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.
Hi, I'm Lexlee Overton and welcome to today's Mind Over Law podcast. Today in a reflective mode. It's the end of the year and I've already put all the things in place to look at next year goals and strategies.
Been working with all the teams that we work with, helping the leaders to do the same. But I think it's important at this time of the year that besides you're looking to plan ahead that there has to be a little bit of reflection to look at where you've been this year. So I wanted to give you some as I've looked back on the year, the greatest lessons, rules, beliefs that I've learned this year.
I wanted to share my top ten with you. So the first one is, as leaders, our greatest responsibility is to inspire greatness and others. Our greatest responsibility is to inspire greatness and others.
So I'm going to encourage you that if you're a leader and you're feeling frustrated with your team and you're not sure how to get people fully engaged and people don't seem to be all in, I want you to step back and start to think about how do you inspire greatness in the people around you? This message of caring has been shown in a Gallup poll that says when we show that we care about people, that's the most important powerful driver of engagement. And 70% of employee engagement is driven by direct managers.
So there's questions of starting to ask yourself as a leader, how can I bring out what's best in this person? Where are their strengths? How are they unique and what about how I'm leading maybe limiting that?
I think as leaders that we always have to be looking at ourselves 1st. And when I talk about being a leader, I'm talking about if you're a leader of a team or thinking about any role in your life that you're a leader. So I think of myself as a leader, as a mother, and I'm thinking with my children who are vastly different ages.
I have one that's almost 30 and my son is almost 17. But for both of them, I think about and ask myself, the question is, how can I inspire the greatness within them? So it's not just about leading the people on your team, it's about leading the people in your life.
So how are you showing up to inspire greatness in others? The second top lesson that it was really reinforced for me this year is at the core of every soul, at the core of every human being, is a deep, undeniable yearning to be truly seen, to be deeply heard and wholeheartedly celebrated for what makes us unique. Everybody wants to be seen and heard and to be acknowledged.
And so this applies to your personal relationships and it applies to your clients. You know, a lot of client dissatisfaction that I see between lawyers and their clients could be cured if people slow down enough to truly see and hear. And then you have where the different spaces opened up between two people.
But that's true in your personal relationships and conversations. So a reflection question is to ask yourself, have you really been present with people and who's helped you to feel singing and heard and celebrated this year? It's a great practice to think about the people who've been strongly in our lives over a period of time and then to slow down and reach out and give gratitude to them.
But when we bring this back to teams, engaged team members will do three times the work of a disengaged team member. And one of the keys to having engaged team members is regularly giving them feedback on how they uniquely contribute to the mission, to your mission, and to the goals of the the company as a whole. People need to be seen, heard, and uniquely celebrated.
The third truth for me this year is the story you tell yourself and the beliefs you hold shape the path of your journey. Choose them wisely because they become your compass, the story you tell yourself. Here's a key question.
What story are you telling yourself about your life? What story are you telling yourself about your life? What story did you tell yourself predominantly in this last year?
So I try to start the year with a word for the year, and that word is an energy that will define the story as long as I use it and I remember it. I use it as a compass. So last year my word was magic.
I want it to me that that meant that I wanted to live in a way where I was present in my life with my clients, with my team, with an open to with my children, with my family and open to the experience of magic shows up every day. This is living in the state of awe. Like, it's amazing to be in this world and there's so much that comes in on a daily basis that we could be in.
I'm in awe of technology. I often feel inept with it, but I am in awe of what technology can do. And the fact that I can be speaking to you here, and I'm in Baton Rouge and you may be hundreds of miles or thousands of miles away and you're hearing this message.
I'm in awe of that. So the story that I started with last year was I'm going to live in a place of awe. And it unfolded so much magic in my life holding the lens that way.
I've already chosen my word for the year, for 2025, and it's in power. So if I was, I ask you the question that if you chose a word for the year, it would represents the energy you want to show up in your life. It represents the energy that you want to hold with other people.
It will become your compass on how to answer questions in your life. So I can ask myself on a daily basis with the word empower, Am I doing things to empower my mind? Am I doing things to empower my body?
