How thinking like an athlete can make you a better lawyer

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library Podcast. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m here with Amy Wood, author of the book, lawyer, like An Athlete, how to Up Your Game at Work and in Life. Amy, thanks so much for joining us.

Amy Wood:

Thanks so much for having me on today, Lee.

Lee Rawles:

So first off, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to work with lawyers.

Amy Wood:

Sure. So I’m a psychologist. I’ve been a psychologist now for about 25 years and I’ve always worked with adults and I came from the corporate world. So I’ve always worked with people who work in corporate and work in really demanding jobs. I started to notice about probably 12 years ago, I started to get attorneys coming to me saying that they needed coaching. One of the services I offer, they were telling me things like no one understands attorneys. I’ve been to a counselor, I’ve listened to wellbeing podcasts, I’ve gone to conferences, and nobody seems to understand attorneys and what we’re really up against. And that got me curious. So I started doing research on why attorneys stress is so different from the stress that most of us experience in professional occupations. And from that research I really became interested in helping attorneys and I started not only doing coaching but then started doing wellness types of CLE programs for different bar associations.

And from that I developed a whole program called Lawyer, like an Athlete because what I started to see is that similar to high level elite athletes, attorneys are really under a spotlight in terms of the expectations the public has of them, really high levels of pressure that they’re working under where the stakes are high. And I noticed with athletes that athletes of course, because they’re doing physical work, they have to really take excellent care of themselves. And I was really noticing by this point in working when attorneys, attorneys don’t understand the importance of self-care, they look at it like, okay, this is a mental job. Of course, athletes have to take care of themselves physically because they have to use their bodies to perform, but we don’t. It’s all mental. So we don’t need to take breaks, we don’t need to eat well, we don’t need to have social lives, get exercise, have interests away from work.

And actually the truth is that just like athletes need to be mentally sharp and mentally conditioned to do physical work, it’s the same with attorneys. Just because they do mental work doesn’t mean they don’t need to be conditioned in other ways. They need to really be working at not only good but exquisite self-care. Having relationships outside of work is essential as it is for athletes who want to perform well, having other interests. And number one thing I think if you had to pick one, is really a mindset that’s positive, a mindset that is trained to work with high stress.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and I love this you pointed out a lot of people think being a lawyer is all mental,

But the deeper into your book I got, and the more I thought about it just as a concept, I’m like, there are so many similarities when you think about mindset. And a lot of people think being a professional athlete, well, you show up and you shoot baskets or you get the puck in deep. And so much of what an athlete does is the preparation, the visualization. So much of what a lawyer does is preparation for what is a competition or a performance. You are in prep mode for a lot of your working day. You are in research mode doing all these things. And in order to keep yourself at that peak performance mentally, there are things you need to do to support your body. So when you talk to lawyers about this, I do think you mentioned a lot of the very common wellness advice kind of lands with a clunk for a lot of lawyers. Things like, well just turn off your phone for a couple weeks. Oh, well, I would violate my ethical standards and be fired from my firm. I don’t know what to tell you.

Amy Wood:

Yes.

Lee Rawles:

So what are some of the top pushbacks you get from lawyers who come in for coaching and what are your response to those?

Amy Wood:

The top pushback is really, I don’t have time to do any of these things that you are recommending. And what I tell attorneys is that much like athletes, quite often therapists and coaches will give advice to professionals under a lot of stress. Like, okay, don’t take your job too seriously, just put it to the side, take more time off. And you can’t do that when you’re an attorney, as you alluded to. It’s a very important job. It has to be central. Just like if you’re an athlete, your job has to be at the center. It’s everything to you. And when you’re an attorney, just like when you’re an athlete, you have to keep it at the center what your occupation is, but you have to nourish your performance, your ability to do that job in these five different ways. And I take this directly from the world of athletes, and I’ve already mentioned this but I’ll say it again.

It’s four different components that you have to constantly be working on in order to form at your best and keep your job at the center of your life and do really well with it. The number one thing is you have to have a social network. Now you look at athletes and they always have an entourage, not just their coaches and their trainers and their massage therapist, et cetera, et cetera, but they often travel with their closest family members. They might travel with a pet because they need a sense of security. They need to know that their favorite people are there for them. And it’s the same way with attorneys. You need to have a full social life professionally and personally and get away from work to spend time with those people you can really let down your guard with so that you can give your brain a rest. In addition to that, I’ve mentioned this already, but exquisite self-care. Now you don’t have to care for yourself like an athlete does because obviously they have to go to extreme levels of self-care to excel at sports.

Lee Rawles:

You probably don’t need the same level of protein consumption Exactly. That an ultra marathoner needs.

