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Episode 40 Buy Episode

Happy Lawyer, Happy Life: how to create an authentic personal brand

Law as stated: 24 June 2021 What is this? This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Clarissa Rayward aka "the Happy Family Lawyer" joins us in this episode to discuss how to create an authentic personal brand as a lawyer in a way that not only brings you success, but most importantly happiness. She shares with us insights gained from her journey finding success, balance, contentment and joy as a lawyer.
Practice Management and Business Skills Practice Management and Business Skills
24 June 2021
Clarissa Rayward
1 hour = 1 CPD point
How does it work?
What area(s) of law does this episode consider?In this episode, family lawyer, blogger, podcaster, author, business owner and coach, Clarissa Rayward, joins us to discuss her success in building and communicating her ‘The Happy Family Lawyer’ brand. We also discuss burnout culture, finding your values and developing your network as well as the importance of fun in fostering a healthy and sustainable work/life balance.
Why is this topic relevant?Finding work as a lawyer is not all coffees, lunches and golf games.  A personal brand, communicated effectively through social media as well as ‘high-value’ content likes books, blogs and podcasts, can communicate your values to the market and find you new clients from outside your immediate network.  But more importantly, a personal brand that matches your values will help you find the right kind of clients – the ones you actually want to work with, and who want to work with you.
What are the main points?
  • Lawyers and law firms can cultivate a distinctive brand for themselves by identifying their strengths and values through discussions with people they interact with closely. Developing a brand that aligns with your values is a way to differentiate yourself in the market.
  • A network of many weak connections is more valuable than a few strong ones, so remember that time spent on business development will increase your reach and can help you to attract and keep clients.
  • Once you have discovered the differentiating factor for your own brand, develop a business strategy around it to consider the various options available to communicate it to the market. For example, assess how relevant a social media presence may be to your target audience or high value content such as books, blogs or podcasts.
  • As with all things in life, balance is key. Depriving yourself of adequate sleep for example has the same effect on your brain as being drunk. In order to avoid burnout, it’s important to prioritise rest, food, sleep and time for other non-work-related activities to satisfy your emotional and physical needs as a human.
  • Creativity fosters happiness and happiness fosters creativity. This positive feedback loop is created when you, or your workplace encourages you to, approach work with a sense of innovation and enthusiasm. Encouraging failure in the workplace under the ‘failing fast’ model is one way to ensure that lawyers have a creative outlet with regards to their work.
What are the practical takeaways?
  • Find out what your values are and what is important to you in life. Happiness in the law means approaching your work in a way that is consistent with your own personal values.
  • Being a lawyer doesn’t mean you have to work long hours, sacrifice an active social life and always be serious. Lawyers should strive for a healthy work/life balance, instead of pursuing endless growth, and feel comfortable expressing their personality and creativity. This ties into inciting a wider discussion in the legal industry around mental health and wellbeing.
Show notes

 

Paula Davis’ 2021 article in Forbes ‘Why you can’t yoga your way out of burnout’

The Happy Family Lawyer website

Happy Lawyer Happy Life website

David Turner:For those of us in private practice, it’s essential to put ourselves out there and attract work. Whether you call it business development, marketing, or something else, there’s plenty of competition in every practice area and it isn’t enough anymore to be technically excellent; you need to be able to offer something more. Cultivating a distinctive brand for your practice and for yourself, can help you to attract and keep clients. Our guest today Clarissa Rayward, the Happy Family Lawyer, joins us in the studio to share her insights on building a brand. Clarissa, thanks so much for joining me today on Hearsay.
Clarissa Rayward:Thanks David for having me.
DT:

 

 

1:00

Now Clarissa you’ve developed an extraordinary following in the legal profession and not just in family law – certainly that’s where your brand started or developed but now lawyers of all stripes find that they really resonate with the Happy Family Lawyer brand.

TIP: The Happy Family Lawyer blog was created by Clarissa back in 2013 when she started sharing her insights on how to have a happy divorce. The blog quickly gained popularity amongst both separating spouses and family law professionals for her advocacy of happiness both in divorces and in the workplace. In 2016, Clarissa launched her business ‘Happy Lawyer Happy Life’ to offer business coaching and training services to other legal professionals looking to find happiness in their careers. As we’ll discuss further today, Clarissa is now a happy podcaster, happy author, happy business coach, happy speaker and happy lawyer with considerable experience in building her own personal brand.

When did you realise how popular your unique brand had become?

CR:

 

2:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

3:00

So, there was this really surreal moment one day when I was walking to court here in Brisbane and with a colleague from my firm and chatting as we walked. And in front of us was a woman and she turned around and she said to me “are you Clarissa?”. I said “…yes”, “I listen to your podcast every week and I could hear your voice and I thought that was you and I just had to ask!” And it was just this really strange moment for me where I was like “yeah right, I’m talking to strangers every week” of course I am, like you know you’re doing it, you’re doing that right now with this show, but I’ve never really thought about it from that perspective of there’s a whole lot of people that know about me that I’ve never met. I’ve never really turned my mind to it. And even when you sort of posed this question today, it’s a really strange thing to ponder the idea that there is this sort of weird following that sits around what I’m doing because for me it’s not about following. For me, particularly the messaging and the work that I do now in our industry, is so steeped in wanting to build a profession that is healthy. So honestly, I don’t mind if there’s one person that’s engaged with that or a thousand if we can as a profession actually really start to talk and think about: what does it take to have a legal career that has at the heart of it, happiness. Then I really hope that’s a positive thing for the future.
DT:Absolutely. I mean it might be such a strange experience, I’m maybe fortunate enough to not have had that experience yet.
CR:I’m no Britney Spears, let’s be real. It’s very low-level celebrity status.
DT:That’s probably for the best, right?
CR:I would have thought so yeah.
DT:But although it is a strange experience, as you say it’s a fantastic one to have from a business development perspective of course that means you have this broad network of people who know what you do and what you specialise in. But as you say from a wellness and wellbeing perspective it means that your message about how to practice law in a more happy, positive way is reaching and resonating with so many people. For those of our listeners who maybe haven’t heard about what you do both in terms of your professional practice and your approach to legal practice, tell us a little bit about that.
CR:

4:00

 

 

 

 

 

5:00

So I am a family lawyer, I’m a divorce lawyer by trade, have always been in that space. I’m an accredited specialist in that space here in Queensland running a little firm called Brisbane Family Law Centre and I describe that we do what it says on the tin. So you know we’re a family law practice, but we’re an out of court dispute resolution practice. And again put simply, I help people separate, stay out of court and ideally stay friends. And so that’s a really specific niche part of the market in the family law space. There’s a whole range of reasons why I work best with those types of families and why I think that is a better way of going about relationship breakdown than many other ways. But that’s really my day-to-day business. And then as you’ve already mentioned, I have this side hustle that’s fast become so much more than a side hustle, which again began with my own experience of having to really work out how I could remain a lawyer when I was very very burnout having had my first daughter, having a law firm, and found myself not wanting to come to work. And that’s never a good thing when it’s your business.
DT:No.
CR:

 

 

 

 

 

6:00

…that you don’t want to go there. On so many levels that’s problematic. And I started to try and research and understand why I was feeling the way I was. And at the time there was a lot of research that had just been published just in the years prior from Australia, Europe and America about our very high rates of burnout and psychological distress.

