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The Mindset Breakers: The Value of Strategic Career Coaching in Legal Practice
What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Career coaching for lawyers. |
Why is this topic relevant? | As legal professionals, we often find ourselves in a state of panic as we navigate the complex and competitive industry we work in. With our attention consumed by daily tasks and responsibilities, we often neglect to plan for our long-term career goals and strategies. Career coaching is a valuable process that supports and assists individuals on their professional journey. It can mean different things to different people, but ultimately, it involves clarifying personal and professional goals, identifying strengths and areas for development, and creating effective strategies for success. In this episode, we dive into the fundamentals of engaging a career coach, highlighting the benefits it brings to young lawyers and the transformative power of coaching in legal practice. |
What are the main points? |
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What are the practical takeaways? |
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Show notes | Robert Dilts, A Brief History of Logical Levels |
David Turner = DT; Lara Wentworth = LW; Ross Davis = RD
00:00:00 | DT: | It won’t be news to you, our guests, that it’s hard being a lawyer, but it’s even harder navigating a career in the law. With our attention consumed by daily tasks and responsibilities, we can often neglect to plan for our long-term career goals and strategies. We often leave those important but not so urgent tasks to tomorrow. Now that’s where a career coach can come in. Career coaching is a valuable process that supports and assists individuals on their professional journey. It can mean different things to different people, but ultimately it involves clarifying personal and professional goals, identifying strengths and areas for development, and creating effective strategies for success. Now in this episode, we’ll be diving into the fundamentals of engaging a career coach, highlighting the benefits that it can bring to young professionals and the transformative power of coaching for lawyers. Our guest today to help us talk through all of that is Lara Wentworth, a former lawyer with nearly 20 years experience in personal injury, family law, and estate planning. Lara is now a director and co-founder of Coaching Advocates, a business that she established in late 2020 focused on helping members of the legal profession to achieve success on their own terms. Lara, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay! |
00:01:56 | LW: | Thank you, David. It’s lovely to be here with you. |
00:01:57 | DT: | Now we’re talking about long-term career goals, planning one’s career, being intentional about one’s career, so it’s only fitting that we talk a bit about yours first. You were a practicing lawyer for a long time. How did you get into coaching? |
00:02:12 | LW: | It’s a bit of a story – and I know we don’t have all day! – so I’ll tell you the abridged version of that. So, I was a lawyer like you said for about… almost 20 years – 18 years actually, to be exact – in the areas of family law and personal injury, and I was feeling quite good. I did have a period of time throughout my career where I didn’t feel so good and I hit a bit of… well, let’s not lie, it was a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of issues that affected my health, my mental health, my family, my performance at work, a whole heap of different things, as mental health usually does. And then I got over that, thankfully, and I sought some help, and I went back into practice after it sort of took a couple of years off to recoup. And then I got to a point where I thought; “this is great, what else is out there?”. I sort of felt like there was something else that I could do with my – let’s call them gifts – my talents, my skills, my personality that may make more of an impact in the world than what I was doing as a lawyer. And so in about 2018, I started to explore that option of a career change. Apparently, I’m not a good florist, so I had to stop that. I did one wedding, and I didn’t get any return clients. So that wasn’t for me; although I love the color and the whole joy of the whole thing. So coaching was really my passion, and I had done that for a long time without knowing it throughout my career, coaching people and loving it. And I’d say to people; “time will stand still when I have these kinds of conversations with people”. Really something that I just made my heart sing if we can say that. Anyway, long story short, I made that decision. That’s how I want to see out the rest of my working life. And so I retrained. I became a coach. I retrained in neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP for short, which is something that I absolutely love and transforms lives. And yeah, and became a coach with the International Coaching Federation, and co-founded Coaching Advocates in 2020… and here we are. |
00:04:19 | DT: | Fantastic, and I love that you’ve been there… that you can have these conversations with lawyers because you’ve been through the things that they’re going through. And thank you for being so candid about your own experience in the law. I think we hear lots of performative stories of success and how happy and humbled and grateful we all are on LinkedIn and places like that about our careers in the law, but that doesn’t often reflect reality. We have some of the highest rates of depression and anxiety and mental illness in the country in our profession. And it’s certainly not unfamiliar to many of our listeners, it’s not unfamiliar to me, so thank you for being so candid about that. And we’ve talked to coaches, we’ve talked about positive psychology and coaching on the show before, and it’s such an interesting emerging profession – because it is a profession, there is a kind of body of knowledge, there’s a purpose around it, and a community of professionals, but unlike the traditional professions, it’s still sort of taking shape in terms of who are the industry bodies and what are the norms and what are the ethical norms. So, it’s always interesting to sort of hear the path there because I think it is that sort of field where you need that experience in the working world to have a kind of meaningful contribution to someone else’s career journey. |
00:05:42 | LW: | Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is definitely emerging and it’s probably more popular in America and in Europe, and we’re seeing a lot more statistics coming out of those regions of people taking up coaching and seeing the benefits of coaching. But it’s definitely something that’s gaining traction here in Australia, more and more people that we speak to know about it, know what it is, more so than before, and are taking it up as an option. It is unregulated, if you like, it’s the Wild West. In terms of who can become a coach; anyone. Anyone can sort of wake up tomorrow and decide “I’m done doing what I’m doing, I’m going to put myself out there as a coach today”, and away we go. So, it is a little bit unregulated that way, and that’s why it’s important, I think, that people choose someone who is qualified or accredited in some form of coaching psychology or coaching modality, just to make sure that they’re actually seeing a coach, not just someone who’s done what they’ve done and can tell them a few things about it… |
00:06:39 | DT: | Not just getting someone’s hot takes. |
00:06:42 | LW: | Definitely, there’s an art to it, there’s definitely skills involved in it, there’s a structure to it, it’s not really just about having a conversation with somebody. |