Amy Wood:

But you have to be getting enough sleep, for example. You have to be eating well, you have to get regular exercise. And then we go to having diversions away from work so that your mind can get out of work mode and you can relax and use your mind differently. And so I’ll give you an example from the world of sports. A lot of NFL players, they play chess in their off hours because it lets them think differently and it lets them let go of the training. And that really allows you when you have other interests that may seem frivolous. And this is usually what I hear from maternity, well, I don’t have time to just read a book for fun or I don’t have time to play games with my kids or just have fun with my dog. They don’t understand that that so-called frivolity is really important for the brain because your brain needs a break regularly in order to come back to your work so that you can be sharp and be innovative and problem solve.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and I liked what you had to say about the reset, the importance of reset because many people, for instance, when they first start weightlifting or strength training, think, well, what I need to do is really up the number of days I’m in the gym. And they forget that the actual process of building muscle requires rest days. That’s not you being lazy. That’s you working towards the ultimate building of strength.

Amy Wood:

That’s

Lee Rawles:

Right. He is incorporating these rest days.

Amy Wood:

And then you’re bringing up a really important point here, which is that many people, people from all professions, but especially attorneys, they’ll come to me and at a first session of coaching, they’ll say, look, I just need to get rid of all my stress. And I’ll tell them that’s not possible. We live in a world that’s moving faster and faster and faster. There’s stress all around us and it’s only going to escalate the demands that we’re faced with every day, all the information we have to sort through all the options. So the idea is not to get rid of stress, it’s to get your stress to a level where it’s helpful to you. So think about if you lived without stress, it would be pretty boring sometimes stress can help to motivate us. We want a little bit of a fire under us. The example I always use with attorneys, imagine if you didn’t have a little bit of stress when you were going through law school, when you were studying for theBar, you probably wouldn’t be prepared. So we want to have that stress to be engaged and to be alert and to be focused and motivated, but we don’t want it to be so much that we’re incapacitated. So when we’re under too much stress, what that really means is we have a level of stress that we’re not prepared to cope with. It’s no longer motivating, it’s preventing us from moving forward. It’s preventing us from reaching our goals.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and I had to laugh at one of the things that you said about when people come into you, which is usually, okay, so how fast can we get this done so that I’m no longer stressed? And it reminded me just this past fall I fell and sprained my ankle and at the three week point I showed up to a physical therapist’s office and I said, okay, so show me the exercise I can do because my ankle still

Amy Wood:

Hurts. And

Lee Rawles:

He was like, so how long ago did you sprain it? And I said, well, two and a half weeks. He’s like, yeah, your ankle’s still going to hurt. I don’t have a way or a magic exercise to make your ankle not hurt. It’s going to take five to six weeks

Amy Wood:

That’s right

Lee Rawles:

For your ankle to stop hurting. And I was like, well, I don’t like that answer.

Amy Wood:

And so a big thing when you asked me what do attorneys object to typically when you tell them about your philosophy, and often they’ll say, look, I don’t have time to work on this. Give me a quick fix. And the whole focus of my book, as you know from reading it, it’s really about getting distance, stepping back, slowing down in order to ultimately produce results with greater efficiency because you’re in much better shape mentally, physically, socially, in every way, so that are in a better position to achieve your goals.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Amy Wood, author of lawyer, like an Athlete, how to Up Your Game at Work and In Life. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host Lee Rawles here with Amy Wood talking about the book lawyer, like an athlete. So Amy, I don’t have science to back me up on this just anecdotally, I know a lot of attorneys who participate in athletics like marathons. It’s a solo it endeavor. It’s kind of an extreme that you’re going out, you’re practicing, the only one that you’re relying on is yourself. I don’t know if that is something that particularly appeals to lawyers, if that’s something you see, but that individuals striving seems to really attract the lawyer personality. Have you seen that in your coaching?

Amy Wood:

Absolutely. Attorneys tend to be very, very ambitious, more ambitious than most other types of, and so they like to be competitive and that can be great unless you’re overdoing it. So I do know a number of attorneys who do participate in extreme sports and it’s great as long as you’re conditioned for that, just like working too much, exercising too much is not a good thing.

Lee Rawles:

And what can lawyers be learning more from team sports? I have a couple thoughts that had occurred to me as I was reading this book, but one in particular is you point out that people we see as elite athletes, it isn’t necessarily that they have become amazing at doing everything in their sport, it’s that they have found the thing that they are particularly skilled at and built their athletic career to make that skill work for them. So Tom Brady, you point out he was not perhaps the strongest or had the most physical prowess, but he had this very specific and useful skill that could work for him as a quarterback.

Amy Wood:

That’s right.