Am I doing things to empower my relationships, my conversations, my connections? You see how it becomes a guide? Should I do ex event?
Will it empower me? Will it empower my clients? Will it give me the ability to empower others?
And if so, the answer is going to be yes. So what's the story you're going to tell yourself about your life? What's the word that's going to be your compass this year?
And brings me to the fourth truth that I really have experienced in 2024. And that is that the antidote to fear is service. The antidote to fear is service.
When we shift our focus from ourselves to uplifting others, courage and purpose take its place. So when we've shift our focus from ourselves, our own fear, and focus on others, then courage and purpose take the place of fear. I experienced this a couple of times this year when I walked into different workshops and to a place that I wasn't completely in control, didn't know exactly the audience, a little fearful.
Would I do a good job? Would I say the wrong thing? Would I do something that would make me look silly?
I all that is a fear of just being in apartment or not enough. And each time I found myself doing that before I walked into experience, I was like, OK, let me just take a deep breath and let's switch that. Let's shift it from the focus of what if I do it wrong to what if I just step into the space with the intent to serve?
I'm here to serve and I know I have something to offer. And as soon as I did that, courage comes in and excitement comes in and the fear goes away because I'm not focused on me, I'm focused on what I can do for others. So the antidote to fear is service.
The 5th truth is, challenges can either hold you back and keep you stuck, or they can become the launchpad for something new. And the choice is always yours. So when we have a challenge, we can look at it as something that's horrible or really hard, or we can look at it as something that is pushing us to become something more.
Over the last two years, my dad has been on a journey and we've been on a journey with him of where he has has dementia and it's been hugely challenging as he, I feel like we're already experiencing the grief of losing who he is. And anyone who has someone in their life that has Alzheimer's or dementia problems knows that this is a really hard watching someone fade from you right in front of your eyes. And so part of my year in the beginning of the year, I felt very ungrounded around that and I stopped one evening, it was a Friday evening and I was at home and I was feeling really sad.
And I said, what am I going to do with this? What is this calling to me to do? How can I become more grounded in my life?
What do I need from this? What is this pushing me towards? And the answer came in very clearly to be more present.
So instead of looking at this as a terrible thing that's happening, it is a loss. But the gift from it is being even more present in my life with the people that I care about, with my clients, with my family, with my dad, and went from being a challenge that I didn't want to go through to who is this calling me to become? There's something that shifts in a way that is almost magical.
When that happens, it softens the harshness of the experience. So challenges can hold you back or they can be the launchpad for something new. The choice is yours.
The 6th truth is one that I find with lawyers, there's a lot of resentment that we're not resentment, a lot of resistance around. And this is the truth that self-care isn't a luxury, it's a necessity and it's your secret weapon for unlocking peak performance and sustained success. The hustle mentality that you have if you're not working hard enough, if you're not exhausted, is keeping you small.
It's keeping you low performing. If that's where you are, if you are not making yourself and your energy and your power, your number one focus, you will never be all that you can be. We have to have that.
Self-care is about showing up the best that you can be and self-care looks like exercise and eating the right food and getting enough sleep and not working seven days a week and not working until midnight. When you were in that hustle mentality, you will be low performing. Self-care is not a luxury, it's an absolute necessity.
I see every day lawyers and leaders that I'm working with who are burned out and exhausted, and they just keep thinking I have to do more, and the more is what's keeping them burned out and exhausted. And oftentimes I see illness comes in. The truth is that taking care of yourself is a necessity if you want to be the best leader and the best in any role that you have.
The 7th truth for me this year is that reflection is the gateway to transformation. The only way to truly live life differently and with intention is if you have a reflection, and I think that should be on a daily basis, multiple times a day. I can often I can ask myself many times a day whether or not what I'm doing is empowering me.
That's a reflective practice, but reflection in being a daily gratitude practice, which we know just two weeks of a gratitude journal will significantly boost your happiness levels, which means that you'll be better performing. But gratitude is a reflection process of slowing down and saying this is what's good, this is what's amazing, this is what's magical, this is what's empowering, and I'm in gratitude for it. But also a reflection process of at this time of the year is particularly of looking at where your life has been and how do you want to do it differently, What's amazing and what else do you want.
