year?
How do I want to grow? And one of the things that I audit is I look at the relationships in my life and I'm looking for am I surrounded with the right people? The questions that you can ask yourself is that you want to look at are you surrounded with people who have values in alignment with yours?
And if you're not, then why are you, if you're not surrounded with people who have the values in alignment with you, why are they around you? This is very important. I was looking recently at a friendship that I had and talking about what I wanted to do next and what I wanted to accomplish next year is I really try to set very big, audacious goals.
And this person's response, like I could literally feel it, even though they didn't say anything, was the energy that they were giving me was, that's just crazy to think that you're going to do that. And I've had people tell me I'm crazy before. As I was closing out my law practice to step into building this business where I could really help and have an impact in a different way.
That was very heart following my heart. There were a lot of naysayers in my life, and I had to really learn not to listen to them. If I had listened to them, I'd still be a lawyer.
And that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't be on my life's purpose. And so I want to ask you, are there people around you that you are allowing to influence you, that are holding you back? That are the naysayers, that are the ones that are like, yeah, that's just crazy.
How can you limit those people, right? How and how they influence you? And that.
So my example of telling you about, sharing with this person about my goals for next year is one of my core values is to always be learning and growing. And then the flip side of that is that I want to teach, right? I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to heal, and I want to teach that that's part of my medicine in the world.
I know this. So his values, this person's values were not in alignment with mine because they don't believe in the same type of pushing yourself to learn and grow, right? And I had to tell myself I needed to make sure that I kept a boundary around that energy because I didn't want to let it limit me.
So think about the people in your life. Are they in value alignment with who you are? And if they're not, how are you going to limit that?
One of the things that we really need to ask ourselves about the people that are around us is do they believe in you? Do they push you? Do they believe in you and believe in the possibilities?
So this is important for you and the relationships that you allow around you. But it's also important if you're a leader of a team. We have to be very clear as leaders of the values of our organizations and the values of the people that we want people on our team to be in alignment with.
If you don't get this right, you will suffer because when you hire people in who don't have the same values are not in alignment with what your core values are for your mission. They won't believe in you, they won't believe in where you're going and they will inhibit that and it becomes toxicity. So when I'm working with teams, they're always talking about how do I have a culture that's for high, for pouring teams.
You have to be really clear on your values and that the people that you bring into your environment, which is your organization, need to be in alignment with those values. And one of the core things that we do when we're hiring people for teams that we work with and you know, we work with organizations, law firms and other organizations all over the country and we do help them with hiring and we have a whole process around that. But one of the part of that process is to look at whether or not someone has a growth versus fixed mindset.
And a growth mindset is someone who always believes that there is the next level that you can get to that you always have the ability to learn and grow. A fixed mindset doesn't believe that. And if you don't hire people with a growth mindset, they will inhibit your ability to grow.
So really asking yourself those questions, the second thing, the way to audit the people in your life is to really look at and ask yourself, does this person contribute to me? Does this person relationship with me? Does it fuel me?
Does it enhance me or does it drain me? We all know those people that are just so negative, right? With someone who's always talking about what is going to go wrong in the worst case scenario or seeing the worst view of people.
We all have people like that that we've met and it's real important to limit their influence on you. So if someone is draining, usually they are going to be people who are more negative than a positive outlook. And they usually oftentimes live in the past.
And they have what I call a victim mindset, which basically means that nothing that happens is their responsibility or anything that they could take accountability for. Everything is someone else's responsibility or someone else's fault. So this is very important not just again in your personal relationships, but in your team members.
If you have team members who have a negative outlook on the world, the lens that they put onto the world, usually you will see victim talk and victim mentality. So that is like if you ask them why they left their last job and they complain about and talk negatively about their last position, as opposed to how they were looking to grow. You will hear all kinds of victim talk.
It'll be, you know, this boss did this, this boss didn't do this, this team member didn't do this. That's victim language. It's always looking to someone else.
And then you just want to ask people about how they handle challenges and look at their answers. Are they looking for solutions? Are they talking about the ways that they grew from that?
Are they talking about strengths that they developed or weaknesses that they learned about, as opposed to talking about and blaming all the negative about something that happened? What's the positive? I'll tell you a story that really touched me recently.
I have a practice of doing a gratitude practice. I've had gratitude practice for almost 30 years. It's one of the things as a young lawyer that I learned could instantly shift myself state if I practice gratitude for whatever was right and to really focus in.
I try to do the top three things in the last 24 hours. I do that every morning. But I've kept a gratitude journal from time to time.
And I found the other day a gratitude journal from 2001. At the time, my daughter was 6 years old, 7 years old. And in that journal she has there's this six, seven year old girl.
Her gratitude list, I just loved finding it. It was everything from that she was grateful for her scooter to she's grateful for her teachers, she's grateful for her friends, her room for food. I mean, she really thought about all the things.
But that ties into a story that recently she called and told me about. She works for a venture capitalist company, capital company that is out of New York, that is, you know, a very high performing team. And she is stepping into some leadership roles and has had a lot of challenges in the last year that have really helped her to grow.
And she recently had a meeting with her supervisor, her vice president, who said to her, you know, I just want to make a reflection to you first that you are one of the most positive people I've ever met. And my daughter's response, her name was Kali. Kali said, oh my goodness, my mother would be so proud.
Because my mother is the positivity queen. And I just want to reflect on that for a moment because I do believe that we have such an ability, if you're a parent, to like shape who our children become. And I have made a focus of gratitude in my life, but also looking at things in a positive way and teaching her that I'm telling you this not just for your personal Growth, but for you as a leader, that if you can look for people who have a positive lens on the world, they will shape your team in a different way, your growth will go a different direction and faster.
And that's basically what this team leader was saying to Callie. Was that your attitude? You take everything in stride.
If we throw a challenge at you, you're willing to accept it with a great attitude. That's what you're looking for. So are the people around you an energy drain, or are they someone who fuels you?
Do they have a positive outlook and growth, outlook on life? Do they focus on the future or do they focus on the past? You really want to look at that as a leader.
The final thing I'm going to ask you to consider is to really think about the ways that you want to grow. So I'm thinking about how I want to grow in the next year. Thinking about the ways that you want to grow, do you have the people in your life who could help you with that?
You want to seek out people who are where you want to be or are striving for similar goals. And these can be mentors, it could be peers. It just wanted to be those that help to challenge you to think bigger.
So your circle should reflect where you're going, not just where you've been. And we really try to build this in in our communities. We have a leadership community for women leaders that every month meets in two different ways.
And one is a way that we're all growing together and learning different leadership skills. And the second way is being basically a mastermind to each other and helping each other to see the possibilities around challenges and to grow. I not only run those communities, but I have a community that I belong to that has business owners that are eight and nine figures.
It's the place I'm going, and I'm surrounded by people who are helping me to think big. And this is a mastermind community that I belong to. And it is inspiring to see people at that level and to look at what they do every day, how they think, the practices that they do that make a difference to get them there.
You want to surround yourself with the people who are seeking to go where you want to be, or they're already there and you want to learn from them. You want to step into those communities. If you'd like to know more about our leadership community, all you need to do is just give a message to lexleyxleyoverton.com that's my email.
You can reach out directly to me. I love to talk about anything that has to do with helping you to be the best you so really think about the people in your life. Are they helping you to be at your next level of greatness?
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. Don't forget to hit subscribe and let us know what you think.
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Until next time, Remember, with intention, anything is possible.