Lee Rawles:

So when you’re a lawyer, what can you take from that mindset of identifying what are you particularly skilled at and then find a role within a team?

Amy Wood:

So the important thing here is psychologists, as you might imagine, have been studying pretty intensely over the past 20 or 30 years how people can reduce their stress level and get it to a manageable place. As we speed up, as we have more and more expectations, more and more technology we have to deal with. And one of the key ways to reduce stress and also get better results is to focus on what you’re best at. So a simple way to think about this is what do you get complimented on most in your life? So people might say anything from, you are a great writer, you’re a great listener, you work really well under pressure to wow, you throw a great dinner party or you’re really, really good when it comes to designing your home or good at yard work, whatever it might be. And you’ll know that it’s a strength if when you’re complimented, you say, well, that’s no big deal.

Anyone can do that. It just takes common sense or something like that. The reason that you don’t take the compliment seriously is because it’s a natural thing for you. You have an affinity for that particular thing. So you do it because you enjoy it, you’re drawn to it. So looking for those things where you’re in the flow when you’re doing it, where you feel like, yeah, this really feels like me. This feels like what I’m meant to be. Doing more of that and taking it more seriously. Taking it as this is my strength. This is something that I am drawn to because it really resonates for me. And then doing more of that. So for example, I consult with law firms on this idea of picking out what your strengths are and then letting go of the things that you’re not so good at and collaborating with other people in a team kind of way so that everyone is contributing what they’re best at.

So for example, I just met with a law firm where we were trying to do this and one person was saying, I just love proofreading. It’s relaxing to me. I love to look at contracts that my colleagues send me and go over them and edit them. And many people and the firm say, I hate doing that. I’ll gladly give you my stuff to proofread. So other people might say something like, I’m really good at helping clients when they’re upset. I like to be a good listener. I’m really good at calming people down where many attorneys say, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to meet with upset clients. So the idea here is whenever you can as an attorney or everywhere in life, look at what you are naturally drawn to, what you enjoy and you do that part and then ask someone else to do something that you’re not so good at.

Another way of looking at this to simplify it is think about your home life, how you divide up chores. We used to divide up chores according to gender. So let’s say 30 years ago, the husband in the house might be doing the finances because that’s what men do, and the woman might be doing the cooking, well, what if the guy’s terrible with money? And what if the woman hates to cook? So now what we do in households is try to split up chores according to who has an affinity for what. And nobody likes to do chores really at the end of the day, but it’s what you are better at and what is less irritating to you. So in my house, for example, my husband does not mind at all doing the dishes where I really don’t like doing the dishes. I prefer to cook.

He’s really good at yard work. I don’t like yard work, I don’t mind doing the laundry. So we try to divide things up that way. Now we’re all adults, and so of course there are going to be things nobody wants to do. And so you take turns. So my husband and I take turns taking the trash out. But the idea here is look at the people you work with and look at what they’re good at and meet with them and ask, okay, how can we collaborate better by just like a hockey team does. If you take the position that you’re best at, that you’re naturally wired for and drop those things you’re not so good at and let other people pick up the slack by doing what they’re better at, you have a much better chance of accomplishing your goals together with less stress. It’s a much better oiled machine, so to speak.

Lee Rawles:

And this seems particularly important as an exercise to do. You wrote this book for the solo small firm and general practice division at the A, B, A. And when you are in a big law firm, it does seem like true specialization would be easier because you have so many

Amy Wood:

People,

Lee Rawles:

But it seems especially important for small firms.

Amy Wood:

Yes.

Lee Rawles:

If you only have four to six other attorneys on staff, it is so important to know where everybody thrives best and what their skills are so that rather than everyone behaving as well, I am a solo and I need to be good at everything. How can we really use our more limited resources as a team?

Amy Wood:

Exactly. And beyond working on a team, if you’re like me, I work on a team sometimes, but I’m also self-employed, so I do a lot on my own. It’s about delegation. Then if we don’t have someone on the team with us who can do this, how can I delegate so that you are not spending a lot of time doing work that is taking you away from high level work that is going to get you the results you’re looking for. So anytime you’re looking at what you’re doing, ask, okay, how can I get someone else to help with the cleaning or doing my accounting or again, doing the proofreading, whatever you can think about that will free you up to focus on high level projects. That’s what you want to be doing.

Lee Rawles:

And you brought up a term that I hear athletes talk a lot about and it’s the idea of a state of flow.

Amy Wood:

Yes.

Lee Rawles:

Can we talk about flow?

Amy Wood:

Sure.

Lee Rawles:

I hope that all my listeners have experienced moments of this because it really is wonderful when it happens and athletes talk about it a lot. So what is flow and how can we get ourselves into that state more often?

