1-800-525-0210 FREE + CONFIDENTIAL SUPPORT GO TO MASSLOMAP.ORG

Career & Practice Concerns

Respect is not a commodity; Respect is a character quality

How can I respect someone who doesn’t respect me? How can I be respectful toward someone who is being aggressive or rude toward me? These are common questions many of us ask when we are faced with the challenge of interacting with people who are not following the Golden Rule. Whether you are 45 or 16, it can be difficult to show someone respect when the other person is doing anything but (whether that be your parent, your child, a supervisor, or opposing counsel).

Read more

Take ownership of your reputation

One of the most common warnings I hear given to new attorneys is that your reputation is key. It takes years to build a reputation and a minute to ruin it. These warnings early on serve to guide attorneys to take their interactions seriously, to commit to acting respectfully and professionally, and to avoid making mistakes that will harm their reputations. On one hand, this is good advice. It can steer you in the right direction. On the other hand, this can be taken as a career death sentence if you ever make a mistake. News flash: We all make mistakes.

Read more

New Year’s Resolutions – Start small

Every year I make the same resolution. My resolution is to not make any resolutions this year. And every year, I break my resolution simply by making it. This is my way of taking away the guilt or pressure of making lofty goals that will most likely be broken sometime in the near future. This is our human nature: we get excited about change, start to make a change, realize that change actually takes hard work, get discouraged by that requirement, start failing in our efforts, and then stop making progress entirely. This is why so many people buy gym memberships at the start of the year and then stop using them entirely in March. This is also why gyms do not expand their space due to the influx of new members at the beginning of the year. They know that the numbers will decrease rapidly.

Read more

Tips on winning the fight against anxiety – Tip #4: Beat it to the punch

As we have discussed previously in posts (Tip #1, Tip #2, and Tip #3), anxiety attempts to gain control over you by suggesting a feared future outcome. The more you try to prevent that feared outcome from occurring, the more anxiety grows and the less control you feel. The desire to live a life free of problems or mistakes is not a bad desire in and of itself. The problem starts when we begin to believe that we need our lives to be problem/mistake-free in order to have an enjoyable life. To be blunt, this is a lie.

Read more

Fake It ‘Til You Make It – Part 1

The suggestion to fake it until you make it is one that has been used for many situations over the years. Many people have strong reactions to the suggestion, either they hate the idea because it seems disingenuous and an admission of inadequacy, or they love it because it helped them get over a barrier of doubt and allowed them to persevere. In many ways, whether you love it or hate it, your opinion of “fake it ‘til you make it” is usually influenced by what the suggestion symbolizes to you.

Read more

Argument: Law School Changed Me

Law students and lawyers often tell me that law school changed them. This realization usually occurs after numerous friends and family members tell them that they have changed. “You’re more argumentative” is often heard. Typically, the law student does not feel like they have become a different person, but instead they have been learning new skills. One of the most prevalent experiences about law school is the way that it changes the way you think about everything. Whether you are thinking about an argument to make or about the intention behind a law, law school teaches you that there are no right and wrong answers. It is all about the argument you can make. This is why the Socratic Method is used in almost every law class that you take. The Socratic Method uses a series of questions to help explore potential answers or avenues of thought. The point of the method is to ask questions and engage in the process of exploration. It is not about determining the one and only right answer.

Read more

The Secret to Winning – Often not what you think it is: Competition vs. Cooperation

Recently, as I was listening to the TED Radio Hour on NPR, I was intrigued by a TEDWomen 2015 talk by Margaret Heffernan about how our traditional ideas of competition and pecking orders based on individual achievement are causing much more harm than good. In her talk, Heffernan talks about “The Superchicken Model” which was derived from the work of an evolutionary biologist from Purdue University named William Muir who studied chickens. Muir found that a flock of chickens made up of only the high producers (i.e., the “superchickens”) eventually failed over time due to the fact that all but three of them died as they pecked each other to death. In essence, the heightened competition literally killed most of them.

Read more

The Cost of Depression

The statistics are, well, depressing when it comes to the rates of depression among law students and attorneys. While law students do not differ from the general population in terms of depression prior to starting law school (about 7%), approximately 32% of law students experience depression by the end of their first year in law school. This trend continues through law school to the point of 40% of students experiencing depression by the end of the third year. After law school and the bar exam, rates of depression go down a bit but generally stay at over twice the rate of the general population. Lawyers in all areas of law are faced with various stressors (financial, pressure, long hours, unemployment, etc.) that contribute to their impaired well-being.

Read more

Increase your pain tolerance in order to get the tough stuff done

One of the most stressful situations that a person can be in is when they feel they have no control. Feeling a lack of control increases stress. Lists of the most stressful jobs are often topped by jobs in which the employee feels little control over their time and workload. A CEO who is responsible for the operations of a company and the jobs of all of its employees will most often report a lower amount of stress than a middle manager who feels like he or she is stuck in between the rules of upper management and the complaints of the ground level workers. The biggest difference between those two jobs (aside from the paycheck) is the amount of control that each person feels they have within their job.

Read more
Back To Top