TIP: If you’d like to hear more about mental health in the legal industry, listen to episode 2 of Hearsay with Michael Tooma from Clyde and Co who shares his insights and tips on how to create mentally healthy workplace cultures.

But I couldn’t find anything to help me understand what to do about it. And so that is where my own experience of trying to understand “well what do we do?” If you don’t want to leave law, you want to remain a lawyer ‘cause you’ve worked really hard to be here, how on earth can you build a career that keeps you well at the centre of it?

DT:

 

 

 

 

 

7:00

 

 

 

Absolutely. And I want to come back to the benefits both personal, psychological, professional that come with that more positive approach to legal practice, but starting with your approach to separation, your approach to the area of practice that you work in. Originally that brand ‘The Happy Family Lawyer’, that was the name of the blog that you started writing in 2013 and you published a book ‘Splitsville’ in 2015 that also focused on a more positive experience of the legal process for people going through a separation, that’s  still really a, as you say, a really nascent approach to separation. There’s still a very adversarial, combative approach to separation for many family lawyers. We’ve spoken to collaborative law practitioners on this show before and we know that that’s building, but certainly in 2013 and 2015 even less popular than it is today for sure.

TIP: If you’d like more information on the collaborative approach to family law, try episode 17 of Hearsay with Leona Bennett and Shelby Timmins who share their experiences as collaboratively-trained lawyers.

Did that perspective, that desire to move away from a more acrimonious approach to separation come from a desire to differentiate yourself in the market or did it come from somewhere else?

CR:

 

 

8:00

 

 

 

 

 

9:00

Somewhere else honestly. From a really early stage as a lawyer I could not understand why the adversarial method was in place for so many of the people that I would see in my day-to-day work. And it just never made sense to me. So, from a really early stage I was questioning like why is it that when people’s hearts are breaking, we get them to write 40-page affidavits about the other person setting out all the terrible things that anyone’s ever done in their life? One day I, as probably a 25-year-old, was at a legal conference where one of our judges here in Brisbane had been over in Canada doing a bit of a sabbatical really, and came back having spent time with collaborative lawyers and presented a paper around collaborative practice. And it was one of those moments for me where literally I saw my career going “that’s me, I want to do that, that’s exactly the type of person I am. It’s why I came to law, it’s all problem-solving, it’s being creative, but it’s doing it in a really helpful way, pulling upon knowledge of people that are outside of the legal industry.” Everything I read about it I just resonated with. And so from the minute I set up my firm, I was quite young when I set up my firm because similarly I was like “this doesn’t really work for me the traditional way, I’m going to have to do it my own way to genuinely do what I think is going to help people best.” I’ve always run a multi-disciplinary practice. So 2008 is when I began, I’ve always had in the practice counsellors, financial professionals, because for me divorce is so much more than a legal problem. There’s so many aspects to it. So it’s that, I guess that belief system that there just can be better outcomes for families when we think of people holistically and we try and treat so much more than just the legal challenge on the paper. That’s really led to my style when it comes to helping people through separation and divorce.
DT:It sounds like you identified an approach that you believed in philosophically that was consistent with your values, consistent with what you wanted to do with your time and with your career, and the benefits of differentiation kind of came with that.
CR:

10:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

11:00

Exactly. That’s exactly right, like it was really still very new like you said back in 2008 when I started my firm there was a handful of people, in Brisbane particularly, that were trained as collaborative professionals and you know we were desperately trying to educate a market and educate a professional market. And I remember, so I now teach professionals all around the world collaborative practice, and I remember the very first course that I taught and it was in 2012 and it was so difficult. It was like 40, largely lawyers, in a room and it was just so difficult to explain, you know, this is the way “oh no we can’t do that.” And right now I’m teaching a course for the international academy of collaborative professionals and it’s the most fascinating thing for me. I’ve got professionals from New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, like so diverse, Washington DC, it’s the most diverse group of people I’ve ever worked with. And at no point have I had to persuade them that this is a useful thing. What’s happened in that 15 years is there’s been a real tipping point in the industry where certainly the messaging in the Australian system, the messaging in the Australian courts and I think the majority of practitioners are saying “this is not really the best thing and there are other things we can do.” We’ve had a whole systematic change around mediation and so the acceptance around collaboration, working together, trying to solve problems in a more useful way has really occurred. And so that whole market education piece has happened, but I will never forget those early days and people looking at me like I have four heads when I said, you know, “I’m not going to go to court” “well what are you going to do? That’s just silly.”
DT:It is wonderful that it’s becoming more mainstream in the family law space. I would love collaborative law in my space, in the corporate space I think that there are so many relationships to preserve…
CR:That’s it.
DT:

 

 

12:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

13:00

…or at the very least to end amicably both in terms of both founders of companies, shareholders of companies, investors in different projects, you know those relationships can be saved or if they can’t be saved they can at least be preserved for the next project even if this one has to end. So I think it’s a method and mode of practice that’s clearly well-adapted to family law, clearly a better way for most couples than the adversarial process, but I think probably a better way for many people exposed to a dispute in any area of the law really.

TIP: We’ve talked about the advantages of collaborative law before on Hearsay but let’s just quickly recap. Collaborative law is a method of dispute resolution that side-steps the adversarial legal system by inviting both lawyers and their clients to work together to reach a solution that works for both parties. Although mainly practised in family law, collaborative law can be utilised in any legal dispute and can be more beneficial to parties by focusing on their respective interests rather than their respective entitlements. In a collaborative law process, the parties’ lawyers commit not to act for the parties in litigation, and thereby the immediate threat of costly court proceedings is removed, encouraging parties to work together on solutions that wouldn’t be possible to achieve by court order, helping them to maintain an ongoing relationship, or at least resolve the dispute amicably. Unlike a one-off mediation or conciliation, a collaborative law process can run over several sessions, attended by different parties and attended by different experts, and is facilitated by a collaborative law coach, whose role is more expansive than a mediator’s role. Collaborative law is said to be particularly appropriate in family law due to the personal and sensitive nature of relationship breakdowns which requires a more human and emotional method to resolve legal disputes. And although it’s not yet widely used in commercial disputes, collaborative law practises could be useful for any type of relationship breakdown, including a dispute between business owners, or business founders, or even a customer and a supplier.