Amy Wood:

So flow really is what happens when you are immersed in doing something that is a strength to you. So for our listeners, if you can just think back right now to a time when you were doing something, it could have been anything at work or it could have been at home, it could have been on vacation, it could have been anywhere at any point in your life. So it could have been earlier today, it could have been when you were a kid, but imagining a time from your past when you just felt like all was right with the world, you just felt like whatever you were doing, whatever you were engaged with, time wasn’t an issue. You didn’t feel rushed, you didn’t feel really any stress or any sense of frustration or irritation. You just felt like, yeah, this feels good to me. I could keep doing this and tap into that.

And the idea here is to do more of it. So sometimes people will come up with a strength like, oh, I can remember a time when I was swimming and it just felt so good. I love to swim, but that has nothing to do with work, so why would I want to do more swimming? But what I tell people, attorneys, especially when you’re doing whatever it is, whether it’s work or whether it’s a physical activity or working on a hobby, a crafting, yes, crafting do more of that because what that is doing, it’s reducing your stress level. It’s allowing your brain to take a rest and to be refreshed and revived so that you’re coming back to work feeling sharper from taking that break and doing what comes naturally. So being in the flow, it really is just a sense of everything is where it should be.

I’m just kind of clipping along. I don’t feel any resistance. I don’t feel like I’m trying to force anything. I’m not going against the grain. I’m really aligned with myself and really in sync, that’s when you know you’re using an inherent strength and the better you can get at that strength and the more you can let go of what does go against your grain that you’re just trying to be good at, but you don’t really like it. Let me give you an example. I was just reading Brooke Shield’s new book. It’s a memoir, and she talks in the book about how her friends wanted to start surfing as a regular thing. So they would meet every week and they would surf and all her friends are really into it. And Brooke kept telling herself, I should want to surf because it sure is fun, it looks fun, but I don’t really like this. And she kept forcing herself. And finally she just realized surfing is just not my thing. It’s not my strength. I’m not going to do this anymore. So look at the things in your life where even though on paper it might look like, oh, this is a great thing to be doing, but it’s not for you. And let go of those things.

Lee Rawles:

And let’s talk about, we’ve drawn a lot of parallels between a lawyer’s mental state and an athlete’s mental state. And as I brought up, there are lawyers who are elite athletes who really love to do marathons and such, but plenty of people who if they had their druthers, would just be a brain and a jar. Let’s talk about the physical aspect because someone who does not feel that they have a lot of athletic talents, et cetera, you do want people to move their bodies.

Amy Wood:

For

Lee Rawles:

People who that does not come naturally and that hasn’t really been a priority, how do you encourage them to become more physically active, to improve their mental functioning, their physical functioning? It is a struggle for a lot of people.

Amy Wood:

It is, it is. So I think there’s two things to look at here. One thing is that in order to be healthy, you really should be getting up and moving around about every 90 minutes when you’re working. Studies have been done to show that when you persevere longer than 90 minutes, even if you feel like, oh, I’m really in the zone here, you’re actually starting to make mistakes. Your body is in need of movement, you’re not as focused. So just getting up every 90 minutes and doing a couple of stretches or walking around, that’s a really good start. One of the problems that attorneys have, and this is actually a good thing to a certain point, is they set really big ambitious goals and want to get there quickly as we’ve talked about today. And so when it comes to exercise, you really have to meet yourself where you’re at.

So if you’re someone who’s never exercised before, just like with an athlete, they’re not going to push themselves too far, too fast or they’re going to get an injury. So you want to start with very tiny steps to get started. So let’s say you’ve never exercised or you used to and you haven’t in a long time, you don’t want to say, okay, I’m going to go to the gym every single day starting now, not only is that probably going to give you an injury, you’re moving too fast, but you’re going to get burned out because it’s just too much change too quickly. That’s why so many people, they make New Year’s resolutions that are really, really ambitious. And then typically by the middle of January they’ve moved on from their resolutions. It’s just too much pressure. So starting with small goals. So if you haven’t exercised a lot, maybe you’re getting up and stretching every 90 minutes or taking a little walk around the room or the office you’re in, better yet you’re going outside and breathing some fresh air and taking a little walk outside because nature, just being in nature, being out of fresh air is one of the best boosters for mood and thinking, power and stamina and resilience.

