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 and leader. Welcome back to the Mind Over Law podcast where we dive deep into what it means to thrive as a lawyer, not just in courtrooms, but in life.
I'm your host, Lex Lee Overton and today's guest is someone who truly embodies courage, clarity, and conscious change. Whitney Betts is not just a brilliant attorney, she's a powerhouse who walked away from a conventional definition of success to create something more meaningful.
After years of practicing law and high pressure, high profile roles, Whitney and her husband took a bold leap and they launched the Betts Law Group where they've built a thriving firm that centers trauma, informed advocacy and purpose driven practice beyond the courtroom. Whitney is a yoga teacher.
I love this. She's a mentor to young attorneys and a leader committed to building a legal practice rooted in integrity, healing and impact.
So this conversation, y'all is all about advocacy, resilience, and what it looks like to build a legal career that truly aligns with your values. So if you've ever questioned whether you could step away from the traditional path and create something aligned with your deepest values that can bring you joy, this conversation is for you.
Please. It's so amazing how this conversation and Whitney's path really is the definition of with intention, anything is possible.
Let's get started. Whitney, I am so excited to have you here today.
I've been waiting for a while.
I know, and I'm so happy to be here. It's been quite the year already.
Yes, it's very, very crazy. I'm going to dive right in.
I love that you have built a part of your practice around survivors of sexual assault and abuse and harassment, and I want to talk about that. That requires not only great legal skill and precision, but it also requires deep empathy and the ability to hold space for that kind of trauma.
What does trauma Informed advocacy look like in a courtroom setting. And what do you think that lawyers need to know?
Why should they be even trained in it?
I think you have to be trained in it because it's not a car accident. It is not a chronological.
Tell me what happened. Okay, that hurt a little bit.
Can you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10 for me? How you doing now?
How you doing three months later? How you doing six months later?
Could not be further from kind of those rote ways that a lot of attorneys are trained to look at and analyze and work with clients in accidents, which is a lot of personal injury practice one way or another. And working with survivors is personal injury, but it's also so much more.
And to be with a trauma survivor to understand them is to understand the complexity of the questions they might have, their fear that they bring to the table, the shame that's also attached to it, the hesitation. And then the challenge that I watch them go through of taking these steps and overcoming the hurdles to ownership back of their own life and getting back in control.
But to be able to facilitate that for somebody, you have to understand that step one, fear that they're calling you with more times than I think now I can count have been told I'm the first person somebody's disclosing to. They know that they want help.
They're scared. They're scared the police won't even help.
They're scared their friends won't believe them for some reason. They're scared for X, Y and Z.
But also they know it was wrong. They're deeply upset.
They know something needs to be done. Sometimes they don't know what can be done.
So I think as a civil attorney handling trauma survivors, too, I often have to do a lot of explaining for them all of these different routes and what they are, the complexities of civil interlapping with the criminal justice system, when that's going on in our cases all the way through, how you prepare somebody for a deposition and if they have to go to trial, how you can help them get ready for that, by seeing it, understanding it, really breaking it down, saying you're going to go up and testify is nowhere near enough. They need to see that courthouse.
They need to walk the steps. They need to know what to expect and who they might see in the halls.
It takes more work to get him all the way through from start to finish.
Yeah. And they have so many questions first.
How did you get so involved in this area of law? Because it does take a certain skill, not just the Legal skill.
But I'm really talking about the passion and ability to be in this space and to do it repeatedly, because you are talk to people about energy you're taking on. And when people are sad and traumatized, this is something that we as lawyers can then have that as secondary trauma to us.
How did you get into this? And how is it that you maintain your resiliency?
They're two big, big different questions.
Two big questions. I've always been interested in somehow helping women on a platform.
And to be sure, not all of my clients are women, and not all survivors are women by any definition. But to be fair to myself, that's always been a somewhat of a passion of an area.
I mean, there's only so much we can go on about the patriarchy and its current and continued existence in our subculture in the legal field. From how women are treated from their days of law school, which I do think is getting better as those ratios equalize and populate, but to how it's still systemic.
Different treatment of women within firms, within becoming partners, within how you're presented and treated at court, within the number of times I've been assumed that I was a court reporter when I sat down across from an attorney to take a deposition and had to defend my place there. It's just one of those things that in life, it doesn't make me really angry, it's just honest.
It is still there and it's prevalent. So I think in any which way, that we can support each other and lift each other up instead of down is the right way to go.