00:06:52 | DT: | We were just talking about how navigating a career in the law can be very stressful and can be quite damaging, really. And I think one of the contributors to that is that the traditional career in the law has been this kind of up and out pyramid model, in the sense that we have a lot of young lawyers coming into the profession, and traditionally, there weren’t enough spots for everyone to move up in the firm, and so a level of attrition was expected. And then as you ascended the pyramid, you’d end up as a partner, or you’d drop off into in-house or you’d go to the bar. Those paths were quite limited, and there was often an expectation that people would sort of fall out of the profession along the way. Is that an observation that resonates with you? Is that something that you’re still seeing when you’re coaching lawyers? |
00:07:45 | LW: | Absolutely resonates with me. From my own experience as a lawyer, I remember sitting in law school, it’s first semester – and in fact, it was first subject in, first lesson in. One of the subjects, I think it was torts law, and I remember the lecturer saying; “look around you, by the end of this course, you’ll be one of six still sitting here”, or some statistic like that. “Not everybody’s cut out for this. This is quite difficult. It’s really only for those who are going to do X, Y, or Z, or can cope” or whatever. And, being a persistent little thing, I’m like; “well, I’m going to be one of those, those people who can make it through”. But it’s the same kind of rhetoric, I suppose, or narrative that happens when we enter the profession. This whole idea of you need to be “cut out”, I’m doing the quotation thing, to be “cut out” for the profession. Not everybody’s cut out. This may not be for you. And whilst I still think there is some truth to whether or not, like any profession, this might resonate with some people and it may not resonate with others, the idea of being cut out, I think, was very much about the system, if we can call it that. The system not being accommodating to the lawyer who was not a cookie cutter lawyer. And then that lawyer then felt broken because they didn’t fit the mold and may have left the law or decided they’re not good enough and continued practicing feeling like they were an imposter. What I’m loving seeing now, David, there’s definitely a wave of change that’s moving at a lot faster rate than it has in the past. And that is this new generation of lawyers and some older generation of lawyers who have said; “you know what, I’ve had enough of this kind of mentality” of these old, archaic mental models about what it means to be a good lawyer; “we’re going to turn things on their heads. We’re going to change things a little bit”. So, you’re seeing some law firms that are doing things a little bit more progressive, a bit different, even some of the bigger firms that are listening now and going; “okay, what can we do to change the model?”. And things are moving probably a little bit faster than when I was practicing as a lawyer. So, it’s good to see, but we’re still a little bit behind the eight ball, I think. |
00:09:46 | DT: | And I think that “you’re either cut out for this or you’re not” sort of that attitude was really built on and promoted this kind of fixed mindset around capability. You either were a good lawyer or you weren’t, and you were born with that trait or not. And your mistakes are part of who you are rather than a process of learning, which is so interesting because it really is a career of lifelong learning. There’s any profession where we should have a growth mindset about our constant working towards improvement. It’s this one where there are constant changes to the law, and we have to be constantly brushing up and improving our skills. But instead, we have this very fixed mindset about who’s a good lawyer and who’s not. |
00:10:31 | LW: | And so much feeds into this fixed mindset that I think prevents a lot of really brilliant lawyers from coming to the forefront from really shining. There’s lots of different things that I see as a coach in terms of mental models that have been passed down through generations of lawyers that unfortunately some junior lawyers adopt as their own. This whole idea of we need to be busy and we need to be stressed because otherwise, well, how do I know if I’m a good lawyer and I need to know if I’m not busy? |
00:11:01 | DT: | Yeah. Oh, that was something I hated about practicing at the bar actually. I could always tell what the answer to “how are you going?” is going to be; “oh, busy! Oh, busy. So busy. I haven’t had a weekend off in three weeks…” Like, that’s not something to be proud of! |
00:11:16 | LW: | It’s a badge of honor. Can you imagine asking a lawyer how are you going? And they were like; “well, I’m managing actually. Work’s a good steady pace”. |
DT: | Great balance, yeah. | |
LW: | … “I’m having balance”. You never really hear them say that. It’s like this; “I’m busy, it’s really stressful, it’s very busy”. And that’s one of many, I suppose, mindsets that perpetuate this fixed mindset about what it means to be a lawyer that really overlooks a lot of brilliant lawyers that could really shine in the profession. And so, my job as a coach is really about bringing those people to the forefront and helping them understand and realise that you don’t have to fit a cookie cutter model or mold of what it is to be a lawyer. You can be your own kind of lawyer and still thrive in the profession. But it’s an uphill battle, I think. | |
00:12:02 | DT: | I suppose something else that’s changed a lot in recent years is the options for modes of practice. When I started practicing going in-house, for example, was really something that you did at the kind of senior associate or above level. It was considered very career limiting to do it too early because there’s no options for advancement. But now, in-house teams can be quite large, they can be quite good for advancement if you’re looking at a public company that might have quite a mature legal department with levels of responsibility and management responsibility to climb through. So those options really changed. It’s not just; “well, you go into private practice and 10 years later, we’ll see what you can do”. |
00:12:39 | LW: | Not only have the options changed, I think the meaning that we give those options have actually also changed. I remember I was coaching a young lawyer only recently. I think she was only out a year, or two years, and really wanted to go in-house but had this mentality that she had to slug it out in the private sector first and really give that a good go and climb the ranks. And then if she couldn’t cope with that, then she could go in-house. And that was really depressing for her to think that she had to go through that trajectory of career progression before she could really go work in the sector that she wanted to. And so doing some coaching with her and helping her sort of uncover what’s really important to her and reconnecting her with what’s important to her at this point in her career, helped to get that confidence to be able to go; “well, you know what, I don’t really care what the success pathway is meant to be and what my values should be. I’m going to pay attention and be more values led and aligned with what’s actually important to me”. And found herself an amazing in-house role, paying a lot more than what she’s earning now and she’s absolutely thriving. |
00:13:46 | DT: | It’s so interesting how the conversation around in-house has changed because I remember at the start of my career, you talk to people who went in-house and it was sort of; “oh, well, it’s good not to do time sheets”. That was the big benefit. But the conversation now is really, and is a fantastic thing, it’s really about having a passion for the purpose of the organisation for which you’re working, right? Sort of, as you say, it’s values led, right? It’s about connecting your personal values with what you’re doing at work. |