But I think it’s really again about where you’re at. So if you have an exercise, maybe you say, you know what? Over this week, three times, I’m going to walk around my neighborhood for 15 minutes this coming week and see how it feels. If you’re a little more experienced with exercise, then you might say, you know what? I’m going to find a class online that I want to take because I know that when I have a class scheduled, I show up for the class because I feel more accountable. Part of this is finding ways to get physical movement that appeal to you. And we’re all different

Lee Rawles:

And physical movement. It doesn’t have to be, well now I’m in a strength training class

Amy Wood:

Right

Lee Rawles:

Now I’m doing, I’m running on a treadmill and I hate it. Do you like dancing? Do you like gardening? We are not saying in lawyer like an athlete that you must be going out there and absolutely crushing tennis doubles necessarily,

Amy Wood:

Right? It’s about doing, if you want a lawyer like an athlete and you don’t care for exercise, it really is about doing the minimum that is required that most medical doctors will tell you you need to be a healthy functioning adult. So that in my mind would mean maybe three times a week. You want to work up to about an hour, three times a week of exercise where you’re really huffing and puffing while you’re doing the exercise where it could be fast walking, it could be jogging, it could be boxing. You might prefer to go to a gym, you might hate going to the gym. There’s all kinds of ways, and especially now that we do a lot remotely, you can find just about anything online, any kind of class if you like to exercise at home, ranging from yoga to spinning weight training. So there’s a lot you can do. Many of my attorney clients, they choose to just get a personal trainer, if not permanently, just for a few sessions to learn some easy ways to exercise to get started and to learn to exercise in ways that really suit them

Lee Rawles:

Well. We’re going to take another break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Amy Wood, author of lawyer, like an athlete. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Amy Wood, author of lawyer, like an Athlete, how to Up Your Game at Work and in Life. And Amy, we have talked about the concept of flow that both attorneys and athletes can understand. Let’s talk about an athletic issue, the yips and how lawyers can experience this too. I want us to get into, many times when you’re seeing clients, it’s because they have reached a point where what they’re currently doing is no longer sustainable and they realize they need help. And we know from the data coming from lawyer assistance programs, this is where a lot of attorneys really are. Let’s start talking to them. How about the people who are like, what I am doing is no longer sustainable, I need help.

Amy Wood:

Well, first of all, that’s probably the best thing that you can do when you’re at that point where you feel like you’re headed toward burnout, meaning you’re becoming increasingly jaded about the work you’re doing. You don’t have the energy for it anymore. You may be even experiencing depression, anxiety, you probably have trouble sleeping. You may have symptoms physically from being chronically stressed and you realize, look, I’m about to fall apart or I know I’m headed there. Getting help is a great thing to do. It takes a lot of strength to reach out, a lot of courage to reach out and ask for help. But I will tell you that the smartest attorneys that I see, the most successful attorneys are the ones who do reach out and get assistance, not just with their work, but with their mental health and with their physical health. So that’s the number one thing.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, you identified five signs that help. You’re in need of professional intervention. So people out there listening, these are the ones that Amy pulled out for you to really start paying attention. Number one, you can’t snap out of it. Number two, it’s getting in your way. Number three, you detect a pattern. Number four, it’s back again, this is something that just keeps kind of circling around, popping up

Amy Wood:

Again.

Lee Rawles:

And number five, you are self-medicating. And we know that substance use disorders, gambling issues in the legal profession, these are all, we see these at a high rate. So these are the five signs that you identify. Hey, if you’re seeing these, please, it’s time to get some professional intervention.

Amy Wood:

That’s right. And a lot of times these signs that you just mentioned from my book, they happen because you may be handling your stress in a way that is initially very helpful. It gives you a feeling of freedom and it takes the pressure off. It numbs you out. But when you do it too much, it becomes unhealthy and it can create problems. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. A lot of attorneys will, at the end of the day, they’ll just numb themselves out either by drinking or eating too much food or doing online shopping or playing video games late into the night. And then they’re not sleeping well and they’re waking up feeling groggy and disenchanted and not ready to greet the day. And then they do the same thing the next night when they’re trying to reduce stress, they’ll do something that immediately gives ’em that sensation of, oh, I’m checking out. But when you’re checking out in ways that disturb your health or upset you financially, it’s not really helpful. So that’s a question to be asking. Are your coping methods when you are stressed, are they really helping you or hurting you? And then it’s about getting rid of those unhealthy ways of dealing with stress and dealing with stress in ways that are actually building your resilience.

Lee Rawles:

And for athletes, if you’re an athlete whose statistics are being tracked, it may be easier to see a trend. You can say to yourself, oh gosh, my possession metrics are way down. Oh no, I haven’t scored since October. Oh dear. What are some of the signs that you ask your lawyer clients to look for that could be kind of a parallel to an athlete’s stats?

