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Kathleen: [00:00:00] You are listening to The Thriving Lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz. I'm Kathleen, a highly experienced lawyer and an International Coaching Federation accredited coach.
Carla: And I am Carla. Like Kathleen, I am an ICF certified coach and I have worked with top leaders and professionals, many of them lawyers, at some of the world's biggest organizations.
My focus is on using evidence based approaches to help my clients thrive at work and in the rest of their lives. Together,
Kathleen: we bring you the Thriving Lawyer podcast, a podcast filled with ideas and inspiration, as well as practical tips to help you thrive as a lawyer and in the rest of your
life. Let's get into it.
Hello lawyers. Welcome to episode five of season two of the Thriving Lawyer Podcast. So pleased to be with you again today. [00:01:00] And today we are going to be talking about the flow state, your secret weapon for legal peak performance. From the last episode, we talked about the perma model of wellbeing and one of the key aspects was engagement.
And we talked about briefly the fact that flow was really important. But we wanted to go much deeper into that because it really is so fundamental. I think particularly given the reality of lawyer lives, where we are often doing really high priority, difficult work. It's intellectually demanding often, and a lot of pressure, and this modern world that we live in has a lot of distractions and it can be really challenging.
To be able to get that focus. If I think about my own experiencing, I can remember actually being proud in a job interview once talking about my multitasking abilities, I now laugh at myself for that and [00:02:00] realize what that meant and what it actually cost because you actually can't multitask and the distractions that we have accepted as normal in our life.
With the access to our mobile phones over consumption of news, the phone calls that we get, even if we just think about the reality of professionals, um, the, the reality for a lot of lawyers is the interruptions. The meetings, the feeling when your email box explodes with 30 emails and people are wanting things from you and you feel like you are getting arrows in every single direction you, and you're unable to focus, can't do the deep work that you need to do to actually do your job.
So. I say all about because this body of work around flow [00:03:00] has been such an interesting one for me to delve into and one that I have become increasingly aware of the importance of. And in fact, you and I have just finished creating a one hour session on this, and we are going to be launching that as part of the bonus for the Thriving Lawyer course.
The reason that we have included that is for all those reasons that I just talked about, that this ability to be able to carve out that deep thinking so that we can achieve what we need to perform well do our jobs well, but also in the rest of our life can have such a significant impact on our wellbeing as well as our performance at work.
Carla, that's a lot that I've just talked about there, but I know that this is a particular specialty of yours. You've trained directly with Steven Kotler from the Flow Research Collective. Can you introduce us to this idea of flow in a bit more detail and [00:04:00] tell me about the insights that you've gained from engaging with this body of work, and maybe even once you've done that, this is a lot too, like how it's affected your own life and the impact that you've seen with some of your clients.
Sure. So flow, at its core, it's a state of complete and immersion in an activity. So we are at our most productive and creative space. My work with Steven Koler gave me insights into how flow can really create a big impact when we approach our day to day with much more clarity, like we become more efficient.
For me, flow particularly has really transformed how I manage my workload and my time. I guess the biggest challenge for me was to really understand how I best function, what is necessary for my peak performance, and I spent a lot of time readjusting, starting from the environment, like creating a distract free environment by [00:05:00] turning off.
All notifications in my devices when I am doing my deep work, really restructuring my workspace to minimize the interruptions, the agreements that I've made that I work from home. So the agreements I've made with my families around try on and flow. I am doing my deep work here. What was necessary like to actually put those things in place.
I also focused a lot in like how do I get my best brain and body in a stage two pick performance or prioritizing sleep. Eating really well, incorporating meditation sessions and reset to help reset my mind. Of course, I'm big on exercise, so the movements that allows me to really help getting to flow, so I really, I really, I learned to recognize, and also the time of the day when it's most likely for me to get into flow for me is in the morning.
Right. The best time is really after light exercise is when I'm primed, most primed to, to do my deep work [00:06:00] applying. All of these changes were really transformative. I gave myself permission to slow down and focus a lot more and my productivity skyrocketed, like things that I used to take half a day. Now I can do it in an hour and a half because that is the best.
Best time to to approach them. And with my clients, it really help them better understand their individual rhythm and identify the times and the activities they feel most energized and productive. And then setting the boundaries around their deep work goes into eliminate distractions. How do you manage your environment?