CR:

14:00

And look all it really is, is a problem-solving framework. So you’re exactly right David and it’s happening in the States, you know it’s not unique to family law in the States, it’s well spread across different types of conflict. And honestly I look at what’s happening in the world around us at the moment, the challenges we’re facing in Australia right now as we try and understand and deal with issues of domestic violence, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, all these really massive issues and underpinning so much of that is this simple concept of respect. And that for me is what underpins collaborative practice – is the idea that you can be heartbroken, you can disagree with someone, you can be deeply frustrated with how you found yourself in the situation that you’re in, but respectfully find a solution. And I think that really should apply in business, in employment, in relationships of any nature. This stuff from the grassroots level is I think what can genuinely make a difference in the world.
DT:No matter what kind of dispute you’re with…
CR:Exactly!
DT:

 

15:00

…respect is a cornerstone to dealing with it productively. Now let’s talk about the Happy Lawyer approach. I think you said it really well, having a career in the law that has at its core happiness. As you said we know that there are high rates of depression and anxiety in our profession, we know that there are high rates of burnout, and of course taking a more positively minded approach to practicing the law might be thought to reduce some of those more deleterious effects but personally, what are some of the benefits that you’ve seen or your business or your practice have seen from adopting this different approach to the law?
CR:I guess from a business perspective, you know I love coming to work. There you go! It’s like sort of that simple.
DT:Pretty good start.
CR:

 

 

 

16:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

17:00

I don’t have a Sunday afternoon moment where I’m like “oh god it’s Monday tomorrow and I’ve got to go to work.” And that’s where I was you know back in 2012/13 that’s where I was. But I honestly think It’s the same for everyone who works in here, no one is coming in going “oh god, I’ve got to go to work.” Everyone’s coming in with real energy. Now that doesn’t also mean though that we’re killing ourselves, you know, we work hard when we’re here but I do believe that work should be limited to you know the 8am-5:30pm or the whatever it is around those sorts of periods that we come in, we work really hard as a team while we’re here and people should have lives that exist outside of work. They shouldn’t just be “oh here I am, I’m a lawyer and I’m killing myself and I’m really proud of that fact.” I think also what I’ve observed culturally is having a focus on all sorts of pieces that connect into this idea of happiness means that we’re a pretty nimble, innovative, creative organisation. And it’s that creativity piece that I think is really powerful in the marketplace that we’re all working in right now. Because we have a culture here where it’s okay to fail. Now ideally you don’t want to entirely screw up client work clearly, but when I say that what I mean is we want to go “look I’ve got this idea about how we might change some way that we’re doing something and I want to experiment.” And the culture here is “go for it! Have a whirl! See what happens!” And if it doesn’t produce the result that you thought, then what have we lost in that? But we’ll learn something along the way. And that is right through my business. There is no hierarchy here, that’s really important to me as well. So we don’t sort of have titles and we don’t have a sort of ranking, we just have everyone is valuable. We don’t have time-based billing, like there’s so many elements of what I guess what would be associated with traditional practice where I’ve just gone, I call it the Marie Kondo thing – ‘does that bring me joy?’ If not, do I need it? No? Get rid of it. I’ve just gone through absolutely everything and Marie Kondo’d it and really asked the purposeful question of, you know, why is it done that way? Is that useful to us? Is it useful to me? Do I enjoy that? If not, can I get rid of it? If I can’t, can I find a way to make it joyful? If it’s a thing that you just have to do, for example trust accounting, is there a way that you can make it useful to you?
DT:Can’t Marie Kondo that one out just yet.
CR:

 

18:00

No I can’t Marie Kondo it away, but I can hire someone that does it for me. So you know, it’s just for me there’s so many pieces to that I could talk to you for hours about the benefits, but I think merely focusing on happiness, valuing it, saying it. You know when I started talking about happiness in the legal industry I was really dismissed quite heavily. ‘We don’t need that fluffy stuff Clarissa, we don’t need that, we’re a serious profession.’ And yet people are crumbling. And I think we have to find a way to accept that we are human beings, and human beings need things like fun and joy and creativity to be happy. And I don’t want to work in a career for 40 or 50 years and at the end of it say ‘I’m so proud of how hard I worked but I didn’t enjoy any of it.’ That’s not what life’s about for me. So for me it’s been really exploring: how do I have a purposeful career with this idea of what makes me happy which is different to perhaps what makes you, David, happy, which is again the point. We’ve all got to explore what is it for me, and how do I build a career that fits in with that for me.
DT:

19:00

Absolutely. I remember someone saying to me that they thought it was a privilege to work 24hrs a day. They had this mentality that that was a lifestyle to be valued, that was a lifestyle to be proud of. And as you say, maybe some people find joy in that kind of lifestyle, but I don’t think many people do. I think that level of balance in the time you spend practising law is really important to the quality of what you produce. I think so many of these million-dollar mistakes that come before the tribunals and courts that are very embarrassing for lawyers, happen at 3am when people are exhausted and trying to produce a result when they really have no mental energy left. And so I can imagine that having that disciplined approach to having a life outside of the office avoids some of those mistakes and improves the quality of your work.
CR:

 

20:00

It completely does. What you’ve just reminded me of, and I can’t remember the exact statistic but, there was some research I was looking at last year where if you’re sleeping less than 4 or 5 hours 3 nights in a row, it has the same impact on your brain as being drunk. So lack of sleep is one of the biggest challenges in our industry, and part of it connects with what you’re talking about David, overwork and that culture of overwork. And the pride that comes ‘how many hours are you working? Let me share with you how many hours I’m working because I’m really important.’
DT:Normally when you say ‘how are you’ the usual response Australian response is ‘good thanks.’
CR:Yes.
DT:In the legal profession it’s ‘yeah busy.’
CR:

 

 

 

 

21:00

‘Busy. I’m super busy’. Yeah we do, we wear that with pride. And I think this is the thing, like anyone that’s had kids, and unless they’re in that unique bottle of humans that have children that sleep, that you know haze that you’re in when you’ve got a newborn in your house, that’s what so many lawyers are doing to themselves on a permanent basis. That cannot be good. We need our brains functioning at the highest possible level. And I always look across to sport champions for this, you know particularly say your tennis champions or whatever, and the time and energy that they invest into the psychological element of what they’re doing at that high high level. And we need to be doing the same. Like how do we make sure that our brain is functioning at the highest possible level because that’s what we rely upon for our job. So we have to sleep, we have to eat, we have to rest, we have to do things that have nothing to do with the work that we’re doing and that’s when you’ll get your best thoughts. But we have to value those things to create space for them.
DT:

 

 

 

 

22:00

Yeah absolutely. As you say our brain is our useful tool, our most important tool for the work we do and we mistreat it really in order to get as much work done in as little time as possible. But as you say I think that metaphor for high-performing athletes is a great one, you have to respect that tool and care for it if you want it to keep performing at a high level. Just returning to your earlier answer, I also really love the idea that creativity comes from happiness, that you have this creative approach to problem-solving in your practice and being welcoming of failure. I think Microsoft might call it ‘failing fast’ – that it doesn’t matter how often you fail so long as you do it quickly and then try something else which I love. I think we’re such perfectionists, we’re so adverse to a mistake, to admitting that we were wrong about anything that it can hamper creativity, it can hamper experimentation but it sounds like having a happier approach to practising law can ameliorate some of that, can get us into a more experimental mindset.