00:14:12 | LW: | Absolutely. I just recently finished judging some awards and my category was in the in-house lawyer category and I loved reading some of those applications because it really was about that. It was about no longer just being a lawyer in-house, it was about connecting with the organisation’s purpose, as you say, and the impact that it’s having and really identifying with that as a team member, not just the in-house lawyer that’s there to do any legal work that might come their way. And so, I really enjoyed reading those applications and I thought the same thing; “wow, it’s a different kind of narrative to what in-house used to mean a few years ago”. |
00:14:47 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. Now, you mentioned you were coaching a lawyer who was only one or two years out. I imagine those conversations and that process looks very different to coaching someone who’s at a partnership level or who’s sort of in that senior associate position where they’re not sure which direction they’re going to go in. So, tell me a little bit about how your process as a coach changes depending on the kind of level of experience for your client… or does it change? |
00:15:16 | LW: | It’s a good question. I have a fluid process because everybody’s different. Although we have very common themes that we see across most of the lawyers that I coach, no two people are ever the same. But if I was to safely generalise for the purposes of this answer, in terms of what I see or how I coach people going up to partner roles, as opposed to people who have just started out in the profession, what I commonly see, people who are more sort of senior or have been around for a lot longer, I see more of that generational mindset, that fixed mindset being a little bit more prevalent in terms of what they can and can’t do. And so, helping them step outside of that and think about; “well, what can you learn?”. I like this idea of “I’m an old dog, can’t really teach me new tricks” kind of thing is something that I challenge quite a bit. There’s more of that curiosity, there’s more of that learner mindset, more of that growth mindset, more about where else can I go, what can I learn? And I do see from time to time, I do see it quite often, people who come to see me who are burnt out or overwhelmed or are not in a great frame of mind that want to progress and move forward. So that I see sort of on common grounds between the senior lawyers and the younger lawyers, but in terms of mindset, I think there’s more of a fixed versus growth mindset if I can generalise safely between the more senior lawyers and the junior lawyers. |
DT: | Yeah, interesting. | |
LW: | I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, it could be. One thing I’m noticing with the – I’m going to sound really old now! – but one of the things I’m noticing with the younger generations of lawyers, and they’re very different the way they think to the older lawyers, but there is that more of a growth mindset. There is that; what else is out there, how else can we change, what can I do, rather than there’s only one way and that’s the only way forward. So, it’s an interesting kind of time to be coaching, I think. | |
00:17:13 | DT: | Yeah, I wonder if that is generational, because I remember as a young lawyer kind of feeling like; “oh, well, I’ve picked my profession and now I’m in it and this is life now until I retire”. So, when I started to not enjoy it so much that was like; “oh man, but this is supposed to be the next 50 years, like what am I? What am I? What am I?” And it was only a little later that I had this epiphany. That, okay, well, actually it can be what you make it, and you can grow in all of these other directions and build a role for yourself. But it sounds like the young lawyers that you’re talking to now really don’t have that problem. They’re thinking much more broadly about their careers. |
00:17:57 | LW: | Well, it’s more about where to from here rather than feeling stuck, although a lot of them do feel stuck because of interpersonal issues or lack of confidence or skills or whatever. But I think in general they’ve got more of that; “what else is possible” rather than “well I’ve now started in this area of law, I must stick with it”. That’s how I started in the law, and it was like this is the pathway. I remember my mother saying; “you get your foot through the door, and you get yourself a good work experience job with anyone, it doesn’t matter what. You just need to get your foot through the door and don’t ask to be paid. Just do the job until you prove your worth and then somebody hopefully will pay you”. So, I did six months of volunteering in a law firm like three or four days a week, traveling to the city or whatever and it didn’t matter what they gave me, and I did that. It’s just the way that you did things and then hopefully somebody noticed you and hopefully somebody paid you and then hopefully you found a better job and you can get promoted and whatever else and climb to the partner level which we’re all success awaits you. |
00:19:00 | DT: | And then that’s the kind of Disney happily ever after. |
00:19:04 | LW: | And then you’ve made it, and your parents can say “my daughter’s a partner somewhere”. Anyway, oops. But it’s definitely that idea of is that really the only way that we can find success is being challenged quite a bit? There’s a lot more coaches coaching lawyers. So that mindset shift is more readily available if you seek it out. |
00:19:26 | DT: | Yeah. So, let’s talk about the process. So, it’s our first meeting. You’re going to start coaching me on my career. What are you going to do to start that process off? |
00:19:40 | LW: | Yeah. I might just start by saying that different coaches do things differently. So, I’m not going to profess that this is how it’s done everywhere and every time, but this is certainly how I do things. So, the first session with anybody especially around career coaching is where I get to understand and help them understand a few things. Firstly, we understand where are you now in terms of your career, and not just physically what firm or what section or sector or whatever, but where are you now in terms of your emotional wellbeing? Where are you now in terms of your skill set? Where are you now in terms of your belief system in terms of your values, like what is the state of play right now? And so, I’ll ask a few really good questions to help unearth some of that information. And I’ll also ask them around; “well, where do you want to be? What do you want to have? What do you want to feel? What is that ideal outcome that coaching can give you?” And I don’t tell them what that should be because when I’m coaching someone it’s less of the advice-giving… fact; it’s no advice giving, or “you should do X, Y or Z”. Sometimes I might put my mentoring hat on because I’ve been in that space, and I will say; “this is not coaching, I’m now just giving you some mentoring help because I’ve been there”. Traditional coaching strictly speaking is not advice giving. So, asking them some really good questions about what is that ideal career or job or feeling or whatever they come to see me for; what is that? And then we also unearth and uncover two other things. What is getting in the way? If you were already at point B, then you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d already be at point B. But we’re having this conversation because you have point A, and you want to be at point B but for some