I don't want to be a woman that closes the floor behind me as I climb up the ladder. I want to pull others up with me.
So I found myself as a defense attorney for a number of years somehow just getting these assault cases, be it at churches, be it at massage spas, be it at hospitals. I had a bunch of different types of defense clients, and I just slowly kept getting these assignments.
Oh, Whitney knows how to handle those. She can do those.
She can do those. And I told myself, well, I'm never representing the perp.
I'm always representing the company that hired the perp. And if it's a legitimately good case, I'll evaluate it and I'll recommend it for a good settlement.
And I felt good that I was at least doing that from the inside. And over time, I just realized I was like a salmon swimming upstream, that I was constantly educating and re educating and arguing with superiors about what true trauma responses look like in My free time I was reading books about trauma.
I was also getting really into yoga and holistic well being and just like aligning my core with who I was and it just felt upstream was the best way of putting it. And realizing that I was just not quite right with what I was doing and not actually helping those as much as I thought I could be.
At the end of the day, all you get in defense is if you get a good settlement is a gold star, a pat on the back and 10 more files. And I wasn't enacting any real change and I wanted to help more.
Right.
More heart mind in your work. Right?
Yes, there's absolutely been a path and secondary trauma. You are right, could not be more real.
And I think it's fair just to even give yourself the space to recognize that reality. We are not these fierce shielded warriors of armor and metal just because you get out of law school.
When did that happen? Didn't that cruddy of us?
Right. But then you get handed these very heavy cases of very heavy things.
And I will tell you, I feel like how can you not practice in this area? It is so important.
I just can't get off that platform of people need to be seen, heard and the trauma they went through validated like this is real. And my partner and I have really been talking about core values and purposes of our firm.
And we realized both of us really have this underlying foundation of validation is what we feel we can provide to people more so than this term of justice. But in getting them the validation, we have to get through the muck and this ugly heavy stuff.
And I mean I watch these terrible videos, I hear these stories over and over. And even on intakes of cases we can't take, we hear some really heavy stuff.
But I think it is for me because I'm passionate about it and I think it's so important I'm willing to weather that storm a bit more. And I found tricks and tips and tools for myself that helped me get through that in a way of.
I think I kind of shield myself in a bubble, if you would, of knowing that if I can handle inputting all this information, there might be a way that I can look at it, evaluate it, find the wrongdoing, figure out a way that I can turn it around for this person to give them some hope, give them some control back in their life, give them some power. And that is really good for me.
Whereas when I was doing trucking accidents, I can still close my eyes and see every dead body I saw A picture of everybody's shocked that I handle sexual assault. Those are harder for me.
The number of times that I dealt with wrongful death cases and trucking and they just had no explanation and no cause and just pain. So does this.
But in that sense, I couldn't do anything about it, and here I can. But allowing yourself to feel pain sometimes is good.
Allowing yourself to empathize is good. Allowing yourself to relate can be bad.
Letting your actual core beliefs and experiences, if there are threads coming out of you, you can't actually tie them in a knot with your client. You can't share that bond.
Truly, as much as people say, get to know your clients, I do. But if I share too much of myself, if I feel too much of their pain inside of me, then it will break me.
And I can't do that. When I talk to my team and we're always talking about intakes and training and I always have an open door policy because it definitely happens that sometimes people hear something and they need to take a break, they need to talk it through, they need 10 minutes to go for a walk because no one's perfect and they need that space.
I talk about our shields and trying to keep them up, but inevitably we're going to pierce them through. But I have found that as much as you can empathize with somebody, when you overrelate, when you start putting yourself in their shoes, when you're talking to them and feeling what they went through, that's a little too far.
And that's when it makes it too hard to process. It's kind of the line that I've been noticing with myself, with my staff and the team is you really want to get there with them, but you shouldn't cry about shared experiences.
You shouldn't actually overshare that door of yourself to protect yourself. It is a protective mechanism.
It's not that I don't want that bond with every client, but it's to be fair to myself, to be fair to my staff, to handle the client's case, not just as their attorney, their advocate, but then not turn into their therapist. Which is also a very, very careful, bright line when you're working with Hyde trauma survivors in these cases, is there are lines that have to be drawn, those boundaries to protect yourself.
And there's a lot of theories around storytelling that have a lot to do with our ability to be vulnerable and for others to share with us. Right.
I've done a lot of training. Like, even with trial lawyers on our own, vulnerability in the courtroom helps.
The jury to connect to us. I'm just so curious.