TIP: Let’s talk a bit more about this concept of ‘failing fast.’ The failing fast approach is often discussed in the context of technological or software industries and was made popular through a keynote address delivered by Michael Kordahi from Microsoft at the TechEd conference on the Gold Coast in 2013. The principle is that businesses should frequently test out new ideas to improve efficiency and produce new products and services, but be able to quickly recognise when those aren’t working and invest their energy into something different. The word ‘failure’ has such a negative connotation, but as Clarissa has correctly identified, humans are inherently creative beings so it’s important to foster creativity and innovation in the workplace even if that inevitably involves some failure.

CR:

23:00

 

 

 

 

 

24:00

And it’s a bit like chicken and egg in the sense of creativity for me fosters happiness, happiness creates creativity. So all these things are linked. I think in terms of business, you know and so much of my influence in business comes outside of law, Microsoft was the example you were giving there, you know think of the big companies Google, Apple, the team here in Australia running Atlassian, you know the extent that those businesses go to really, from an atmosphere perspective, how do we create an environment where people are completely doing things differently because that’s how we’re going to create innovation. It’s the same thing in law. I think if we really want to be thinking outside of the box and building something different, we have to be doing something different in a granular level in our practices. It’s that wonderful old Einstein saying ‘you can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting to get a different result.’ And you’ve got to apply that on almost every level. And that’s scary because we are a profession that goes to great lengths to not be different. We don’t want to be judged, we want to be the same. And again a lot of that’s tied in with the idea of: what does it look like to be a lawyer? And that connection between professional-ness and seriousness is really interesting for me in our profession. And then how that limits the ability for people to do things that ultimately will sit at the heart of innovation, creativity, happiness. They’re all these things that are interestingly in conflict. And I actually don’t think they need to be. I think you can be a wonderful professional lawyer and not be that serious, heaven forbid.
DT:Oh I agree. I think we could have an entirely separate conversation on this idea of severity and seriousness…
CR:Yes.
DT:

 

25:00

…and this connection to the law. I’ve heard that many times before that people expect their lawyers to be very dour, grey-suited automatons who don’t joke, but they can be trusted to very seriously do their jobs. But I’ve found, from personal experience, that people like working with human beings and human beings make jokes and have lives and introduce a bit of levity into what they do.
CR:Yeah.
DT:

 

 

Now, you’ve found this differentiating factor both in terms of your family law work as a collaborative law practitioner before that was cool, if I can put it that way, and also in the way that you, differentiating as an employer or as a professional philosophically. Having found that differentiating factor for yourself, I guess twice now, what advice would you give to other lawyers in trying to find the thing that sets them apart from their competitors? It sounds like you find the passion first really.
CR:

 

26:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

27:00

 

 

And for me it’s coming from a place of, you identified this earlier in this conversation, it’s just what I believe in. It’s the values that I have in life. So it’s innately connected to the human that I am. I do have a belief set that life is very short, I wish to live my life to the fullest every single day. As a result, I do a hell of a lot of stuff because I want to do it all. And all of those things are innately the human being that I am and so you know these ideals, these values, this idea that people should be respected, that life doesn’t need to be full of this drama, underpin both of my businesses. So if someone else was in the headspace of trying to work out ‘well what is it about me? What is it about my business?’ it’s actually really hard to identify your own strengths, the things that you believe in. But the people closest to you will know it. So go and have a conversation with your closest friends, your family, people that know you really well and say to them ‘what do you think I do really well?’ But then just listen. Lawyers are terrible at listening. We say ‘oh no I don’t do that so well. Oh, oh really you think that?’ So you’ve just got to ask these questions and you’ve just got to either record or write down the answers and you’re not allowed to rebut. Terrible skill that we have. So you listen and you just ask more questions. If you think of me and you had to describe me in 10 words, what would you say? If I was a car, what am I? And then do it from a business perspective from those that work with you or know of you, you know sit there and just ask: ‘what is it about us? What is it about us that’s different, similar to others?’ And just a little bit of navel-gazing I guess. But then it changes too, you get a bit of clarity around that and then something happens and you go ‘actually it’s a bit more like this.’ You just keep digging away. And I think talking like I do in the sense of when you’re presenting, when you’re having these sorts of conversations with you today David, it always just refines. You know as people ask you to think about it, it makes you go ‘oh actually now you mention it, maybe it’s more this.’ And it’s just paying attention to all that. But everyone has a differentiating factor, you just actually have to be comfortable to go hunting for it. And I go back to saying one of the challenges in law is that we make a lot of drama about being the same. And so it’s scary to sometimes say ‘well actually I do believe in that but I do it this way.’ And be proud to do that.
DT:

28:00

 

And as you say it is an iterative process that changes over your career, it might change day to day with how you’re feeling. But going outside of yourself, finding a coach, finding someone who can give you feedback is a great tip I think, a great way to identify that differentiating factor. You know, we talk about mentoring a lot in our profession, looking for someone more experienced, wiser, to give you some advice, but you know coaching can come from anywhere, coaching can come from the people you work with, your peers, they can be from the people who work for you who are maybe less experienced in the profession but who know you well. That kind of coaching conversation can come from all sorts of places. Now once you’ve found that differentiating factor, as you have, you need to communicate that differentiating factor to the market. And you’ve done that in so many ways, we’ve talked about your blog, we’ve talked about your book, you have another book being published soon. Tell us a bit about how you communicate your brand to the market? How do you choose the ways you do that?
CR:

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For me it’s just about story-telling and almost painting a picture is how I would describe it. So I heavily use social and online media and there’s a whole business strategy that sits behind all of that, but part of why I do that is it’s actually fun, heaven forbid. So you know if it wasn’t fun I wouldn’t spend half the time that I spend on it. But it has this dual purpose for me; the online world is an opportunity, as your show is, to connect with people, to build relationships, to learn about stuff. I love the fact that I live in the time that I live and that I can have friends across the world that I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet. So there’s that whole part to it to me, coupled with there’s a whole business strategy that sits around the idea that if you can go out and communicate with the marketplace ‘this is who we are, this is how we do what we do, this is why that would matter to you, we can help you’ then that leads to people coming and doing business with you. And that’s how we ultimately generate and grow clients. So in a simplistic sense, I perceive it as story-telling. It’s going out on whatever platforms are available at any moments that I have. Today an example of that might be that I’m sitting with my hairdresser and she’s saying ‘what are you doing?’ It’s the same thing, it’s a moment to tell some stories about what you do with passion so that the person goes ‘gee, if I knew someone that was going through a separation, they’re the firm that I want to send them to.’ And you’ve just got to do that everywhere. So you’ve got to see joy in it, you’ve got to see fun in it, but you’ve just got to go out and do it everywhere.
DT:

 

 

31:00

It’s exhausting if it feels a bit mechanical, if you go to those networking events and hand out your business card and rattle off the same elevator pitch all the time. If you find joy in it, it makes it a lot easier for sure. And the broader that network is, I remember reading about the strength of weak connections. I think that was in ‘The Tower and the Square’ But it was about this idea that a network of many many weak connections is a really powerful network rather than a network of a really small number of strong ones.