reason you’re not. And so, building that real sense of awareness of what’s going on for you in between what are those interferences that are getting in the way? And because of my background and my training in neuro-linguistic programming I can’t help but talk about the unconscious. What’s going on for people on the unconscious level that’s getting in the way of them getting from this job, this career, this way of feeling about their career to this. And once we understand what that is we can then do something about it. We can shift it, change it, until you know you’re in a cage you can’t get out of one. So, we really have to build that level of awareness. And then the last thing that I do in that session it sounds like a lot in one session but it’s all about sort of gathering information at this stage. What do you need in terms of the resources that you need to tap into? Both in internal intrinsic stuff as well as external support? What do you need to help you get from where you are now in your career to where you want to go? What do you need to tap into? Do you need more confidence? Do you need more self trust? Do you need more self belief? Do you need support from other people external to you? Do you need more time? Do you need more energy? What is lacking that if you had more of, you’d be able to get to point B? And so that session is basically kind of understanding the lay of the land so to speak in terms of those four things. A, B, what’s getting in the way? What do you need to get you there? And then from there, depending on the number of sessions I’ve got in the package that I’m coaching with, I think I’ve come up with a bit of a plan that I’m always testing obviously with the client because it’s their sessions and they get to drive. But in my mind, I come up with a plan of how to help this person get from point A to point B. And I always have something in my back pocket what I call for each session that helps get them that little bit closer to point B. And if they’re happy to do that’s what we do. But otherwise, they get to tell me what they want to work on in that session. So, it’s a bit of a loose kind of process. Most of the time, I’ll say that because everyone’s different, but most of the time we look at values. We look at what’s important to you in your career, your job, your work, whatever word you have for it. We understand what they are, and we help you understand; what do you need to stop, start or continue to show up in line with those values and be more values-led? Because once you can do that, the rest falls into place. But a lot of the times the interferences, things like; “well, I can’t do that because that’s not who I am, I’m not confident enough or I want to, but I can’t”. So, we end up with these parts. Have you ever had those parts? Like I want to, but I can’t. So, there’s this internal… |
DT: | … the competing commitment. | |
LW: | … or competing values or competing beliefs or competing thought patterns where you want to. but it’s like doing donuts. I don’t know if you ever did donuts in a car when you were younger, David? | |
00:24:26 | DT: | No comment! No comment. |
00:24:28 | LW: | It’s that petrol gas, petrol brakes kind of thing. I’ve heard that’s how you do donuts. So that happens in real life and that can cause people to feel a bit stuck. |
00:24:38 | DT: | And in your experience, which part do people have the most trouble with? Do they have trouble with identifying that point B, where do I actually want to be? Or do they have a clear picture of that and they really struggle to identify “well, what do I need to get there”? |
00:24:53 | LW: | It’s a really interesting point. I think what I see more of than not is people who know where they don’t want to be. |
DT: | Where they don’t want to be. | |
LW: | Yeah, yeah. So, people who know what they don’t want to have. I think, I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, if it’s a profession thing, I don’t know. I haven’t done my research yet, but we tend to be more comfortable, I think, as human beings almost to think about what we don’t want instead of what we do want. Because what we do want might need us to be a bit brave, a bit courageous, a bit confident, a bit out there. And it’s a lot safer to just go; “well, I just don’t want this”. And so, a lot of the times people come to me… | |
00:25:33 | DT: | It’s a bit like picking takeaway for dinner, isn’t it? It takes bravery to make a decision. But you can say; “I don’t want pizza. No, I don’t want Chinese”. |
LW: | Isn’t that easier? | |
DT: | Yeah, it is easier. | |
00:25:43 | LW: | Actually, what do I want? Because then you have to commit to that. So, I see more of that. So, people, especially early career lawyers, they may have had a rough start to their career. They may not be happy where they are. They may feel like they’ve still got some untapped potential that they just don’t know how to get tapped into. Whatever the case may be. So, they might be feeling like I just know I don’t want to be here. Who’s going to help me work out where I want to be? And so that’s where a career coach can come in really handy. |
00:26:14 | DT: | When you’ve got those clients who have that kind of sense of discontent, but not a clear picture of where they want to be, is it common for your clients to sort of maybe overestimate the size of the change that’s needed? I ask this because I don’t often talk about my own experience on the show, but there was a point in my legal career where I wasn’t enjoying practice. And I thought, “well I’ve got to get out of the law then”. It was a point where I was practicing as a barrister and it was this sort of point in my career where I thought; “well this is the thing, I’ve made it, I’ve got to this shiny goal that I had set for myself a long time ago. I’m here now but I don’t like it and so therefore I just have to leave the profession completely”. It took a bit of work to realise that; “well, no, I don’t need to do that. I actually need to make a relatively small change. It’s actually returning to practice as a solicitor. That is what makes me happy practicing again and I don’t need to leave the law, I just need to change how I’m doing it”. But when you feel that sense of discontent, it feels existential, and it feels huge, and it feels like it needs something drastic. |
00:27:24 | LW: | Absolutely. So, the easiest thing to blame when we are not feeling the best, when we’re not feeling content, when we’re in survival – so, when we’re feeling like we’ve just got to get out of here – the easiest thing to do is to leave the environment. That’s when your flight instinct kicks in and goes just get the hell out of there because this is dangerous. The mind wants you to believe it’s dangerous because you may not be feeling whatever feeling you want to be feeling. So, the easiest thing to do is go; “I just need to get out of here” and sort of blame the environment. What I find happens quite a lot is that people do that. If they do that out of that survival instinct to get out because of the flight, they find themselves in another environment and they wake up two or three years later and they realise they’ve taken themselves with them. And all of a sudden there’s the same things or similar problems are happening. And so, without boring you with too much of the – they’re not technical parts of how I coach – but too much information about how I coach. There’s more than one level to our experience. The environment is very much at the base of our experience. That’s the first level. And if you think about it, the environment is simply bricks and mortar. It’s where the tables and the chairs are. It’s where the windows sit. So very rarely is the actual environment the problem. What happens in that environment, about