Are you completely satisfied with your legal career? Do you wake up in the morning eager to get to the office? Do you have a clear vision of your career goals and how to create fulfillment in your life? Odds are, your answer was “No” to each of these 3 questions.

As lawyers, we have specific issues and pressures to handle on a daily basis that don’t exist in other professions.

In law school, we learn to define success as the Firm in which we work and the amount of money we make. This definition of success follows us throughout our careers and erases our personal definition of success. Still, our definition of success is always in the back of our minds.

We also learn to focus on winning as the end all be all. We don’t learn anything about the importance of communication skills, how to establish rapport with clients and staff, or how to gain respect and agreement from juries.

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Work life Balance

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The field of law attracts a specific type of person. Because we tend to be driven, intelligent, hard-working people, many of us tend to dive into our career head first and meet whatever goals are put in front of us (ie. Billable hours, depositions, motion hearings, appeals, you name it.) The main problem with this scenario is that those goals are fluid, you get very little feedback or validation, and very little if any support in creating fulfillment in your professional life.

The fulfillment to which I refer is that which you get as a result of achieving success through work life balance. When you create boundaries and allow yourself to life a more full life, you experience empowerment and a life of fulfillment. This can be a difficult task to undertake especially for solo practitioners and small firm partners who have no in-house support staff available to provide assistance for running their legal practice.

Yes, the results are absolutely worth the effort.

When you have a healthy work life balance, you no longer fall into the pattern of competitiveness measuring yourself against others. You experience new found confidence and personal satisfaction.

This satisfaction carries into every segment of your life, allowing you to be more effective in court, efficient at the office, and present at home. It motivates you to manage your time in more efficient ways, delegate work appropriately, and inspire cooperative relationships among your legal staff.

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Interpersonal skills, Emotional Intelligence, and Communication

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Are you a good listener? Do you communicate efficiently and empathically? Are your clients satisfied with their relationship with you?

Though your gut reaction would lead you to answer “Yes” to all 3 of these questions, if you look further, you’ll realize that the answer may not be what it seems.

You graduated top 10% of your graduating class. You have won dozens of motions, appeals, and hearings. You are now on your way to partnership or partner at a Firm. But, do you really know how to communicate?

Having excellent legal skills is a minimum requirement to succeeding in the practice of law. Progressively though, you will realize that interpersonal skills such as communicating and listening are as essential. They are a bare requirement for business development, client relations, staff management, delegation, and collegiality. Communication skills are also critical in successful negotiations. To reach professional success, more effective productivity, and your professional goals, you must develop your communication skills.

As a coach who experienced being a lawyer in both the public and private arena and had a private Firm, I work with lawyers to achieve success through work life balance, develop their interpersonal, leadership, and time management skills, and focus on their strength building.

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Values and Decisions

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When you know what your core values, you walk more confidently and secure. You are not swayed nor affected by your clients’ values. You are less likely to take on their values and potentially be the subject of an ethics complaint. Being aware of your values enables you to make decisions that are congruent with your personal and professional life plan.

Each time you make a decision in this manner, you take control and empower your professional and personal life.

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Beliefs and Obstacles

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Every single one of us has beliefs about ourselves, our career, our office, and life in general. These beliefs either support or paralyze our personal and professional success. As lawyers, we work in a field that is adversarial at best and combative at worst. Our professions and life experiences create beliefs for us that we are generally not ever aware of. These beliefs are what determine how we respond to changes, challenges, and goals in our life. They can be our most powerful tool or our worst enemy.

Through specific coaching assessments and techniques, I work with you to use your beliefs to your highest advantage.

We work together to 1. Identify your beliefs, 2. Determine how they are helpful or harmful in regards to where you want to get in life, and 3. Re-frame those beliefs to create new ones that are supportive of your goals. Changing beliefs is the most effective strategy to reaching goals in life faster and more easily.

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Lawyers v. Executives

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Unlike law firms, corporations in the United States, identify high potential individuals and support their personal and professional growth. They do this through career transitions and coaching programs. The case for lawyers however, is completely different. In general, we are thrown into the practice of law after graduating from law school not having learned many, if any, skills that will support our personal and professional success other than legal analysis, research and writing.

As a lawyer and coach, I am keenly aware of this scenario. I give lawyers a confidential and supportive sounding board. I work with them in designing strategies to clarify their direction and help them develop the skills necessary to get ahead in the legal career.

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Stress Reduction

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Working as a lawyer is a job that is filled with continuous pressures, deadlines, headaches, and stress. To many of us, the word “lawyer” is not just a professional title. It is who we are and who we identify ourselves to be in society, in our home, and to ourselves.