TIP: That book that I couldn’t quite remember the title of at the time is Niall Ferguson’s insightful book “The Square and the Tower”, in which he discusses the benefits of networks and hierarchies, as well as the benefits of a less visible network of many weak connections.

And those weak connections can link up to produce clients and referrals from places you really didn’t expect they’d come from. Given how broad your network is, how broad your reach is, do you have a story about a kind of surprising lead or referral that came to you and you thought ‘wow how did that get to me from all the way out there in my network?’

CR:

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Look, it happens so often. And ‘cause I do track, I track where did you come from, how did you find out about me. I guess an example is I’m acting for a woman now, a new client, and she reached out to me and she said ‘three different people in the last two weeks have told me that you’re the person that I need to work with.’ I said ‘that’s really interesting.’ And when we started working I said to her ‘can we just circle back to that, I’m just really interested to know for my own understanding of how and what that was?’ And so she was obviously in the midst of separation and it was a woman at school who turns out was a former client of mine, was her hairdresser which turns out is my hairdresser, and then it was an artist that I’m connected with on Instagram who then sent her through my Instagram profile. And she followed on that. And it’s very much what you were saying there, it’s, you know, these 50 degrees of separation but when they all line up, all of those things occurred without me being involved in that conversation at all. And yet at the moment that that kind lady reaches out to me, she’s already in the headspace of ‘I’m going to work with Clarissa’ because of the effort that I’ve put into building all of those relationships out there. So she can make that buying decision without ever having met me. And some people no doubt, come into, you know, that same world of Clarissa out there and look at it and think ‘good golly not. I don’t want to be involved in this crazy colourful madness. That is completely not what I’m after’ which is my point as well.
DT:You don’t want those clients either!
CR:No I don’t. Because it’s going to be a battle for them and for me, the minute we meet.
DT:And it’s…if you try to please everyone you’re not going to be happy with the work you’re doing. You have to be selective.
CR:That’s right.
DT:

 

 

 

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That’s a great story. I think the thing that really strikes me about that story is that multiple touchpoints in your network, but touchpoints that are both professional and personal. If it’s a referral from a former client, but it’s also a referral from a shared hairdresser, from someone that you both have an interest in through art and through social media. I mean that shows that you can build your network in this less mechanical way, in this more organic way as you say by telling stories of your passion and what you do in a way that shows how much you enjoy it. Now you’ve said you use social media quite a bit, you’ve mentioned Instagram as well, I know you have quite a following on Facebook also. Our practice doesn’t use those platforms, our practice uses LinkedIn principally. Hearsay is on Instagram I suppose, but obviously some social media platforms work better for some practices than others. Do you think social media of some kind though is going to be universally useful for every lawyer whatever practice they’re in? Or does it suit some lawyers better than others? Is social media a better tool for some lawyers than others, I suppose?
CR:

 

 

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Yeah it is. it’s going to work super well from some practitioners and some practice areas, and not be as relevant for other practitioners/practice areas. I think if you’re going to use social media either as an individual lawyer in terms of your personal brand, or within a firm in terms of the business brand, you actually are going to need to enjoy it. And where lawyers get tripped up with social media is the word ‘social.’ So we go on and you see law firms and here you are ‘senior associate publishes very important article about very important decision’ and gets posted on Facebook and they wonder why no one engages with that. And then here we are, here’s the next thing that we did, and here we are, here’s the next thing that you should buy. And it’s just all about us, here we are – and that’s not the point of social media. Social media is about them. And so we’ve got to make a big mindset shift when it comes to our use of those platforms and it needs to be strategic, and it needs to be well-thought out. We don’t just go ‘oh well you’re the youngest person in the firm so that must be the thing that you can do best so you get to do that.’ There’s a whole strategy that has to sit behind this. And sometimes the social media strategy is not the social media as the strategy, we’ve got a marketing strategy of which one element is to utilise social media to expand the reach of our marketing strategy. But it would take, I think, some consideration for all firms before launching upon ‘ok let’s get a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a Twitter account, a Clubhouse account, a Tik-tok account’ oh my god like there’s so many right now that you just go ‘we’ll just do none of them.’ But I do think there are incredible benefits when you pause and really think what are our business goals, what are our marketing goals, and how might the various platforms that exist be of use to us in achieving those goals.
DT:I always find it really useful when large international law firms publish articles about a case or a new development because it’s very useful to me in advising my own clients.
CR:Turns out you’re not their client.
DT:Yeah that’s right. It’s very useful for the rest of the profession, so
CR:Which is, you know in fairness, that’s an entirely OK strategy, if that’s your strategy. And that might be a part of a brand/personal brand strategy. Particularly at a particular stage in your career, the goal is to really position yourself as an expert, then that’s the strategy in that moment. But if that is being done because we’re trying to garnish clients, then I feel that there are stronger strategies that could be utilised than that style of content.
DT:

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And I think that content works well for a boutique firm, a specialist firm that has its area and can offer those kinds of reciprocal referrals between practice areas. I think for a full service where you’re really relying on, and are obligated to provide internal referrals, there’s little motivation for a lawyer outside of your practice to look at that article and say ‘oh well the next time I have a matter in that area I’ll give it to them’ because you know you’re not going to get anything back out of that relationship are you? It’s all going to stay within the walls of that full service firm. So I do think that kind of content approach does work a bit better for people who have their specialisation and stick to it, and can promise that kind of relationship with other professionals. But something else you said about social media I think is a great point which is you don’t just start with saying ‘well we need a social media presence. Let’s create some accounts and create some content.’ It’s part of a marketing strategy and a marketing strategy is part of a strategy. You have to start with purpose, start with goals, how does your marketing strategy more broadly achieve those and then how does social media fit into the marketing strategy. It starts much earlier. And I do think there’s a kind of uncritical acceptance of the need to be present on social media and be producing content on social media perhaps without a lot of thought about the strategy that that sits within. In identifying the platforms that you’re active on, Facebook, Instagram, tell us a bit about the marketing strategy, a bit about how you identify ‘those are the platforms I need to be on’ and ‘this is the kind of content I should be producing’?