Amy Wood:

Well, a good thing to look for is are you having trouble in your professional life or personal life that you didn’t have before? So maybe you’re starting to see there are relationship problems or you’re starting to make more mistakes, or you’re late a lot for meetings when you didn’t used to be late or you’re finding you’re just not feeling that excitement anymore about your work that you used to feel, or you don’t have any hope for things getting better. So generally that is what when you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist or counselor, that’s what they’re going to look for to determine, let’s say you may need medication. It’s going to be is this person’s ability to just work and live the life they want being interrupted in some way in a chronic way.

Lee Rawles:

Another thing that I love you bringing up and talking about is more and more athletes across sports have been utilizing visualization exercise, and you talk about the importance of rehearsing your wins.

Amy Wood:

Yes.

Lee Rawles:

And I love this. You mentioned a lot of times if we all could hear the inner talk, what you are saying to yourself, often you are talking to yourself in a negative way. You are thinking about, well, what’s the disastrous thing that could happen to me when I go to court? You’re having the nightmares of, oh gosh, what I forget, how am I going to screw up? So instead, how can we use this athlete’s tool of visualization to rehearse our wins?

Amy Wood:

Well, the idea of visualization is, again, I say this a lot, it’s about slowing down. We tend to be very reactive in a world that’s moving quickly. Attorneys are very reactive. They’re just trying to move through the day, check off boxes, take calls when they’re interrupted, and then they finish the day exhausted. But the idea of visualization really is that you stop before you even start your day. And you imagine how you want the day to go. So you go through it in your head. Let’s say you have a really busy day where you have to drive somewhere. Maybe you have to go to court, you have some new clients you have to meet with, and you’re worried it’s not all going to go well, I have too much to do. I’m feeling tired already. Instead, stop and imagine your day going Well, I often call this paving the way for a good day by taking yourself through it mentally and picturing it going well.

And so that you’re putting yourself in the emotions of things going well rather than the anticipatory emotions of, oh, my day is going to be so stressful. I’m going to have to go to court today. That’s not going to go well. I just know it. You’re just exhausting yourself even more. So let me give you an example of how this works from the world of professional sports. There was an athlete, she was a professional diver going to the Olympics several years ago, and she injured her foot about three months before the Olympics. And her doctors and her trainers said, you have to take some time to heal. You cannot be training, you’re probably not going to be able to compete in the Olympics, but we’ve got to focus on you getting better. So no training for at least the next couple of months. And what she would do during her typical training time, she would take an hour out of that time and she would sit down, close her eyes, and she would imagine herself going through all of her dives and what happened, and this is the true beauty, the science of envisioning things, envisioning the outcome you want, why it worked so well.

She was going through the movements in her head. When you’re going through the mental movements and practicing and visualizing, you’re exercising the same neural pathways, you would be reinforcing if actually doing those dives, doing those movements. So what happened with her is she, to the surprise of her doctors and trainers, she was able to heal much more quickly than she had anticipated. Not only that, but she was able to go to the Olympics and she did rather well. So that translates for attorneys into this idea of getting out, of anticipating the worst and imagining things going better than that so that it eases your way through the day. Now, there are two parts to this. You can’t just imagine things going well, I’m picturing a perfect outcome. That’s very helpful, but you also have to be prepared. You also have to work hard. You also have to be at your best.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I love there was a phrase you had, and this is part of your conditioning principles that you outline, but the phrase was, take your stressful thoughts to court.

Amy Wood:

Yes, that’s

Lee Rawles:

Right. And I love this positioning of it because you will discover in taking these stressful thoughts to court and interrogating them and making them give testimony and then evaluating some of them are going to be a real problem. Okay, great. Then you’ve identified a real problem, and some of them are going to be, you know what, this is really far outside the bounds of what probably will happen. And we’re not going to put this on a front burner. So I love that idea of take your stressful thoughts to court.

Amy Wood:

Yes. So the idea here is oftentimes we create our own stress just by the way we’re thinking about something that doesn’t really match

Lee Rawles:

Reality,

Amy Wood:

And it’s a natural thing. We all do this. So what I mean when I say take your thoughts to court is if you’re feeling really stressed, ask yourself, okay, what are the threats? Or what are the thoughts I’m having right now that are creating the stress? And are these thoughts really based on reality? In other words, would they hold up in court? So let’s say you have a performance review that doesn’t go well, and you might come out a lot of adults would, because this is just what adults do. We go to the extreme. So you might be thinking, I’m never going to recover from this. I should never have become an attorney. I’m a loser. Who knows where you’re going to go with this? But taking those thoughts to court would be, now wait a minute. What evidence do I have that I’m never going to recover from this, that I am a total loser, that I should never have become an attorney, and I’m wasting my time to the contrary?