Those are all reflection. And if you don't take the time to slow down, you won't do it differently. Tomorrow will be the same as today.
We have 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day. There's the story where pattern creatures and if you want tomorrow to be different, you have to have a reflection about that. So when you think about this year, what were your highlights?
What would you change? How do you want to do the next year differently? You have to look at where you are and really be aware of how you want to be and how that might be different and what you actions that you can take that will support you in that.
The 8th truth for this year and this one. I get a lot of resistance and sometimes I find myself falling out of this truth. But the truth is, rising early with a plan to fuel your mind and energize your body is the foundation of reaching the next level of your potential.
Every great leader out there that you can name, if you research, I guarantee they have a morning practice that sets them up for success. And we know that if first thing in the morning, if you went from immediately from waking directly into focusing in on working on some project and you had a clear goal. And if you did that almost as soon as you wake up, we know that you or it's more easier.
It's easier to tap into a brain wave state that helps you to be in flow in high performance. So the message there is I've done a lot of studying with neuroscience in the past year and we really should eat the frog first. We should the thing that's going to be the most mentally like you want to be really sharp, you should do first thing in the morning.
It's because the brain waves were asleep are very close to the brain waves that we are in when we are in flow, which is that state where everything just moves quickly and easily and you feel like you accomplished so much in an hour that you thought would take you all day. So the first thing is to try to set up your morning where you can do that first and then do the morning practices that fuel your mind and your emotions. So the gratitude practice or fuel your body, doing exercise, doing some kind of meditation.
That's the recovery phase from flu. It's actually doing the flow work first, and then those powerful morning practices of exercise for the body, exercise for the mind and your emotions. So rising early, it's not just about the extra time that you get in the day, It's about a mindset shift that happens, starting your day with purpose, fueled in a purposeful way.
You sharpen your mind and you create meant momentum that carries you forward for the rest of the day. My 9th truth is one that I saw a lot of teams that struggle with, and I know this is really hard as a leader, but it's a truth that if you ignore it, it's really dangerous. And this is that one toxic team member can derail your momentum and undermine your success.
You got to protect your culture and your vision. If there is one team member that is not in alignment and that team member is disengaged and engaging in behaviors and conversations that are not in alignment with the mission and the purpose that you're setting for, one toxic team member will undermine your momentum. It will.
One toxic team member can bring down everyone else. Don't let it happen. Protect your culture and protect your vision.
You don't get the standards that you say you want. You get the standards you accept. And so I saw some hard lessons with leaders this year and wanting to see if you could rehabilitate someone and talk about the standards, but not do something that actually would correct the actions of a toxic team member.
And what happens is all your standards begin to fall because you don't get the standards that you say you want. You get the standards that you accept. Don't accept it.
Protect your culture and your vision. And finally, my 10th truth for 2024 is that living from your heart and staying true to your authenticity is the only path to avoid the weight of regret, living from your heart and alignment with who you authentically are. And that means I look back over this last year, there have been tough conversations.
I've had to have conversations where I've, yeah, that's not the right thing to do. And I'm going to step in this conversation and I'm going to stand up and advocate. That's hard to do sometimes because it can really change relationships, but I also know that if you don't live from your heart and authentically in alignment with who you really are, then you will regret it.
Ask yourself the reason why you are doing things. Is it coming from a place of living, out of service and from your heart? Or is it coming from a place of fear or scarcity or doubt?
Don't do it. Don't fall into those traps. Don't sell yourself out.
Be willing to have the courage to live from your heart of who you authentically are. And when you do otherwise, it's really selfish of us to do that because the world needs you. The world needs who you really are in your heart alignment and who you want to show up to be and of service and what your medicine is into the world and when you don't live in that truth.
You cheat the world of that person. Don't do that. All right, I hope these give you something to reflect on, and I'm wishing you an amazing new year.
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