TIP: Now many of you will be very familiar with all of the social media platforms available to build your practice’s brand on, but if you’re like me you might be uninitiated or maybe need a bit of a refresher on the vast choice and diversity of social media platforms and their particular pros and cons available for building a brand. Today we’ll talk about the platforms with the widest professional reach: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

With over 2 billion active users, Facebook is the largest platform of its kind and it’s likely going to be one of your first choices of social media platforms for building brand awareness. With Facebook, your client base can be turned into a community, by sharing personal photos, status updates and behind-the-scenes insights into your business where you can raise your overall profile and network.

LinkedIn is perhaps the staple social media for white-collar professionals. If you’re listening to this podcast you’ve probably got a LinkedIn account already, you might even have found Hearsay that way. But in summary, LinkedIn is best suited to expanding your professional network and contacts. Most LinkedIn users, both individuals and businesses, share only work-related updates, milestones and achievements to give a snapshot of their careers. And some users or so-called “LinkedIn Influencers” seek to exploit the platform’s reach of 610 million users by posting and sharing non-professional content as well, and in doing so garnering a considerable following on the platform.

Instagram is not likely going to be the first platform you think of when considering ways to boost a professional profile but with a much younger and urban demographic, and where the best performing accounts are those with visually appealing or aesthetic media, Instagram isn’t for all legal professionals. But as Clarissa mentions, it can be suited to those individuals whose professional networks sometimes cross over with their personal ones, as is certainly the case with Clarissa’s family law practice and her Happy Family Lawyer brand. Not to mention, if Instagram does present an opportunity to raise your own personal brand, you’ll be tapping into a platform with over 1 billion active users.

CR:

 

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So I have two businesses and I have two audiences. So I’ve got a business that helps families through separation and divorce, and then I’ve obviously got a business now that works with lawyers around the world both on their businesses and in terms of the wellness piece as well. So knowing that, my brain, as a strategic business owner, says ‘alright, where are the customers for each of my businesses when it comes to the online world?’ Something everyone needs to know about me is I don’t do networking in a physical sense. I don’t do coffee, I don’t do lunch, I don’t do any of those things, I have no time, I have no interest so I have made a business decision, a human decision to say ‘I’m going to use the online world.’ It enables me to do it from the comfort of my bed at 10 o’clock at night – that’s how I want to live my life. So again, so much of this ties in with how I want my life to look and making my business fit to my life, rather than my life fit to my business. So knowing that my clients are human beings, Facebook and Instagram are very powerful platforms for me ‘cause I can talk straight to the human. And as a result, Facebook was a platform that was set up around friendships. So again, I just use the ethos that sits at the heart of that platform: friendships and connections. And so you’ll see my content is a combination of kindness and entertainment and behind the scenes, and this is what’s going on in Clarissa’s life, and by the way here I am and here’s a thing that you might want to buy. You know, just tell the story. And Instagram I love because it’s just such a simple, beautiful platform that doesn’t take a lot of time or energy but it’s so beautiful. I’m a really creative person, I did an art degree with my law degree, Instagram just innately sits with who I am. And I can talk with both my potential lawyer clients on Instagram as much as I can talk with my separating divorce clients. And I share little snippets about my life with my own children, and so people go ‘oh she’s just like me.’ And then that satisfies the ‘know, like and trust’ factor when it comes to marketing, and away we go from there. So for me it’s just that real clarity. I’m teaching social media right now to lawyers, I was doing a class last night with my current course, this is where I began with them, I said firstly, we need your business goals, and secondly we need to be clear on who it is that we’re trying to talk to before we do anything. Then we can work out where they are and then we can think about well what is Facebook and what content is appropriate for Facebook versus what is Instagram versus what is LinkedIn. Because they’re all different and the type of content that works on each platform is different, so we need to pause and be strategic to make sure that whatever we’re doing is going to get traction. We don’t just want to do cat memes because that’s a thing. We want to be really strategic, like what are we trying to achieve here, what can we afford to do. I’m an advocate for ‘less is more’. Doing something very high value, so for example a podcast, exactly what you’re doing David, exactly what I do, and building a whole strategy around something very high value rather than here I am with a photo of this, here I am with a photo of that. It’s not the most useful way, I think, of using these platforms.
DT:

 

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Something that’s really interesting about that answer and really about a lot of your answers is that you’ve selected the social media platforms that you’re participating in and the content that you’re producing based on what you enjoy. You know that comes first before what’s expedient, before what’s necessarily effective, but what you enjoy. And a cynic might say ‘well, it can’t really be that easy, can it? That you just do what you enjoy and then the professional network just grows out of that.’ But there’s a logic to this in that if you’re doing something that you dislike to try and build a relationship to try and meet new people, new clients, and get them to like you enough to get their work, if you’re doing it in a way that you dislike it’s going to be inauthentic, it’s going to be exhausting and you’re probably not going to be very good at doing it. So, enjoying the method you use to attract clients is probably a great place to start. And as you said, going to the place where your clients are finding the marketplace that’s right for them. We were talking about how social media might not be the best tool for every practitioner. I know some lawyers who work in a very small market, there is literally a list of 200 clients in Australia that do that work, and they are repeat users and they are people that you know of, and you identify them and you have repeat work from those people. And for those lawyers working in that very small, tightly connected market, maybe that is still a market where lunch and a beer after work and a golf game is the way to win work because that’s where those clients are, that’s the marketplace that they’re in. But for other areas, you do need to identify where you’ll find those clients. And I love that idea that when you’re working in a very personal area of the law where you’re dealing with clients at their most personally vulnerable that a platform built on connection, friendship and trust is a good place to find those people. Now something that I’ve noticed about your brand, and I say this whether we’re talking about your approach to family or your approach to a happier way to practice law, is it’s very personal; it’s ‘Clarissa’s’ brand, you know? It’s Clarissa Rayward is The Happy Family Lawyer. And it’s very closely tied to your name, your personality, as we talked about this morning your interests, your philosophy about life and how you like to spend your time. There must be benefits to having such a personal brand to having a brand for your business that’s so closely tied to who you are, but I imagine there’s also some challenges. Can you tell us a bit about the benefits of that and also the challenges?
CR:

 

 