five or six things, layers going up if you like, like a ladder. First one is our behavior. How we behave or what we do in that environment. Sometimes that needs to change. And in order to change that, we may have to look at the next layer up, which is our skills or capabilities. This is the how we do what we do in that environment. So sometimes we need an upgrade in our skills set. We need whatever; better time management. We need better money management. We need better organisation skills. I don’t know, some sort of skill management. But in order to do that, we might have to go up another level. This is where the coaching really kicks in for people. The next level up from that is our beliefs and our values. So, this is the why we do what we do in that environment. And so, I might really want to learn some time management skills, and I’ve tried and it’s a struggle, and I don’t know why. The reason being, and if I ever get that, and I’ve had that quite a few times as an example of coaching, I have a belief system that says, doesn’t work, or I can’t, or time management is not for me. And so, the last level, or the second last level, above from that is identity. Who I am in that environment. If we can align those levels – and part of what I do as a coach is help people align those levels – then you can have a really good picture of where’s the problem. Is it that I’m not showing up the way that I need to in that environment? And if that’s the case, let’s go up a couple of levels and see why that might be. Most of the time, it’s around that belief, values, identity thing. |
00:30:18 | DT: | Yeah, it’s coming back to that fixed and growth mindset that we were talking about before. Is this part of who I am, or is it something I can change? |
00:30:24 | LW: | Absolutely, absolutely. |
00:30:27 | DT: | Now, you mentioned that you work with your clients over a number of sessions, and you have a plan for them across that period of time, whatever it might be, to help them identify where they want to get to and what they need to get there. But after that sort of program is done, there’s still a career to work on for the rest of their working lives. So, what sort of strategies do you try to give your clients so that once your time with them is done, they’ve got the skillset to sort of keep working on their careers? |
00:31:04 | LW: | I’m a big advocate, David, of teaching people to fish. And so, my coaching, and in fact, that’s how we work across coaching advocates with all 15 of us. It’s really about giving people what they need. Or really, we don’t give anybody what they don’t already have. It’s helping people tap into what they’ve already got so that they can continue to create change for themselves. So, it’s about sustainable change. So, some of the things that I personally do in my coaching to help people do that well and beyond is to give them some tools that they can use to do a few things. For example, manage their internal dialogue. Because this thing that sits on our shoulder and talks to us, that doesn’t stop when the coaching stops. Or it doesn’t, it never goes away. That’s an internal thought process. If I can teach people and show people how to manage that internal thought process, which they’re going to have for the rest of their lives, not just their career, then they’re going to be far more in control and in charge of their own thoughts, and therefore the results that they achieve well past the coaching. So, some tools around how do you talk to yourself, and what sort of language do you use? How do you understand your unconscious mind and what it responds to and it doesn’t respond to? So that’s a really cool strategy to teach people, something that I use all the time. How to manage your own state. State management is a big part of what I help people do and anchoring them in those resourceful positive states. Because if you can manage your state, you can do anything, right? So if you can step into whatever – and by state I mean like emotional mood, emotional state – if you can manage that, then the behavior follows. So that’s another one that I do. The values exercise that we do with people, that’s something I always encourage people to do moving forward. Keep checking in on your values because they will change. |
00:33:00 | DT: | Of course, I mean I suppose that’s something that we think of as if there’s anything fixed, it’s that, but of course it’s not. |
00:33:05 | LW: | Well, it’s not the only thing, it’s one of many things that do change. But a lot of the times we think; “oh what’s important to me today is going to be what’s important to me when I’m – whatever – 50 or when I retire”, and that’s not the case. But you know what was important to you David, when you first started your career, is not going to be the same thing that’s important to you. |
DT: | Yeah, absolutely. | |
LW: | As your life changes, as your needs change, as your motivation changes, what’s important to you is going to change. So, one of the best ways to manage your career, and manage your life, is to keep those things in check. Understand what they are, and make sure that you are showing up intentionally to meet those values. So, if we can continue to do that well past the coaching, then you’ve got yourself a pretty good recipe for success. | |
00:33:56 | DT: | So, tell me a bit more about the values exercise, right? Because it sounds like one that everyone should be doing, as a bit of a check in – a diagnostic – to see if it might need a bit more work. |
00:34:07 | LW: | Yeah, look, and in fact I have a free worksheet for any of your listeners who would like a copy of this worksheet that we’ve put together. So, you can do this for yourself. You don’t really need a coach if you want to do this on your own. |
DT: | Well put it in the show notes. | |
LW: | Yes, it’s basically really simple. It’s a few steps. Firstly, you decide which area of life you want to explore or examine, in terms of what’s important to you. Because I don’t know if you knew this David, but your life is divided up into different areas, and those areas are there because you have some values about them. So, they’re important areas because there are some things that are important about that area. So, for example, your wheel of life could include things like career, money, family, health, whatever else makes up your life. And each one of those areas will have its own set of values. What’s important to you about that area. So, if you choose one of those areas, and a lot of people I work with will choose career or work or whatever they call it, you can then ask yourself a simple question; what is important to me about my career? What is important to me? And usually what comes out of that question is a value of some sort, something that’s important to me. And so, once you’ve elicited say four or five – there’s probably a lot more – but the four or five values that kind of come out of you first, are probably going to be those things that are really important to you, the most important things to you about your career. And once you’ve identified those, the next step is ask yourself; “am I currently meeting that value in my career?”