What evidence do I have to contradict that thought? And this is where you really get results because you can say, let’s say in this example, okay, if that’s true that I’m a loser, let me find the evidence that contradicts that. So you might say, wow, I was on law review. I passed theBar exam. I work at a really good firm. I have offers coming to me all the time to go to other firms. I just won a really difficult case. I’ve been through a lot of difficult things in my life that I’ve gotten through. So when you do that, when you step outside the thoughts that are extreme and causing you stress and really evaluate them, it helps to soften that thinking and put you in a much better emotional place that is not nearly as stressful.

Lee Rawles:

Now we’ve been talking about the concepts behind lawyer, like an athlete. Before we end our conversation, I really want to let listeners know more about the format of this book. And one thing I think is important to tell people about is you’ve encouraged them to start thinking about outlining a number of things. This really does read like a workbook. You have sections where you’re encouraging the readers to pull out individual instances, and then you have a space for them to write things in here. You designed this like a workbook for someone to pick up and then make personal to them. So let’s talk a little bit about that. That obviously was your intention. You want this to be not just a reading experience, but something that people are participating in and making personal.

Amy Wood:

And as someone who does a lot of speaking, particularly motivational speaking, I’m familiar with what psychologists and motivational speaker types call conference euphoria. So that’s the experience you have. Let’s say when you go to a really great talk that really pumps you up, and let’s say you’re at a conference with all sorts of like-minded people and you have all these great ideas, and then you go right back to work and it all falls away because you have no structure for keeping it going. And you were hyping it all up thinking, oh, I’m going to change my life and I’m going to start doing things differently. But you don’t have a strategy, you don’t have a plan. And in order to take all the wisdom of the book and make it work for you, you have to do it gradually. You have to integrate it into your life step by step. And so I set the book up so that it’s like a training program like you would’ve participated in if you were a professional athlete.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, I love that. You’ve got preseason, regular playing and then playoffs and

Amy Wood:

You’re

Lee Rawles:

Taking someone through a sports season.

Amy Wood:

That’s right. So each chapter builds on the last one. And what’s really key about this is, and it may be counterintuitive to a lot of ambitious attorneys, but you can’t just race through it. You can’t just read it and expect, okay, I’m going to close the book and now I’m going to be lawyer and like an athlete, you have to really practice. You have to read the book and apply it at a pace that really works for you. So again, I can’t say enough. This is really about slowing down, not trying to move too fast. There’s a lot of trial and error in this as there is in life all the time and work all the time. You have to allow yourself to make mistakes, get up after you’ve fallen and try again and again, again, athletes certainly get that, that there are a lot of disappointments when you’re a professional athlete.

There are lots and lots of errors. Whereas I think one of the problems that attorneys have is that they’re very perfectionistic. And my book is really designed to help with that too, because it really helps you to see you’re not going to be perfect. The goal of this book is not to be good at all of this that I mentioned in the book, all the strategies all the time, but most of the time to practice enough so that you’re doing better. Most of the time you’re getting better results overall, but you’re still going to have disappointments. You’re still going to have failures, you’re still going to have unexpected curve balls hit you because that’s just the nature of life, especially when you’re doing really demanding work in a world that is moving so quickly.

Lee Rawles:

And just to give readers an idea of the kind of language of the book, would you mind reading a passage out loud for us?

Amy Wood:

Oh, sure. So what I’m thinking, we talked a lot about the importance of thoughts, but I like this chapter, which is called Condition your Thoughts because it really brings home the idea that you really have to have a particular perspective in order to be a happy and healthy attorney. And you can’t just let your thoughts pull you from one place to another, which is actually the tendency that all human beings have. You really have to say, okay, there’s a lot I can’t control in my life, but I can manage my thoughts in a way to get better results. So I’m just going to read some from that chapter Condition your thoughts. So here we go. Beyond having the can-do attitude that we talked about in the last chapter, star athletes need the conscientious construction of a mindset that attracts productive thoughts and neutralizes any negative ones, however small that might stifle performance thoughts.

Haphazard by nature can never be controlled. However, they can be influenced by a customized overall outlook that reduces mental clutter. Creating a muscular mental framework capable taming and shaping inner chatter is not nearly as simplistic as just saying positive statements to yourself in front of your mirror every morning, or taking up meditation affirming yourself is a useful way to boost confidence. And meditation, as we’ve already talked about in this book, is a wonderful practice for calming the mind and taking a relevant inner talk less seriously. However, neither of these popular mindfulness techniques is enough to lawyer like an athlete. A total shift in one’s basic approach to thinking is integral. And this requires disciplined dedication and the full clarity that in the fitting words of basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, your mind is what makes everything else work. Athletes must seriously alter their inner world to prevent random thoughts, often innocuous, sometimes self-defeating, usually irritating thoughts from even slightly slowing them down, jostling their mood or interfering with their focus.