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Benefits are it’s just me. So I don’t have to think about it. Just go about my life. And there you go, it’s that simple. The disadvantages are yeah, I’ve built a really strong brand as Clarissa so the client enquiries often are ‘I need Clarissa.’ And I have a team here of lawyers who are remarkable and so we’ve had to really think about how do we ensure that we, as a business, can support and service a broad range of people if the Clarissa brand is the thing that they’re coming here for? And I think we’ve finally reached a point where that is really successful now and what that has taken is firstly me making sure I have a team of remarkable lawyers, but those remarkable lawyers need to do things largely the way that I do them. And for us that’s a very human, personable touch. And what I’ve observed is, once the solicitor has the trust of the client, it becomes seamless. And so we’re just really focused on the touchpoints internally, the systems internally because clearly I can’t do the legal work of every single client that comes to this firm. It’s not sustainable. But I now do have a really wonderful team. So it’s just that balance between personal brand and then how do you as a business ensure that you can still service a broad range of people and there’s not saying ‘but I came for Clarissa and now I’m dealing with’ you know, ‘whoever.’ And so that for us is about excellence in service. And we do that well I think, so that’s become quite seamless now.
DT:

48:00

I suppose as well as finding great talent who are prepared to work in a similar way to you, prepared to adopt the same philosophy towards work as you, because your brand is so personal it probably means you also have to develop these personal brands for the people who are working for you. You need to help them find their own personal brand. As their coach, as their employer, as their mentor, tell me a bit about how you do that for the people who work for you? How do you help them cultivate their own brand?
CR:

 

 

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I do again that this is again a personal decision of the individual, but by way of example I’ve got a solicitor working with me Kiarah Kelly who is a superstar, who has her own brand. And she has actively built that from the minute she began. She began here before she was a graduate so in a law clerk type role, and now is a solicitor with a number of years’ experience. And she’s just chipped away at that herself, in her own way, and I will support her with that, but I don’t go and say ‘right, this is the way that Clarissa does it so you must do it that way.’ Some people who work here have absolutely no interest in spending their life on an Instagram account sharing bits and pieces and that’s entirely OK. They don’t need to. So again, it’s about having a conversation with them about what, you know, I believe in, what does your happiness look like? What do you need in your career? What will work for you? You know I don’t need everyone to have a vibrant social media community because we’re a small business, we have more than enough work. But if it’s something that interests them, then I will absolutely support them with that goal. So again for me as a leader, it’s about working out well what makes you happy? What do you want from your career at this point in time where you’re at and how can I support you with those goals? As opposed to ‘you must – because that’s how we do it here.’ There’s a balance somewhere in that.
DT:

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You mentioned something in there that I thought was interesting, that because you’re a small business, you don’t want to win all the work. You know, if there’s enough work to keep everyone busy, to keep everyone flourishing and occupied then great, you don’t need more than that. I think some businesses have, and some legal practices specifically, have this approach to winning work that you can never have enough. That you should keep winning new clients, you should keep winning work from those new clients, you need to grow the business rapidly to meet those demands and you should grow really really big really really fast.

TIP: With the COVID-19 pandemic bringing the issue of mental health to the forefront of professional workplaces worldwide, an unfortunately all too familiar word that we keep hearing is ‘burnout.’

Forbes Magazine contributor Paula Davis describes burnout as “the experience of chronic exhaustion, chronic cynicism, and [professional] inefficacy.” In this sense, burnout is not simply stress but rather the result of multiple stressors. It follows therefore that burnout culture is any workplace or organisational culture that contributes to these stressors.

Some indicative features of burnout culture include:

  • individuals experiencing a lack of autonomy in their work, or they feel as though they have little no control over the way they work;
  • high workloads and work pressures, compounded by urgent deadlines and limited resources;
  • lack of leadership or support from colleagues;
  • feelings of being treated unfairly or the perception of arbitrary-ness to decisions;
  • a disconnect between personal and workplace values; and
  • a lack of recognition of achievement.

We’ll leave a link to that Forbes article by Paula Davis in our show notes.

And even where the practice isn’t scalable, like I used to practice as a barrister, I knew plenty of people who thought they had to take all the work, then working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. How do you decide ‘this is the right size and scale of practice for me, this is where I kind of want to find an equilibrium in terms of the work that we have’?

CR:

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Yeah so I did all of the things that you’re talking about which led me to that place where I didn’t want to come to my own firm. You know I remember, and I always love that conversation that happens in law of ‘how many fee earners do you have?’ It’s like a sign of success ‘how many fee earners have you got in your firm?’ And I was like that new law firm owner like ‘look I’ve hired all these lawyers, I’m the epitome of success’ then I’m tearing my hair out at the same time. So for me, I did that, and then I shrunk right back down. And what I believe for me, and this is not for everybody, everyone needs to find, again, their own measure of success, but the size of the firm I have right now is all I’m after. And it pays well and it is profitable. It’s so much more profitable than when I had all of these people. It all looked very successful but I wasn’t making money. Now I make good money and we have a good business and we have the right clients and I’m happy coming to work and I very rarely have to work on weekends. So I did what I spend my time now doing with other lawyers. I stopped and I said ‘this is not working for me.’ When I’m coaching the question I always ask first is: ‘please describe for me what a perfect week or day or month in your life, when it comes to your work, would look like. Park what it is at the moment and describe what perfect would look like.’ And I did that myself. And I realised that leading a big team and leading, you know, a whole lot of matters in the firm and of these things is actually not what I enjoy doing. So again it’s that selfish place that so much of my stuff comes from which is what do I actually enjoy? How do I need it to be? How much money do I need to have? You know we are privileged in law, we make good money and I don’t need to make trillions of dollars. It’s more valuable to me to work a Monday-Friday week, make good money, and spend my life making resin with my daughters on the weekend, going to dance concerts and living! For me there’s an amount of work that we need, which we meet, which I’m content with, and that’s success. And I think the minute I stopped trying to chase this, as you’re describing, ‘more and more’, was the minute that I actually got to a place where things were actually really comfortable and peaceful.
DT:

 

 

 

 

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And where you have time to do a lot of the activities we’re talking about today to find the right clients, not just every client that hits the score, to differentiate yourself and then find a niche, I think it’s difficult to find the time to do that. Everyone complains about that, that when they listen to a podcast episode like this they say ‘oh well that’s all easier said than done, I’m so busy, I’ve got 12 hours of billable work to do today, when am I going to take time to navel-gaze and identify my marketing strategy and where social media fits into that.’ Well the time to do that comes from stepping away from pursuing endless growth. We’ve talked about social media this morning, but we’ve also talked about some of the high value projects that you used to build your brand. I’m talking about your blog, your books, your podcasts, but I imagine because you’ve had this really broad reaching brand, because you’ve had so many different ways of communicating that to the market, you’ve probably had an experience of doing something that was surprisingly effective in communicating your brand and generating reach. Something maybe you didn’t expect was going to be quite as effective as it was. Can you tell me a bit about that?
CR:Yeah I’ll give you two examples actually.
DT:Sure.
CR:

 

 

 