Like when you're talking about there's a line, what do you think that works when you talk about people come in and they're afraid you're the first one that they've spoken to. And there is a lot of sometimes shame that comes in.
What is it that you are able to do that creates the space for people to actually be able to open up and share their stories?
I usually start with around the same four or five statements set in a different order depending on the situation. I always thank them for calling and trusting me with whatever it is that they're about to tell me.
I tell them that this is a safe space. I affirmatively use those words.
I tell them your story is safe here even if you don't sign up with us or if there's not a case, Nothing said here will ever be turned around and told to anybody else. If you give me documents to review, they get destroyed.
This is totally confidential. It's also a no judgment zone.
So whatever you think are the worst parts of this that you're holding the worst things on, you can tell me. I will be asking questions.
Because I have to ask questions to understand your case. They're not coming from a place of judgment or accusation.
At the same time, I always make sure that I ask very sensitive questions. Usually the word why is an off limits question in these.
It has too much judgment laden with it of why were you doing this? Why were you doing that?
That's typically bears somebody into a defensive response term. So I don't ever try to do that.
And I always tell people, okay, why don't you fly 10,000ft up, stay out of the nitty gritty details. You don't need to tell me that right now.
Let's just go big picture. What's this all about and where do you want to start?
And then I'll redirect the follow up. And sometimes people start two months after it happened and the fallout, what happened once it got disclosed or here or wherever they can.
But I actually try to not let somebody, especially if the first thing they want to tell me is they want to jump right into these super graphic details without even giving me a context. I try to stop them.
They don't need to relive that trauma. Especially because sometimes we can't help somebody.
And I don't want you to relive that trauma. If I can tell off the bat it's something that for one reason or another, we won't be able to help with.
That's not fair to you, right?
I am curious because you have both sides, right? You're plaintiff and you did the defense work.
I really wish that we could come to the table and practice law in a different way as opposed to going for the win, to looking at what's
good for the whole.
Even if we don't do that, I think that we have a responsibility in some ways that I think that the law and what we do in helping people actually can be healing. And you mentioned that towards the beginning when you were talking about the journey that they go on and even being able.
If you're not trauma and formed and trained in this advocacy, then you're going to miss the opportunity that this actually could be a part of a healing experience for them, which most people would not think having to do with testify in a courtroom and all the things would be a healing experience. But I think that it can be, especially if.
If we as lawyers on both sides approached it differently. What are your thoughts on that?
I think it's absolutely true. I think that somehow this industry of how people present claims and then how you're entitled to a defense which is, yeah, I have a case right now where we're like, don't file that motion.
It's just a waste of time. We all know it's a waste of time, but they're gonna do it.
Cause it's a billing exercise and that's expected. But what that causes is a lot of trauma and pain from my side that now takes six more months of a real person's life.
I don't know how you do this, but I wish defense cared about the plaintiffs. And I don't mean that crass.
I didn't ever care. You're not trained to care.
Caring makes it harder to present an aggressive defense.
Right.
You call them plaintiff. You don't call them by their name.
You don't try to learn who they are as a person. Whereas that has been one of the biggest shocks on this side is how deeply I know them as a person.
And I care about moving my cases forward because I know that if I don't, defense doesn't care. If they just sit there.
And every day since the day that I've signed you, sometimes I don't file your lawsuit for a year until after we've met for one reason or another, or we try pre let or stuff goes on. And that's a year now that's already gone by of their lives that they're struggling through this.
And it's a lot. And I become a trigger that every time I call, they know that they're going to be reminded of all of this.
And it goes on and it's heavy for them. And I do want them to come to the other side.
I want people. And I do see it.
And we're so proud of this, like, ripple effect of what our cases do. I love when someone goes from fear and ashamed to, I did that.
I'm so proud I did that. I picked up the phone, I called you, you said yes.
You pushed hard, and this happened. And I even tell people, you're never going to get the apology.
Like, I'm sorry, it's just not coming. But the check is the apology.
The check is the validation. Them having to take every day out of a CEO CFO's life, deposing the whole suite, deposing their managers, their team, all the interviews, all the stuff.
The client might not see every aspect of that that's going on, but by you being brave enough to pick up the phone and call us, you have actually, usually at a company or at an entity caused a lot of work time, roundtable meetings, talking about it. We see a lot of cases where we know that after our case is closed, we see policies change, ways that things are done differently.
And that's because that person was willing to say, no, it's not okay to treat me like that. It's not.