A big part of it's like how do you put your brain and body as well? Ready for optimum performance sleep. It's always one aspect that sometimes we don't even know we're functioning well, we with poor sleep, but when we sleep well, the baseline just goes all the way up because we don't even know that was possible like that happened to me in in particular as well.
It's a really good practical [00:07:00] definition of flow and at most, to summarize, at its essence, it's about. Being able to deeply focus on our work. It's also an environment when we are in a state where we lose a sense of anything outside of ourselves. So we're totally immersed in the activity. Like when I think for me, flow, the most easy way to get into flow has always been since I was a child reading.
Give me a novel and you'll find me in a back corner hours later, not realizing that it's dinner time. That, that, that's me now. That's all very well, and that's a great simple example, but I'm thinking about the experience of lawyers and I talked about some of those challenges of that, those emails coming through and feeling like you've got arrows coming from every direction.
And also thinking about this, the state of the world now and this avalanche of constant information and [00:08:00] noise. We are not immune as lawyers to any of this. The fact though is that our profession really does require that deep focus. I too work remotely when I'm working in my legal capacity. So I don't have the over the partition discussions that I used to.
Uh, there's not a lot of that chit chatter in person because I'm on my own. I've got my capped. But teams, it's a fantastic means to communicate. But I'm. Also getting lots of messages all the time from clients, from colleagues, and if I'm not very strategic about it, I can actually find myself constantly distracted, not only by those team message, but also like email alerts, you know, this and this.
Sometimes it can feel like there's this expectation that I respond that if a client emails me, I'm responding within a certain kind of period. So I think then it's fair to say [00:09:00] that. Like any professional in this modern world, we as lawyers have a lot of challenges and obstacles in the way of us getting flow to be able to do our work in that kind of deep state.
So what should we know about flow in order to be able to even begin to address some of those challenges? Sure. So the, the term flow was first coined by Miha Chi Miha, a psychologist that spent years studying how people get into that deep state of focus concentration, where time seems to disappear. And so he discovered this concept when he was studying artists and athletes and musicians.
They would get so absorbed in their work and they would lose track of everything. So he started those people when [00:10:00] they were into Flow Chi, we hardly realized that this wasn't just about working really hard, um, was about being fully immersed in that activities for its own sake. You know, when people are in flow, they're not thinking about the end goal or the external rewards.
They're simply lost in that process. It's a state where you feel in control, where you have clear goals, where you are getting feedback, immediate feedback of what you are doing. Now, why is this important for the legal profession in the world? Where of law, where deep intellectual work and critical thinking and problem solving it, the key understanding how you get into flowing really make a difference.
When lawyers can tap into this state, they're able to handle complex TA tasks. With greater FO focus, they are more productive. It actually feels less stressful. A good place to get started is learning about the different stages [00:11:00] of flow. Flow has four stages according to Steven Kotler. The first stage is a struggle phase.
Like this stage often means a bit of frustration, right? We are grappling with complex tasks for optimum performance begins with maximum frustration. So it's a stage where you're loading. Overloading the brain with information. You are really struggling with a problem that you have at hand. Kathleen, do you, could you relate to this?
Is there an example in your legal work that you can see when you are struggling with that first phase? Oh, sure. This is, this happens all the time. I can think of when I get a new request for advice that comes in, might be really complicated. There might be a whole lot of PDF attachments to the request.
Perhaps my instructions are not that clear or maybe they are clear, but it's just the pure volume of information. I'm trying to figure [00:12:00] out the key issues here and to make sure that I have the conversations that I need to under to confirm that my understanding of the key issues are in fact correct and to get a kind of framework for responding to the problem.
So it's really that kind of intellectual grappling. It's not at all comfortable. It can be frustrating because you can go down wrong paths. You, you're struggling to figure out the right approach. Beautiful. So it is a part of flow, right? We start from that at some point in, in time, when you do feel like you gather the information, you understand the request, you let it go, you let go of the frustration and the disengagement momentarily, right?
And you take the, your mind out of the problem. Sometimes this is just a few minutes, you get up and go and get a glass of water. So then I'm going to come up with the, the framework, like you let it go. Of the problem for a minute. So you release, that's the release phase [00:13:00] bef, and then once you come back to it, when you come back to the, to the problem again with, with the example that you, that you've just, um, shared with us.
