With another year of pandemic disruption almost behind us, we’ve rounded up well-being highlights to help legal professionals refresh for another year.
We’re ending another year with Covid-19 uncertainty ongoing, after lawyer well-being had fallen to start the year. We’ve watched climate and other global crises unfold, and we have yet another variant threatening to upend the progress we’ve made with vaccination as we start 2022. Still, taking time to improve our individual well-being makes a difference, and we have resources to help below. (And 2022 couldn’t possibly start as frighteningly as 2021 did… we hope.)
Well-Being Tips for Law Students & Lawyers to Endure Winter with an Ongoing Pandemic. Quick advice to focus on what you have control over when it comes to your well-being in challenging times, written to help us get through our first winter with the Covid-19 pandemic, and just as relevant this year.
Lonely Lawyers: Feelings of Isolation & Identifying Support. While being alone isn’t the same as being lonely, pandemic conditions have undoubtedly augmented feelings of isolation for many of us. Helping others is an effective way to improve your own mood — find tips for supporting yourself and others through pandemic holiday isolation in this article.
How Grief Can Help Joy: Lessons from Juneteenth & Pride Month for the Legal Profession. Written in the context of different celebrations, but the lessons in grief apply to any — allowing ourselves to process our negative feelings is key to experiencing positive ones.
Navigating Difficult Conversations: Tips for the Legal Profession. Hot topics often come up among extended families over the holidays — you can use our tips both in professional and personal conversations, whether online or in person, to work through hard conversations — rather than avoid them.
Year End Review: Keys to Building Habits for Lawyers & Law Students. Our habits influence our well-being significantly, and our environment influences our habits significantly. Starting small with the right changes helps make good habits stick.
How to Manage Expectations for Holiday Success as a Lawyer. Of course, we have a whole new set of expectations this year, including that next year will be better. Still, after the events of 2020 illuminating divisions within our own families about moral issues, we might expect different holiday celebrations for the future — more confrontational and difficult, and more powerful as well.
Balanced Gratitude: Practice Reviewing Consolations & Desolations. Native American History Month is also observed in November, and we recognize the reality of the Thanksgiving tradition described by Corinne Rice in ‘As a Native American, Here’s What I Want My Fellow Americans to Know about Thanksgiving’.
Tips for Lawyers & Law Students to Stay Sober During the Holidays. For those those who are sober or sober curious, the risk of being offered a drink at a gathering might be lower or removed entirely this year, but the holidays are still likely to create new challenges to sobriety during the pandemic.
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