But usually they don't see it as that's what they're doing when they first pick up the phone. We know that sexual violence is a form of power and control, and you lose control in that process.
So I think getting that ownership back is huge. I wish that we could just have a more direct conversation about it.
I am always amazed. My partner, who's my husband, his team does work comp and they will add a deposition, just talk about the case and settle it.
It is wild where we have to plan out these six months out mediations, and everyone edges into their corner of what it is and argues and motions and files and depots.
It's a shame. Is it?
Yeah. And he calls me and he's like, oh, no, the depot didn't go.
We settled. They evaluated the case here.
I said, it's really worth here. We said, okay, this would be fair.
And we got it done all the time. I don't get why we have to make it so hard.
It really shouldn't be.
Yeah, I agree. Speaking of practicing with your husband, My parents practice together.
I saw some things, let me tell you. There was a lot of rules that had to be put in place in our household to keep them sane and not at each other.
What have you learned about on that journey about the balance between personal and professional?
Ooh, I would love to know those rules.
Well, one is, is we can't talk law once we walk in the house because it's just you would never put it down. Like they would just go on and on and on.
They eventually had that rule. Like, we just don't.
Once we're here, we don't talk in
the house about what's going on cases. But yeah, I love that rule.
We should enact that rule. We have tried to enact that rule in some sort of a time zone, but it doesn't always stay put.
For us, it's been really organic and natural. We met our first year of law school and we actually so just going through that hurdle together.
We used to study together, throw things off of each other's backs. Our whole legal career we've been together, but we didn't practice together for many, many moons.
And doing this, we actually both happened to be partners at the same big law firm. We knew we wanted out.
We knew we wanted to create our own thing and kind of made a 1, 2 step plan for him to exit first. Then once we were financially stable, I would exit and join as well.
And at first we ran it as two different companies because I thought the optics. What sexual assault survivor would want to go to a law firm that also serves professional athletes who not always, not always, but are sometimes in the news for these sorts of events.
Right. And we did that to ourselves in these two different buckets and then realized, like, we're just talking about, like we want to be able to talk about cases nonstop with each other.
We want to throw things off of each other. We want to hire a team.
And it just became really like, what are we doing? Let's just do it as one firm, have it in departments.
And no one has scared. No one is scared at all.
And if anything, we realize the parallels between our clients are this validation of what we call the invisible injuries that people carry around with. Most of his clients are people that devoted their whole lives to trying to make it pro kind of were sold a bill of goods that they were never going to get, and now they're beat up, busted and sore at 25 or 30 years old and nothing to show for it.
They deserve to have the workers compensation. It's just a benefits delivery system that they're absolutely entitled to as a result of that commitment and for my clients clients, it's the compensation and justice for somebody doing you wrong and standing up and saying that's not right.
You can't treat me that way. In both situations, we realized we're looking at clients who deserve to be seen and heard for what they went through, for who they are, how they show up.
So we like to share in the feeling that we get to show up for them in both areas that we're passionate about. I'm passionate about women's advocacy, sexual assault and he likes sports.
It works, right?
Yeah. That's great.
When you look at the structure of the firm because you know, I'm always, I'm coaching teams and we're building structure for growth. And a lot of that has to do with like very clear who are, what are the roles and responsibilities?
How do you guys divide that? Do you have a very clear system for who's responsible for what?
That is something that has been that we're working on in the last year. Organically.
I've kind of just become the managing partner that handles a lot of our admin, HR oversight growth plans. But it's also because at this phase of where we are, Tom is just fantastic at what he does.
And we have a first year hearing rep that can help out in cases and then we have a legal assistant in paralegal that's working with them. And I share that same legal assistant paralegal on our team.
But I was able to bring in a 15 year attorney who I know very well and love her very much to really jump in and be me, so to speak. I'm still heavily involved in the strategy in some high level depositions of cases, especially as we get closer to the end of trial and experts.
But it has really allowed me that time that is necessary to work on the business itself, to be able to work on our infrastructure and create growth and scaling plans.
And it's important to recognize that it takes a lot of time and energy to work on the business and not just in the business. And it is hard to.
When you're an entrepreneur starting out, you wear every hat, right? You're in production as a lawyer, you're also managing everything.
But eventually there has to be a point that there has to be. Either you're hiring somebody else to help with managing of things or you're pulling yourself out to be the manager and less in production.
But I imagine that you still get some of the satisfaction that you want based upon being still involved in high end cases. And like the strategy it's towards when it's deeper in the bigger cases, that kind of thing.
