Crushing self-criticism, spiralling anxiety and superhuman standards, does this sound familiar? It’s what Dr Leila hears from many lawyers in her practice, and it’s her passion to support a new narrative.
Amanda Mead explains that she felt the pressure to set up a law firm straight after graduating from law school, with a 2-month old. She realised quite quickly that you need support because you just can’t do everything. And if you do try and do something yourself, you’re not going to do it as well as a professional.
It is exhausting being a lawyer and if you don’t have good boundaries you are going to burn out. It’s not if, it’s a case of you will. You have to have some outlet so you can re energise, whether it’s playing tennis, going for a walk along the beach or doing meditation before bed. That is what is able to sustain your legal career.
It’s undeniable, being a practicing lawyer, you will ALWAYS come up against pressure, be that time pressures, pressures from client’s and/or internal pressures. To be the best lawyer we can be, we have to start by clearing our own internal pressures in order to perform optimally and alleviate the risk of burnout.
When Amanda became a lawyer, she heard her colleagues really struggling. Everybody was really out of balance. Something needed to change. Separate from that, she recognised within herself that something needed to change too. There needed to be a better balance.
When we don’t look after ourselves, we can fall into a trap of behaviours that can lead to more and more of the same. It’s Groundhog Day everyday, combined with feeling painfully stuck and having no idea how to escape.
As they say so within so without, it’s amazing how good you can feel once you start to shift from a place equivalent to survival mode and step into a place where you can thrive.
For Amanda, things like getting a bookkeeper or an accountant, save a lot of time and headache, so you can just focus on the things you really want to do. Don’t wait till your internal pressure cooker is about to burst. There are simple techniques which will support you to feel more ease and increase contentment and self-acceptance as you shoulder the responsibilities of work and family.
Dr Leila and Amanda share tools that can change your life so you will become your own best friend rather than your own worst critic. Inspired by Dr Kristin Neff, they both can help you explore how beliefs drive thinking and behaviour, and how we can gently and kindly work with the root cause to produce a shift from self-critique to self-compassion.
Register here to join Dr Leila and Amanda Mead on 17 November for their complimentary webinar ‘Shifting from self-criticism to self-compassion’. Earn 1 CPD unit.