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I’ll give you two examples actually. One example: I have a history and a life as a performing artist. I’ve danced my whole career and I’m reliving that now as a dance mum and I love that dearly. And years ago a woman came to me that I’d always worked with. She ran a domestic violence organisation and I’d always supported that organisation. And they were trying to apply for some government funding to support an arm of their work and she came to me to help her with filling in the government funding forms. And I said ‘Heather, I appreciate I’m a lawyer but I am useless to you in this. This is not something I know anything about and I cannot do. However, if our goal is to raise money, what I do know how to do is to put on a show. So why don’t we put on a show and we’ll raise money and that’ll achieve the same purpose and guess what, it’ll be fun.’ Do you see the recurring theme? I’m all about fun. So this was back in maybe 2010, and I was, you know, two years into running my law firm and I called up my mates, barristers, judges, friends and I said ‘hi! We’re putting on a show and we’re going to raise money for this domestic violence charity.’ And so we held it in the garage at my office and that was the first charity pantomime. We went on to do, I can’t remember whether we did 6 or 8, charity pantomimes up here in Brisbane.
DT:Wow.
CR:

 

 

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And over the course of doing that have raised over $100,000 for a variety of different organisations over the years. And so I became known as that weird girl that does those weird shows where people sing and dance. Like how ridiculous. And yet through these charity pantomimes I built incredible relationships with local practitioners. I got to see people, you know, drop all of that guard that comes with law and be humans. And there are so many talented people in our industry. You know you stick them on a stage, it’s extraordinary what comes out. So this crazy idea that I have one day to try to help my friend raise some money in a way that I knew how to do things, turned into this beautiful opportunity to do things that, you know you just don’t get to do really once you leave law school and there’s no law revue anymore. So that’s the first example, a more I guess stereotypical example is a campaign that I did run one year called the, and I still run now, called the ‘7 day happiness challenge.’ So inspired by Michelle Bridges, so those of you that know the Michelle Bridges online sort of health course model, she’ll run a 7-day challenge which will be a lead generator to get you into her broader program. I was watching her online business model and I was thinking ‘hm okay, I’ve got an online business, how do I get people into my online business? I’m going to run this challenge, a 7-day happiness challenge.’ Had no idea what that would entail, so in January one year I put together 7 days of content. So people joined the challenge and across 7 days they had little challenges every day that were designed to improve their happiness in law. And when we launched this thing there were over a thousand lawyers across this country participating in this 7-day happiness challenge. It was extraordinary to me! This was just the most bizarre thing.
DT:And this was the first run of it?
CR:Yeah! It was just the most beautiful thing to watch. All of these people that I’d never met before sitting in their businesses around the country and doing the weird little things that I was encouraging them to do, but then hearing the feedback as they just made little shifts in how they were doing things in their business and that it was creating conversations around you know, how we’re going to keep this going for the rest of the year. So really really powerful, random thing that I could never have predicted would have had the reach that it did.
DT:

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Someone once said to me they had a theory that all lawyers were frustrated performers. I was an actor when I was in high school and that’s my frustrated performing background. And I think if you ask lawyers, most of them have some kind of connection to the arts or to performance that fell by the wayside along the way sometimes. But the other thing that your story about the charity pantomimes brings to mind for me is an episode of the Harvard Business Review podcast about strategic side hustles, about this idea that doing something outside of your profession, you don’t have to be doing that for money, or as an escape from your work, it can be something that’s outside of your work but is strategic in that it builds your capacity to do your work. It builds your skill set that you otherwise wouldn’t have in your work or it builds you connections that you wouldn’t have in your day-to-day work. And that really sounds like that’s what that was. It was a different skill set that you had from another part of your life that you employed adjacent to your day-to-day work, and that built your network absolutely, but also kind of reinvigorated a skillset that you can use in your day-to-day work. And I think that’s a great tip – maybe all of us frustrated performers should find some way to vent that frustration somewhere.

TIP: We discussed the importance of having a hobby and valuing your downtime and having a hobby in Episode 2 of the Hearsay Podcast with Michael Tooma where he shares his advice on how employers and leaders can foster a workplace culture that holistically supports its employees’ mental health.

Some of Michael’s tips included:

  • actively discussing with your employees their mental health and engaging with any concerns they raise;
  • tailoring mental health approaches to your employees’ needs, by offering flexible work options and being mindful that different people may be more productive at different times;
  • actively encouraging positive mental health and self-care habits, like healthy eating, exercise, and plenty of downtime; and
  • approaching mental health as a performance issue rather than a compliance issue; getting the most out of your people rather than doing the bare minimum.
CR:

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I think too we can’t underestimate the value of fun. You know and it doesn’t have to be at all connected to anything that you’re doing with work. But we have to value fun. Humans need that sort of energy in their life. And when you’ve got that energy in some part of your life, it feeds into every other part of your life. So you’ve got to create space for these things. And you know the minute you become a more senior practitioner and then you add kids to your life and oh my god there’s just no space, these are the first things that drop off. And the amount of lawyers that tell me ‘oh I used to do this, and I used to do that and then life.’ You’ve got to go back, you’ve got to create it. And I’m all about convenience and ease so I look for ways that I can create it where I get to spend time with my family at the same time. So with every charity pantomime, my husband is the backstage director, and as the kids came along they were on stage too. So it’s just like how can I do this in a way that selfishly I get to do the things that I love but I get to parlay them into all the other things that I need to do. And not trying to, you know silo my life, just go like – it’s all one big mess, let’s just make it all happen, how do we do this.
DT:Clarissa, normally I like to finish the episode with a single tip for our listeners, but I think I might know what that might be from you which is to have fun!
CR:I think that’s right actually. Work out what happiness means to you. And that’s a hard question sometimes. And if you can’t answer it then go and work out what it doesn’t mean and then just do the opposite and naturally it’ll lead you there. Spend your time getting a little bit of light-hearted nothingness into your day. It just makes a world of difference.
DT:I love that phrase ‘some light-hearted nothingness.’ I’m going to find some of that for myself today. Clarissa, thanks so much for joining us today on Hearsay.
CR:Thank you for having me.
DT:

 

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You’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast, I’d like to thank my guest today Clarissa Rayward, the Happy Family Lawyer, for coming on the show. Now we’ve talked about personal brands before on Hearsay, so if you’d like more content on this topic, listen to Episode 11 of Hearsay where we discuss marketing and business development for lawyers with Chris Gingell and our very own Araceli Robledo – or if you’d like something a bit different, you could try our interview with Jennifer McMillan about handling complaints and PI insurance claims. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is, as you know, self-assessed, but we suggest this episode constitutes a practice management and business skills point. If you’ve claimed five CPD points for audio content already this CPD year you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. Visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on the Hearsay platform. The Hearsay team is Kirti Kumar, Araceli Robledo, Zahra Wilson, Sadhir Shiraj and me, David Turner. Nicola Cosgrove is our executive producer and keeps the Hearsay plane in the air. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, making complex, simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as summary papers, quizzes, transcripts and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. Thanks for listening.