Yeah. And I'm still heavily involved in that and intake.
I don't screen every client. I don't talk to everyone.
But if you are potentially going to be hired by us. So we are volume on the work comp side, pretty niche and boutique on the civil on purpose.
I take pretty complex institutional assault cases, abuse cases, ones that are going to take a lot of time and effort and energy. So when we sign someone, I've never signed somebody without speaking to them, usually for a couple hours.
Like, I get to know you because I also need to know that you're going to be a part of our team because they are involved in the case. Maybe there's months and gaps where the plaintiff themselves is not that active in the case, but throughout the life of it, they will absolutely be involved.
And you need to kind of get to know them that little bit. I always like to make that initial connection really feel good about that initial relationship foundation and crafting that initial strategy and where we're going together.
Awesome. That's great.
You're not just an attorney. You're also a certified yoga teacher.
You mentioned the yoga. How has yoga shaped the way that you show up in the courtroom and with your clients?
Because I think law can be a lot about fight and fire and yoga is a lot about awareness and stillness. Right.
But when we have awareness, it's a new way of intuition. That's what I have found.
Those kind of practices. And looking at the holistic healing, like you said, has changed to how you show up as a lawyer.
You know, I think it's allowed me to give myself grace, to pause, to be okay when I mess up, to be able to step back and evaluate that, to listen to that internal conflict when you have your gut fire off an answer and you do something else anyway, because a super aggressive attorney that just wants to push this case wants to get something done, and then it comes back to bite you. And to not be too hard on myself in those moments of like, come on, that moment flared off in your brain.
You knew. And to just try to trust that more and more.
And the more I put myself in alignment with who I truly am and my core beliefs, the easier that has all become. But it's also made me less reactive.
My staff cracks up sometimes when I write back to emails that are pretty hostile and I'm like, hey, so good to hear from you. Thanks so much for reaching out.
And I can hear them in the other room just laughing because it's like really something mean towards me. And I'm like, huh?
And then later I get a phone call and they're like, they're like, oh, they're giving me what I wanted. We're good.
But I don't fight fire with fire anymore. I'm real smart.
I can figure it out and I can do it in a way with finesse and grace. And I always think of every email and phone call being shown in a court in front of a jury or a judge and how that would look.
And no one else on my team is also allowed to overreact or react hot in any way, shape or form. We really believe too here law doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be hyper aggressive, you don't have to be this bulldog aggressive, I'm going to make them bleed type of attorney. Still get those results.
Yeah. I was really lucky to practice law with my dad for many, many years.
But as a young brand new lawyer in southern Louisiana 30 years ago, there were no women role models for me in the courtroom. And I had to learn that he was such a typical over the top, aggressive male trial lawyer that that could not be who I was.
Right. That's not in alignment with who I was.
And the more I learned about practices like what you're talking about with yoga or meditation, anything that brings in awareness of who you are and was able to cultivate that ability to pause, to respond as opposed to react. So I say being able to create as opposed to react.
The more I learned that I was more powerful than the male that was across me screaming or going crazy. Right.
I knew he was tripped and I was the one that was in the power. And I wish more lawyers realized that.
I think we're starting to talk about that more and see a little bit change in things. But the over the top aggressiveness does not mean that you're going to win.
And I think it's the one that stays in control and centered is the one that has more power.
I couldn't agree more. But I do think it takes sometimes years of struggle in this to get there, to realize that, to realize you don't have to play as they play to succeed, that you have to trust that whole abilities and skills.
And like I remember I was upset because I got hyper critiqued on emotion at my old firm and my boss, who was a female, really well experienced came in and she's like, you know how much he would care about that if that was him, he wouldn't let it go. And Move on.
And it's not fair, but let it go and move on. Like they explode and they move on, but they're not always right.
So on.
Right. Well, and the explosion, now that I know what I know about management of energy and state, is most of the time when you've got someone on the other side that is exploding, they are out of control because they're in fight or flight.
So they're not in the most powerful
part of their nervous system.
They're very, actually very dysregulated. And so when you can see that, you can be like, yeah, that's not about me.
That is just about where they are. Right.
And manage it in a different way. So that's a really good point.
Well, we always wrap up with three questions for our guest. The first one is, what's something you're
excited about right now I'm have this duality of I'm really excited about a personal trip to Italy that's coming up that I've been bringing for like a year. It's a big thing.
But I'm also really excited in context of what that trip means because the last time my husband and I were in Italy, we were in law school, studying abroad, weren't married yet. Oh man, we were so broke.