. I remember working with somebody – like I said, I do this quite a lot – but one particular example that kind of stands out for me is one person who thought the environment was a problem; “I must leave, I’m miserable in this environment”. And so started working with her and we thought, “okay, it might be the solution might be that you do leave, but let’s just explore a few things first”. And in my mind, I had those levels of experience thinking I wonder where the issue is. And so when we elicited her values, which if you remember was pretty high up on that hierarchy, she said; “learning is really important to me. I need to continue to learn and open my mind to new things. If I’m not learning, I’m not growing, I’m not happy”. And she said; “in my job at the moment, I’m not learning”. And so, we identified learning as a value. And we then identified that she’s actually not meeting that value, which was causing that feeling of ickiness, technical word. So, then the next part of the process is to go; “okay, for those values I’m not meeting, what can I start, stop, or continue to do”. Real basic things, right? “So that I can show up intentionally and meet that value”. Like if you were to wake up tomorrow, David, and go, “right, I’m going to do and be the person I need to be in order to tick off my values list today”, you’d be moving in a much more intentional, in a much more purposeful way than maybe if you didn’t make that decision. And so when you come up with that list of things, and it could be; “you know what, I’m actually going to go to the boss or to the manager or whoever’s in charge of learning and say learning’s really important to me, I need you to send me to a course”. Or it could be taking matters into my own hands and going “I’m going to enroll in some sort of program, I’m going to do some extra learning”, whatever the case may be. And then that value then is something that you start to meet intentionally, which is what this person did. And so, when that happened, the value of learning was actually being met. And so, the way she felt about her environment changed. She still ended up leaving though, and that’s not to say that you all of a sudden will fall in love with the environment, that’s not true. But she left not because she was in survival and feeling really icky, she left because there might be something else out there for her that she could be better at. | |
00:38:03 | DT: | You mentioned intentionality a couple of times. Talk to me for a little while about what we mean by that, because that story, it sounds like the opposite of passivity, that it’s about… |
LW: | Those are big words now. | |
DT: | That it’s about being active rather than passive. It’s about acting on your values. But tell me what you mean by it. | |
00:38:25 | LW: | Well, that’s exactly what it means. It means moving in life with intention. It means setting your focus. A lot of the times – and I keep going back to coaching examples, because it’s my book on life now because I work with so many people and I see so many different things. But so many times, feeling out of sync, feeling out of alignment, feeling like you are at the effect of your life rather than at the cause of it, comes about because we’re moving around with that intention. We’re not setting our focus on what we want to find. Remember how I said to you at the start, David, that we focus more on what we don’t want than what we do want. Okay, so let’s run a quick experiment. I want you to not think about purple pigs. |
00:39:17 | DT: | Well, that’s exactly what I’m thinking about now, right? |
00:39:21 | LW: | Yeah. So… I tried to think of something different than purple pigs, but that’s all that came out. So, the unconscious mind doesn’t understand that you didn’t want to think about purple pigs. It takes everything literally. It doesn’t process negatives directly. So it went; “oh, are these the purple pigs you don’t want to think about?”. And then now you’ve thought of purple pigs. And so, when we move around focusing on what we don’t want, guess what we get? |
DT: | We ruminate on it, yeah. | |
LW: | We find more of what we don’t want. So, shifting our focus with the intention of what we do want to find can change our lives. It can really change the results that we get. | |
00:40:04 | DT: | Let’s go back to that sort of wheel of life values exercise. I’ve got a question about that. You mentioned that often you’ll work with a client and look at a section of that wheel and the kind of values that they have about that area of their life, career, or work. Is it uncommon to see that sometimes the values in different parts of someone’s life can be in conflict in the sense that they can have things that are important to them at home, things that are important to them at work that don’t gel very nicely together, that can cause a bit of tension? |
00:40:44 | LW: | That can qualify as an interference. Remember how we spoke about point A, point B, what gets in the way? Sometimes there’s conflicting values that get in the way. So, my family might be really important to me and spending quality time with them and making sure that I’m available. That’s a real value for me. And at the same time, I have that same conflicting or I have a conflicting value about my career that I can’t say no to people, that I can’t let people down, that I’ve got to people please, that I’ve got to make sure I’m available. And so, when those two values start to collide because I’m spending, for example, way more time or saying yes to far more people at work than I’m at home, that’s going to cause a dissonance. I think that’s the word. Anyway, that’s going to cause a bit of an incongruence. And so those competing values are going to cause some feelings. I remember, again, another war story, working with someone who wanted to become confident. So, she had this value of confidence and as well as a resource, she really wanted to be confident. But confident people are arrogant. |
DT: | Oh, got it. | |
LW: | She didn’t want to be arrogant and so therefore she couldn’t be confident. So, it doesn’t just happen with conflicting values, it happens with conflicting beliefs. It happens with conflicting mindsets. So yeah, it definitely can be an issue. | |
00:42:06 | DT: | And I suppose, again, it’s about looking at those levels that you described earlier and trying to diagnose where that conflict is happening. |
00:42:14 | LW: | Absolutely, very good. Yes, absolutely. You look at the level above. Einstein said you can’t solve it at the same level it was created. And so, you’ve got to go in this particular model, which I can give you some information about, by the way, in terms of where it came from. I didn’t come up with it. It’s a model that somebody in the 60s called Gregory Bateson came up with. He’s an anthropologist. And then it was picked up by some neuro-linguistic programming specialists in the 70s, I think, or the 80s, Robert Dilts, then came up with this theory called neurological levels or logical levels. And there’s quite a bit of research done on that. TIP: As Lara mentioned, Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist. Although that was not all he became famous for – his work also touched the fields of linguistics and cybernetics. The concept that Lara has just mentioned is that of logical levels. According to Reobert Dilts, this was something Bateson first wrote about in 1954 in A Theory of Play and Fantasy but it wasn’t until the 1960s that Bateson extended this concept to learning and communication. Dilts writes in a Brief History of Logical Levels that: “Bateson identified four basic levels of learning and change – each level encompassing and organising elements from the level below it, and each having a greater degree of impact on the individual, organism or system.” Dilts saw a gap in Bateson’s work and in the 1970s and 80s developed the Neurological Levels. These are Environment, Behaviour, Capabilities, Values, Identity, and Spiritual. Each level “functions by integrating and operating upon the level beneath it.” So, you’ve got to look at maybe another level above or two levels above so that you can change the level where the problem is. |