It’s about learning to ignore the noise inside your head so that you can concentrate on what is most critical. Likewise, attorneys need to keep their minds on what they need to accomplish without being sidetracked by toxic self-talk. It’s a tough day in and day out, never ending lifestyle commitment as opposed to a crash diet type of approach to generate a mostly fortifying rather than rattling thought train. Through the hundreds of clients I’ve worked with as I’ve developed my lawyer, like an athlete program during the past several years, I’ve witnessed that the undertaking is well worth it. And then I go into the principles, how you do that, and one of those we already talked about, taking your stressful thoughts to court.

Lee Rawles:

The other one I really loved is strive for a fan’s perspective.

Amy Wood:

And

Lee Rawles:

Certainly my participation in athletics beyond childhood has been as a fan and the athletes who I am truly a fan of, I do not look at every time that they miss a shot and say, oh, well now I hate you. Alias Patterson of the Vancouver Canucks is having a terrible season. And you know what? I still love him and support him and want him to do great next season. So looking at your own life, how can you strive for a fan’s perspective?

Amy Wood:

Well, this is really the opposite of perfectionism. What we typically as adults, not just attorneys, but all adults, what we demand from ourselves is so much more than what other people demand of us. We tend to focus on what’s wrong and what’s missing in ourselves, what’s not going well, what we’re not so good at, rather than distilling down to what is going well, what we’re grateful for about ourselves, what our strengths are. So it’s really about looking at ourselves as we look at the people we love in our lives. So how we might look at a friend who’s feeling down and feeling like they’re not worth anything or looking at a child who’s struggling to learn something new. We don’t berate our friends, we don’t berate the family members we love, but we do that to ourselves. So having a fan’s perspective is really about getting outside your own head and really striving to look at yourself as others look at you and appreciate what they see.

Lee Rawles:

Okay. Amy, A buzzword or phrase that I hear brought up so much when we talk about wellness with lawyers is work-life balance. So what’s your take on work-life balance for attorneys?

Amy Wood:

Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that’s one of the biggest goals that attorneys bring to me in a first coaching session. They’ll say, I really tried to achieve work-life balance and I just can’t do it. I am not good at it. I don’t know what to do, but I’m really stressed and I want you to help me with that. And the first thing I say to them is, it doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing, especially after the pandemic where we’re now living in a hybrid world, work and life, our home life, they’re completely integrated and intertwined, and we can’t rely on external circumstances to divide that world for us. So maybe 40 years ago, you could say, I live at home and all my home things are there, and then I go into work and then I have my work. Because we’re so integrated now, it’s up to us to create that division in ways that make sense for us.

So we have to be really good at setting boundaries so that, for example, if you’re an attorney, you work at home, you have to make sure you have that office space, a door that closes so that you can be working and be away from the rest of the house when you’re at work, and you have to tell other people, this is my work time. So a big aspect of lawyering like an athlete is to take a look at beliefs that you’re operating with that no longer work and adopt other beliefs. A big one might be, and this is something that comes up a lot with attorney too, along with the work home balance goal, that’s really a myth, is that I have to work all the time because having a life outside of work is just going to take away from my productivity. So that’s an old belief that a lot of us, not just attorneys, but a lot of people in a lot of professions believe that if you spend time relaxing, if you spend time just hanging out with people and having fun, you spend time exercising, taking care of yourself, getting enough sleep, that’s going to take away from time when you could be working.

But the truth is, and this is what we know from a lot of research, is that that time spent socializing, that time spent doing things away from work that are fun and simple and allow you to give your head rest, all of that actually is the foundation for productivity. The more we take care of ourselves and have full lives away from our work, the more we bring to our work and the more focused we are when we’re doing that work and the better results we’re going to see.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about lawyer like an athlete. If people want to learn more, you certainly have various webinars, CLEs, how can they pick up the book? How can they learn more? How should people reach out to you?

Amy Wood:

Probably the best way, if anyone wants to reach me, if you have a question that you want to ask after hearing me speak today, you can always email me at Amy Wood. That’s A-M-Y-W-O-O-D at Amy Wood, A-M-Y-W-O-O-D, P as in Peter, S as in Sam, YD as in david.com. So Amy Wood at Amy Wood id, which means doctor of a psychology.com. You can also go to my website, Amy Woods id.com. If you want the book, you can always go to the A book website. You can also go to Amazon. That’s probably the easiest way, and probably any bookstore you might wander into, either they’ll have it or they can easily order it for you. So it’s very easy to get.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you again to Amy Wood and thank you listeners for joining us for this episode in the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a suggestion for a book you’d like me to feature on an upcoming episode, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.