You decide how you're, you have a clear goal, so you decided, you created a framework for how to tackle it, and that's usually when you can get into flow, that golden zone where you achieve big performance and you are fully immersed in tackling the problem. Like usually times since she's slow down or speed up, right?
Your best idea come effortless. You started being able to link. Your experience with the advice and you bring everything together, like how might this be for lawyers in, in the example that you just shared? Just the example that I gave in terms of the advice writing, like that's really easy to answer because what immediately comes to mind to me is that writing stage where I've got that clear sense of what I am saying.
The advice almost seems to write itself. [00:14:00] Um, I'm typing and it's just coming. It's almost like it's coming from somebody else, but it's me typing and doing the thinking, and it would probably come the best when I'm not just like trying to struggle through the whole thing. I, I might have gone, okay, at this time I'm writing the, the main part of the advice, or I'm just doing the introduction.
I've got a very clear goal about the particular tasks that I'm doing. And it might have been, I can think of an example. Last week I had a particular goal by lunchtime that I would finish a particular thing and I was just focusing on that. By that point, I'd gone through the struggle and was just in the flow of writing that one section.
Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. And then the fourth phase is the recovery. Perhaps this is the most overlooked phase of them all. So recovery allows the brain to process and consolidate the information. It's essential to maintain the long-term [00:15:00] productivity. Without recovery, we can get to burnout. So personally, I schedule downtime intentionally, especially after flow.
It could be. A walk or it could be having a bath or having active recovery time in my schedule these days, the flow consumes us. We need to be able to disconnect from it so that we can keep coming back to this cycle and take tackle the next problem. I wanna interrupt there because I'm thinking about lawyers that I know I'm thinking about.
The experience of lawyers in some notorious law firms. I saw an article over the weekend in a British paper talking about an experience of a lawyer in one of the Golden Circle firms where they basically lived in the office. And what occurs to me is the objection. A lawyer might have it, okay, you told me, [00:16:00] Carla, that you have routines like having a bath or something.
I, in my legal job, I've had this moment of I'm trying to do this complex advice. I've just gone through the struggle and I'm in the flow mode. I'm writing it. I get a phone call, my teams messages go, and then I get distracted, and even assuming that doesn't happen and I actually get to be in flow. Then I'm in flow for an hour and a half, I finish that.
But there's expectations that I'm working, you know, billing eight or nine hours a day, I have to work 12 hours. And there's this sense of grinding and so keep going. And I think that is where a lot of lawyers are probably missing out. You're right on the money there, that recovery. So if a lawyer was your client and basically said to you in a session, Carla, I can't get flow because of those reasons.
How would you respond with your coach hat on? [00:17:00] Okay, so with my coach hat on, I would then ask them questions to try to understand what is really getting in the way. But let's say that we are having a flow sort of sessions where we are discussing how to implement flow in your life. Like with the science behind the flow flow has triggers.
Flow can happen naturally. Sometimes it does like when you were a kid and you're reading in the corner, but it, we can, the productivity aspect of flow that we are talking about here, it's all how do we organize our environment and our work in order to trigger flow in our day to day? The example that you gave with the distractions.
The teamwork, that's the number one enemy. For fraud. Distractions, right? The being able, like notifications pop in. It's very easy for us to get distract and then sometimes we can't quite get back to where we left off. Some jobs don't allow for that. Some job sales doesn't allow to have. I've been working [00:18:00] remotely now for, for a few years and I feel that I'm very lucky that I've created an environment that has these triggers very well embedded in the way that I approach my work.
But I know that this is not the reality for a lot of professions then. It's trying to understand what are the triggers that you can use that is there is an environmental triggers where you locate your, how is your workspace? Is there an opportunity to have in interruption free work throughout the day?
What is the time that is most likely to happen? Can you have agreements around the team, the clients, the manager in a sense of, okay, I'm doing one hour of deep work here, 90 minutes of deep work. I'm turning off my notifications. Or I have one channel where something emergency, maybe you call my phone and creating agreements around that.
Is that possible? It's investigating, right? Or is there an expectation that I should be on? Is, is that [00:19:00] really an agreement? Anything? Is that the kind of environment I want to be in? Absolutely. Right. Yes, and sometimes it'll come, I, I know that it's not easy and some, and it takes a lot of conversations and a lot of trying and experiment to find what is, if you work in a hybrid environment where sometimes you're home and sometimes you're at the office, when am I most likely to get into flow?