00:44:01 | DT: | Let’s talk about confidence a bit. Because I think that’s come up a couple of times in terms of the challenges that young lawyers might face in their careers. Is it something common that you see, especially with your early career clients? And what are some of the kind of practical exercises or tips that you give them to manage confidence? |
00:44:24 | LW: | It’s probably one of the most common things that we see with the early career lawyers. It’s part of the reason we’ve actually put together a program. Actually, just very quickly, a group program called Legal Career Accelerator where we invite early to mid-career lawyers to join this community where we do monthly masterclasses where we get them connected to each other and to our professional coaches. Because that boosts their confidence, and it helps them feel like they belong somewhere. But a lot of the times what we see, especially with, like I said, early career lawyers, because they lack the experience, because they lack the technical expertise and the skills, which the legal profession places so much value and importance on, they disregard or discount their interpersonal skills. They discount their own leadership skills or whatever other skills they have that aren’t substantive law or technical skills. And all they do is focus on; “well, I don’t have the necessary skills and the expertise in this area of law”. And the more they focus on that, the more they find it, and that then starts to deplete their confidence. So, they can develop this view of the world that they are small or that they don’t deserve to be wherever they are. That other people look at them and go; “oh, what do you know, you’re just a junior lawyer”. And so, by working with a coach, changing that mindset, changing your focus, and shifting your focus into; “well, I might not have those skills yet. I might not have that expertise yet, but I have other things that I can lean on or fall on to be able to build the learning and the knowledge that will then get me to have the skills or the experience”. That can really boost someone’s confidence. So they’re not just focusing on all the things they don’t have, which by the way, I think is where the imposter syndrome comes from. And also, by the way, some people retire with the imposter syndrome, and it’s not something that just improves with time and experience. And so, when we focus on all the things… our gifts and talents, and one of the things that I do with people is help them identify that stuff early. Like, what are you good at? What are your gifts? What are your talents? What are your skills? What are those things that you could be the best in the world at if you wanted to? Really boost their confidence and helps them sort of step into an empowered space rather than, “oh my god, what are all the things I don’t know?”. That’s an endless list. Do you know what you don’t know? |
00:46:50 | DT: | Yeah, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what I don’t know. |
00:46:54 | LW: | I don’t know a lot of things, tons of things, but you know what? That’s a lifelong journey. |
00:47:01 | DT: | So, Lara, I feel like we’ve talked about the process of coaching and kind of some of the tools that our listeners can, if they’re thinking that maybe they need some coaching help, they can explore that and kind of start to think about their careers for themselves. But can you give us some examples of, I guess, success stories? The sort of transformations or big changes that your clients have achieved getting through this process, understanding their values, understanding what’s getting in the way, and resolving that. |
00:47:32 | LW: | I’m blessed and lucky enough to say that there’s been quite a few success stories. People who have transformed their mindsets, their thinking, their behavior, their results, because they were willing to do that, and they were ready to do that. There’s a few that kind of spring to mind that I feel really, like I said, grateful to have been a part of. A younger lawyer, she was pretty early on in her career, she really wanted to invest in property and become not just a lawyer, but she wanted to have some other investments and get some more financial freedom. She also wanted to explore different career sectors and do something different within the law because she wasn’t happy where she was. So, when I first met her, she described herself as stuck. She’s like; “I can’t really think outside of the box. I don’t know how to find what I want”. So, there was a lot of imposter syndrome, there was a lot of lack of clarity about what she’s good at and where she can go with that. Had no idea what was important to her, had terrible internal dialogue, that just that inner judge, inner critic that just pounded on her every day about all the things that she was not good at and told her things like; “you don’t deserve this sort of success that you’re looking for”. And after a few sessions working with her and getting to unpack some of that stuff, getting her to actually understand the voice and reprogram it so that it became an ally rather than a foe. And working for her rather than against her, she started to see some things almost magically manifest. And I’m not saying things magically happen in the coaching, but they do. And so, she started to see some real changes in her environment. She got the job that she wanted, she got paid out enough money, which was the exact amount of money she needed to invest. She was a lot more confident in her abilities. She was being paid in her new job far more money than what she was expecting. And so, what she said to me was; “this is amazing, the way that I’m feeling on the inside about myself is actually starting to translate in what’s happening on the outside”. And so that was a really great example of someone who was very much at the effect of her life to being someone who was at the cause of her life. So rather than things happening to her, now she was making things happen for her. |
00:49:52 | DT: | It really sounds like, if there’s a kind of a theme here that I’m picking up, it’s that it sounds like a lot of people, when they’re experiencing this kind of dissonance or this kind of stuckness in their career, there’s an assumption that it’s about the environment, there’s an external cause, and they need to change something about that in order to feel better about it. But that when that change is at a more personal level, you’ve said a few times this idea of being the cause and not the effect, by making that change at a values level, at a beliefs level, those changes to the environment almost happen as a matter of effect, they sort of consequentially happen. |
00:50:37 | LW: | They start to see their environment in a different way. That quote, once… let me make sure I don’t stuff this up. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, is very much what happens. |
00:50:50 | DT: | Yeah, I suppose you start to notice the things that matter to you, but also look at them in a different light. |
00:50:58 | LW: | Absolutely, another one of my favorite clients and some of the results that she got from the coaching was someone who was in big law, so she was an early career lawyer, but she was, she’s like, I’m going to do this thing where I go into this big law firm and I slug it out and I do the long hours because I really want to climb to the top. And so, she developed that mindset of I need to be busy, I need to be stressed in order to be successful. And so, she was coming up, she was burning out basically because she was putting so much pressure on herself, doubting herself, second guessing herself, feeling like she could never do anything right, therefore she had to continue trying. And so, she wasn’t at this point where she was burning out, but she couldn’t stop because what if somebody found out, what if someone said to her, you’re not cut out, all that sort of stuff. So, working with her was a privilege really because what I helped her do was step out of that survival zone and challenge that belief that in order to be a good lawyer, I need to be stressed. And through some coaching and some NLP work, she really came to understand and realise not just on the conscious level, but on the unconscious, deeper level, that she could feel like she was a good lawyer and not be stressed all the time and really use stress for what it’s designed to do rather than what she thought she had to use it for. And so, when… |