I just remember trying to order penne a la vodka from whatever we could. That was the cheapest thing on the menu that we could find.
We had to wait outside in lines. And I don't even think we saw certain things because we couldn't afford the admission tickets.
We saw them from the outside and we've worked so hard to get here. And I feel like this is finally our year of like this isn't just happening.
But we have strategically created a firm now with this team. And everyone is shares our values, everybody wants to help someone else.
We're all operating very cleanly. And you know, they call it the vacation test.
We'll see how well it actually goes. But I think we're in a really great place to not only take this trip kind of of my dreams and be able to go on the early morning Vatican tour when it's going to be mostly empty.
I can't wait and get to do that. But it's because of how hard we've worked.
It's because of how hard we've worked to get here after choosing to follow our passions and leave a different kind of a life where we got one or two vacations a year. And now I almost usually have one trip a month for one reason or another.
But it doesn't mean we're not operating this high level firm. I'm providing the same level of service, and I'm just consistently amazed kind of at ourselves, at how far we've come by trusting ourselves and having these conversations and space to sit in the fear, in the discomfort, and also to grow and develop.
I think we're all so much more than we think we are. And if you just trust yourself to get there, you will.
Yeah. It's so beautiful.
I love that you guys are taking the time to celebrate. I love it.
Not just your birthday, a big birthday coming up, but just to celebrate where you are in life. That's really beautiful.
What's one rule that you would tell lawyers to break?
Okay, so this one's probably hypocritical because I didn't have the gall to do it for a lot of years, but it was, say no. Just say no.
When something doesn't align with who you are, when you have told somebody this motion is going to fail, it's a waste of time and money, and they tell you to do it anyway, say no. And that was a breaking point for me when I was told to berate a sexual assault survivor just to make her uncomfortable and ashamed and in pain.
And I said, no, I won't do that. I'll take a deposition, but I won't do that.
I won't ask those questions. And then I was told I was no good at handling sexual assault cases because I wasn't willing to do that.
But I think that was the first time that I really broke so far out of form that it caused a split inside me that was like, you can never go back to that. This caused a change, but that was something that was eating at me.
So I think when you the time and time that you're like, well, I'm just in the seat. Somebody's paying me to do this job.
And so I think the rule is if it doesn't align with you and you're unhappy, that's yourself telling yourself something. I wake up every day now expecting to be content, to be happy, to overall have a good day.
And if it is not a good day, that's an outlier. Whereas I feel a lot of lawyers wake up with just like, what are you at today?
A little bit of dread. And maybe if your day went okay, you're happy at the end of the day that, okay, it was all right.
We expect it the other way around. And I think doing everything you can to know that you don't have to operate that Way Law doesn't have to be that way.
I love that. Whitney, what a great answer.
All right, our last question. What's one practice that you do that helps you to be a healthier, happier lawyer other than yoga?
You got to give me something else.
I've been doing a lot of walking with my weighted vest. It lets me push out which my husband knows is a big middle aged woman thing to do right now.
I do think it's working and it causes me to feel a little stronger. I love our bulldog.
We have an English bulldog. She's a drooly, drippy, silly mess that half the times misses when she tries to jump on a couch because her legs aren't long enough.
She is just joy. We bring her in the office one to two days a week.
She's a morale booster for the whole team and just allowing yourself the presence to just sit with an animal, kind of pet them and stare in their eyes and let them love back on you and sit against you and lean on your legs. We're so rushed that we almost don't take the time to just experience the moments when we are in them.
So I've been working on finding the joy as little as it is with the bulldog moments with my kids of board games. Like we find time for each other and we work on being present in that moment.
And I think that is something that I do and that I would encourage everybody to not just think of what just happened or what's going to happen. I mean that's suffering.
Right to desire or aversion from something to not be living right here right now. And I think the more you allow yourself that presence and just centeredness in the moment, it just becomes a little bit easier.
And you go through your days and you're like, hmm, things are just pretty dang good. How'd this happen?
Love it. That's excellent.
What great answers. I just want to say you're really inspiring and I think that you are just beginning and I think that what's going to be happening in the next 20 years is going to be a bold journey for you and that the world is very lucky that they have the medicine that you have to offer into it.
So thank you for showing up and doing what you do.
Thank you so much. Lexley.
This has been an amazing opportunity to get to speak with you and I can't wait to see you again in person. Yes.
Okay. Thank you so much.
Of course.
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