Doing this, we create a constant stream of stress for ourselves. We never turn off the “lawyer” mode to be ourselves. So, we live our family lives experiencing the same amount of stress that we did in the office. This is not even mentioning all the stress we bring with us once we shut down our office computer for the day.

These high levels of stress create migraines, back pains, insomnia, anxiety attacks, and depression. They also lead to substance addiction and even suicide. On that note, did you know scientific studies have shown lawyers suffer the highest level of stress as a profession, on a national level?

Stress kills. It can literally kill your professional life, your personal life, your health, and your marriage. I work with lawyers to create work life balance, reduce stress, and teach them easy stress reduction techniques they can apply on a daily basis for coping with office stress.

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Become a Better Advocate

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Can you remember the reason why you became a lawyer? Have you been able to do what you set out to do? Lawyers attend law school for many reasons. Still, the one underlying reason is because they want to help people solve problems. They want to guide and counsel them.

Yet, can you really guide your client if you’ve lost your own way? Can you empower your client if you don’t feel you have control over your own life? Can you solve a client’s problem if you have conflicts present within yourself?

Getting to know what is of most value to you, identifying your beliefs, and creating ways to experience fulfillment enables you to become a better advocate. This is after all what you went through law school, passed the State Bar, and are practicing law for; Right?

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Professional Satisfaction and Fulfillment

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Do you feel disconnected from your work, from cases, and from clients? Do you feel disconnected from yourself? Does it amaze you that the Partners don’t notice this?

If you answered “Yes” to either of these questions, you are not alone.

Hundreds of lawyers feel this on a daily basis. They work over 10 hour days in work they get absolutely no satisfaction from and wake up the next morning to do it all over again. This lack of satisfaction is based on many individual reasons. Yet, the most common reasons are not feeling any control over the assignments they do, not feeling valued or acknowledged, and wander why they find no meaning in their jobs.

If any of these statements resonated with you, you are tired of it, and are ready to create change in your life, please contact me. I offer you a free 30 minute coaching session so you can experience coaching first hand, interact with my personal communication style, and determine whether you are ready to start coaching and developing true success in your life.

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As a Life Coach, these are Some of the Things that I Work on with Lawyers:

• Adjust from being a law student to being a practicing lawyer
• Discover your ideal law practice area
• Design and taking control of your legal career
• Balance billable hours with every other aspect of your life
• Balance your work and family life
• Set professional and personal boundaries supporting your personal and professional growth
• Cope with office conflicts, gossip, competitiveness, and disloyalty
• Develop and improve organizational skills, communication skills, delegation skills, and time management
• Create or enhance client development strategies, Client management, and Networking skills
• Increase the effect of marketing efforts and amount of referrals
• Work effectively with paralegals, legal secretaries, partners, and associates
• Avoid or cope with burnout symptoms
• Learn and Implement Stress management and Relaxation techniques
• Get in touch with your core values
• Make decisions in congruence with your values
• Stay motivated
• Communicate powerfully
• Improve productivity
• Find a Firm where you can advance your career and which values are congruent with yours
• Identify beliefs
• Practice strategies to create beliefs that are conducive to your goals
• Plan an effective career advancement or transition
• Experience personal and professional satisfaction

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What You Can Expect from Coaching

• Objective, confidential assistance
• Increased revenue
• Attainment of personal and professional satisfaction
• Achievement of partnership
• Focused energy resulting in enhanced performance
• Reduction in stress level
• Feeling more in control of your professional life
• Thriving productivity and growth resulting from being pushed out of your comfort zone, challenged, and taught to achieve success through balance

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Typical Reasons a Law Firm Hires a Coach

• There is an urgent challenge, stretch goal, or opportunity, something is at stake
• There is a gap in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources
• There is a desire to accelerate results
• There is a need for a course correction in work due to a setback
• There is a need and a desire to be better organized and more self-managing
• The law career is no longer fulfilling and a change is required for the partners and/or associates
• Improve rainmaking skills
• Improve communication with staff, clients, prospects, and colleagues
• The pressures of work have become overwhelming and burnout symptoms are close ahead

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Why does Coaching Work?

1. It provides a safe and confidential sounding board focused specifically on your personal and professional growth
2. It integrates learning and action
3. Specific plans are designed
4. You take action each week
5. Unbiased, non-judgmental, and honest feedback is given
6. You are held accountable for all actions or lack thereof
7. You learn new ways of handling challenges, obstacles, and opportunities.

See studies showing the success of coaching, find out how the Time for Life coaching process works, and get more details about the coaching programs we have available.