DT: | It’s not meant to be an identity, right? | |
LW: | Absolutely, it’s not meant to be an identity. It’s not meant to be, we’re not meant to be, if you think about in nature… I’m digressing a little bit, I know. But in nature, when something’s running away from something else, that it’s going to eat it, it runs for maybe 15 minutes in that flight mode, in that sort of survival instinct mode. And then when the danger disappears, it sits under a tree and it goes back into rest and digest, goes back into that, I think it’s sympathetic or parasympathetic, I get them mixed up, but that rest and digest state. And then when the next thing pops up, it runs away again. | |
00:52:57 | DT: | But we stay in that running from the tiger mode for weeks. |
00:53:02 | LW: | Don’t we? Forever, really. I mean, the reason I suffered depression, and I’ll be honest with you about that, is because I never stopped running away from the tiger. So even when I wasn’t in front of a client, even when I wasn’t in front of my computer, in my mind, there was this oh-oh feeling, or what’s around the corner that’s going to come out and bite me? Have I forgotten to do something? Is someone going to come out and say, you’re a fraud, you don’t know what you’re talking about? So that constant mindset of I’m in danger, meant that my body wasn’t in that high cortisol, and I was constantly running away from the tiger. So, rest and digest hardly ever happened. And so, my body then gave out, and there was a lot of other mental health issues. So, when we can have that rest and digest, which is what this person did in the coaching, she learnt that stress was only necessary when she was in real danger. Let’s face it, how many of us almost die every day? We’re very lucky that does not happen in our day-to-day lives. And so very rarely do we need to go into that real kind of survival zone. It does happen because of perceived threat, but just being in charge of that, knowing it’s a perceived threat, it’s not an actual threat, can help us come back down to rest and digest quite quickly. And that’s what she did. And so, she wrote me a beautiful testimonial afterwards to say that I really thought being stressed was part of being a good lawyer, but now I understand that my identity as a lawyer does not need to have stress attached to it, which is so freeing and liberating for her. |
00:54:33 | DT: | I imagine there’s a lot of lawyers who still hold onto that as a part of their identity. |
00:54:39 | LW: | Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, sometimes I get a kind of pushback from people. It’s like; “what do you mean I don’t need to be stressed. Just help me manage the stress, don’t take it”. |
DT: | Yeah, yeah. | |
LW: | Just help me manage it so that I can still do my job because the whole idea of not being stressed is so foreign to lawyers that it just doesn’t almost make logical sense. | |
00:55:03 | DT: | Now, we’re nearly out of time, but before we go, I wanted to ask you a question that we usually ask about our younger listeners, our students. If there’s a listener who’s listened to this episode and thinks, that’s me, I need some coaching advice. I need some help getting unstuck. I need to work out where I want to get to and what’s getting in the way. Whether that person’s a law student, whether they’re a young lawyer, maybe they’re more advanced in their career, but I suppose especially for those listeners who are just starting out in the profession, what’s sort of the one tip you’d give them to start that journey? |
00:55:41 | LW: | One tip. Start early. I’ll draw you a parallel. At the moment, I’m going through some physical rehab kind of exercise. Training, if you like. And part of that is teaching me to walk again or walk differently. It’s very difficult to unlearn walking that I’ve been doing unconsciously for 21 years. Give or take a few decades. But something that I’ve been doing unconsciously for such a long time, and apparently doing it in a way that is affecting my health, my back and my knees and everything else. It’s so challenging to unlearn how to walk and then relearn how to walk, and for that to become an unconscious skill. Had somebody taught me to do that early on, when I was just freshly walking, it would be so much easier now, because I’d be doing it. The same goes. The more habits and unconscious programming and patterns that we develop that don’t serve us, it’s just a bit more work later on to have to unpick that stuff, unlearn it, and then learn some new stuff. So, if we could learn new habits early, or good habits early, good resourceful patterns early, if we can learn how to fish early, create that sustainable change early, I mean, I don’t know what else to say. So that would be my tip. Coaching is not, and I make this statement quite often, it’s not for broken people. It’s not, a lot of people go; “oh, I don’t need coaching, I’m fine”. That’s cool, that’s cool. It’s not to fix people. It’s to enhance people. Some of the most highest performing athletes have coaches. They all have coaches. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of someone who’s an Olympian who doesn’t have a coach, because I’m good, high performing, I don’t need a coach. TIP: Listeners of our Sidebar podcast will know that I’m something of a tennis nut. And I do know of one athlete that does not have a coach – Nick Kyrgios. And in Nick’s situation it’s definitely the exception which proves Lara’s rule. Getting a coach has been talked about extensively in tennis circles as one way to get more performance out of one of the best athletes in the game. That’s when they need even more and better coaches so that they can continue and sustain and go up even more than that. So, it’s not for broken people. It’s for anybody who wants to move forward and wants somebody to help them do that. |
00:58:16 | DT: | Well said. Well, we’ve got that worksheet in the show notes that our users should go ahead and check out. |
00:58:24 | LW: | And I can also drop some details about our group program. if any young lawyers or early career lawyers would like to be part of a community to have some support and coaching tips. |
00:58:33 | DT: | That sounds fantastic. We’ll include that in the episode description as well. Lara, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
00:58:38 | LW: | It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. |
00:58:41 | RD: | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank today’s guest, Lara Wentworth, for being a part of it. As you well know, 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 self-assessed, but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a Professional Skills unit. More information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay can be found on our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is, as always, brought to you by Lext Australia, a legal innovation company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes your CPD. Hearsay is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora nation and we would like to pay our respects to elders past and present. Thanks for listening and see you all on the next episode of Hearsay! |
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