Can I arrange my schedule in a way that I can do the deep work from home if that's easier. I work remotely too with the legal work, and that has changed my experience. The opportunities for that deep focus have absolutely skyrocketed. The challenge is still the teams, which are very important to me on the one hand, because I am very relationship focused and that communication is critical.
It's about being more deliberate and one of the things that we, in our team were [00:20:00] experimenting with was letting each other know and perhaps putting our status on red for an hour and a half or something. And that has been very helpful in being able to, I think, share those expectations so that others are aware and can adjust their behavior.
And yes, there's always gonna be times where you've got working in a government environment. For me, it might be that the chief council wants something for the secretary of the department or the ministers requiring urgent advice. You're always gonna have times when something like that happens that is truly an emergency.
But I think what you say is so important about those agreements because I think when I think about the times at work that have been the most horrible for me. It's where, particularly when I think about times when I've been managing quite a large team with a lot of lawyers and feeling like I just wasn't getting the time to focus on the things that actually needed to do because I was dealing the bush [00:21:00] fires that were coming all the time with it now.
Yes, that's part of my job, but. That focus. And it's only when you start to think about and trying to carve out those moments that you can begin to actually perform in a way that you want to. Hmm. And in a way that also challenges that narrative that the long hours are inevitable. I think of some of those times when I was working long hours and I was probably being very inefficient because of these issues.
I actually wasn't doing deep work for that. Time might have been 12 hours at the desk, but how much of it was really proper deep work versus responding to different interruptions, but then having to deal with those consequences of task switching. Does that resonate, KA? Absolutely. And it sounds like maybe there was that if you have that expectation that I should be responding to all the messages that are coming through, [00:22:00] everybody's asking for help.
Sometimes we don't even go and say there is no communication planning in place. If I'm sending your email and I'm expecting the reply, tomorrow is fine. It requires, well, look, my response time is 24 hours. And sometimes if it is an emergency, if it's an urgent here, could you please create a label to say that it is urgent?
Like it's one example, like what you said in your team, like using teams, right? You started playing around with the label that we put. Look, I, um, doing deep work, I'm focusing right now. It's very, it's all about, okay, so how am I man? What is my to-do list? What is my work? How am I managing my time around that?
How am I going to, what is important for me to do? And being able to create a work schedule that you feel productive. That you feel that you are tapping into all of the things that is important and sometimes for that requires some changing in some [00:23:00] boundaries, right? Or I really enjoy replying to email.
What email is the replies to be done within an hour? Is that what is most important for my job today? Yeah, there's a lot there to get a lawyer started. So if you were to summarize that, if a lawyer's feeling like this is an area that they really need to focus on. What I'm hearing then is structuring time, being deliberate about how we spend it, having those discussions around setting expectations so that others understand and that the agreement is shared and having those protocols.
Is there anything else? If a lawyer's thinking, how do I actually start? Where do I start from? Yeah, so the things that we've talked about, it was more of the environmental triggers, right? Like preparing the, the environment for flow. And the, the psychological triggers are more like, how are you going to get into flow, like clear goals, knowing what are you going to do?
So breaking the [00:24:00] complex task into smaller actionable objectives. Clarity in purpose, reduce the mental clutter, reduce the cognitive load that we can hold. So sometimes people block the time to get into flow, but they don't know what are they tackling. So design and advance. So this is the problem that I'm going to deal with.
The other aspect as well that is very important when we think about triggering fraud is that this, the balance between the challenge, the problem you are solving in your level of skills, if the skills are much higher. Then the challenge, usually it's a boring task. Like if the challenge is too big and you don't have the skills, doesn't quite match, it can become overwhelming.
The sweet spot is where the challenge is big. It is a challenge, is a struggle, but I, I believe I have these skills to build to get to that challenge. Like it's still, and that's the sweet spot. So understand sometimes when it's too overwhelming, it's important to go, [00:25:00] what is the beginning? In, in the example that you gave before, that might be, I'm going to analyze the request.
I'm going to understand what they are asking of me before I even go into decide how I'm going to tackle. I think it's also something that if you are a manager of other lawyers, if you've got junior lawyers working for you, really think about the task that you're assigning them. For example, a graduate or a first year lawyer.
That's a big thing, right? That I remember times being given things that were so utterly boring and didn't grow me, that there was absolutely no chance for that growth or flow. But on the other hand, I can also think of situations where lawyers might get something that is so overwhelming and beyond their skillset because they're brand new, that it's also just impossible for them.
So I think. Having [00:26:00] awareness of this body of work can also help you as a manager because maybe it's about identifying discrete tasks that are very clear in their goal. So if you've got that complex matter being really deliberate about the part of it that you delegate with the instruction, though, that you are giving your staff the maximum opportunity to grow, learn, and get into that flow state to be able to do their job well.
Absolutely clear. The, the clear goals on how you communicate as well, right? To be. 'cause sometimes we take for granted, like what we think it's easy and the requests and how we are requesting with all the experience and knowledge that you might have as an experienced lawyer. Um, before we wind up to, there's another question, which is that question around recovery.
I think that's really hard when you've got so much on, right? I think about my own experience lawyering, and let's just imagine this day where I've struggled with this new request. I've figured how to tackle it. [00:27:00] I've had those discussions with the clients. I've started writing. I've got into that state.
I've got a clear goal of writing a particular section. Or maybe if it's maybe even the whole advice in a particular timeframe, I do that. It's lunchtime, but I've got a whole lot of other tasks to do. How even, or even if it's not lunchtime, maybe a better example is it's two o'clock and I've got a few hours of work ahead of me and lots to do.
How can I get that recovery in a micro way? What can I do to do that so that I don't just end up grinding? What's the advice to a lawyer in that kind of situation? It's understanding how do you refill your body? How do you get energy Again, like for me specifically, what I try to do after so many meetings, like if I have two or three meetings, I have to step outside and literally I go outside for two minutes.
I go and stand in my [00:28:00] backyard. I look at the sun and I take my dog out. Sometimes if I have a bit more time, 10 minutes, I'll just go around the block. That for me, is a reset, right? It helps. There is a bit of movement. I, I work in front of the computer, so my v vision is very narrowed for a lot of time going outside.
It opens up this, I have this panoramic view in front of me. It's a break. It, it, it really works. It's understanding what works for you. Sometimes it could be you get a glass of water and come back. How do you resetting and, and becoming clear. Okay, so I have three more hours of work to go. What do I need to reset so I can go and do these three hours?
What, what is the daily recovery that you need? What is the micro recovery that you use during the day? And then sometimes, what is my weekly, it might be something else that we might be able to do it on the weekend and then even monthly, like more when once a month or. A [00:29:00] term or something, I might be able to take a day to rest or to read or to do.
Yeah. I like that way of clarifying the micro versus the different scales of rest. For me in the moment, it's the things like getting a cup of tea or water, looking out my French, like I've got these French doors where I can look on my garden from my desk. Even having that focus for. A few minutes out, or that's probably even 30 seconds can be enough.
Sometimes it's going out and it's putting my feet on the grass outside. Others, it's just doing a walk even around the, the house for a couple of minutes or stretching. Um, other, and then I've gotta be more aware of, um, those breaks after work. And I have really focused on this. Particularly over the last say, three to four months, and now that I'm going both to the gym and yoga both three times a week, which is a heavy load and really significant change for me to be [00:30:00] doing that level I am finding that has just been so significant.
In terms of completely disconnecting the, particularly at the gym, I'm doing circuit classes of like strength and hybrid and personal training, and it's really challenging and really difficult. It's not something I'm naturally good at in a lot of ways, but a fact that it is so different to my legal work means that I tire myself out doing something else and then sleep well.
And then the yoga too, the slow yoga is completely different again, because that's more about the mind and just. Stretching it out, but that also has that important role. I suppose the broader point I'm trying to make is that you've just gotta find ways that work for you. Yeah. Absolutely created. Like it didn't happen one day or the other.
You experiment with it. You tried. What is the optimal way that you can get to yourself in that sort of recovery? Yeah. Sometimes I still think, [00:31:00] oh, I don't wanna go to the gym because I've got too much work to do and it's gonna be a distraction and you're gonna take too much time. But then invariably when I go and then come back, I'm like, oh.
I've got so much more energy and then I smash out something in half an hour. That would've taken me two hours because I was feeling tired. Yeah. You've gotta learn these lessons over and over again. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. We've covered a lot of ground. I think this is a great spot to finish up.
Thank you. Thank you. Bye.
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