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Kathleen: 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.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Thriving Lawyer Podcast. This is [00:01:00] episode eight of season two of the Thriving Lawyer. And I'm Kathleen, and today I'm here with my wonderful co-creator Carla we are so excited about the conversation that we're going to have today. We are going to explore something that we are both incredibly passionate about and that is that importance of coaching skills for professionals generally, and lawyers specifically. So coaching isn't just for professional coaches. It's a really powerful skill set that can transform the way that we show up as lawyers, the way that we practice our profession, how we work with our clients, and even how we lead and collaborate with others.
Today we are going to explore why coaching skills have become more critical in the professional world today, and we'll explore [00:02:00] specifically what it means for lawyers. So as part of that, we'll bring in Carla's extensive experiences and executive coach for a wide range of professionals. And then I'll come in with my experience in coaching and also as a lawyer and how I think that those skills apply in that context.
Okay. Thank you Kathleen. This is amazing. In coaching, it's about asking questions, right? It's about helping people tap into their own inner resources. It's about asking what if, like sometimes we started with the problem, understand what the struggle that we are at, but we always move them towards solution.
How can help people generate their own ideas and solutions? Coaching is so important for professionals, not just for lawyers. Right, and, and it's important to, to think about the legal profession. Like you mentioned this many times, lawyers are good communicators, right? You're a good at giving advice. It's important to differentiate how we create the [00:03:00] balance, right?
When to be the expert, when to a advise, and when to use more of the coaching hat, which is more about active listening and asking questions. Yes. I'm really excited for our conversation today. Why are they so important to professionals in today's world overall? Yeah. Coaching skills like active listening, asking powerful questions, and being really curious about what is the problem at hand.
Like it's rather than just jumped correctly into fixing everything, it's really like connecting with people. It's really the, the sort of building relationship. With the workplace, like changes are happening so fast, like especially post the pandemic with the episode that we had around the uplift, like the razor of ai.
So the human skills like empathy, communication, adaptability, are becoming non-negotiable. They're really [00:04:00] important at this point in time. And coaching is a skill of communication, right? It goes right at the essence of learning how to communicate well. Coach is about helping people find their own solutions rather than giving them advice.
So it's really powerful when we are managing teams, when you're mentoring junior people, when you are even sometimes when you are advising clients to understand where they are at. So Katherine, how do you share coaching skills in your day-to-day work? Look, it's interesting because I think if you talk to most lawyers.
Some might not even know what coaching is, but to the extent that they do and probably increasingly most would now, they would probably come and tell you that it's relevant when you are managing staff that you know you can coach your juniors, you can coach them to develop as staff and absolutely that is fundamental that that is a key aspect of using coaching skills at work.
I. I think it's [00:05:00] unfortunate though that most of the training for coaching skills has been limited to that. So for example, I went to a manager as coach training, and it was exactly that. It was teaching managers how to use coaching skills to be more effective managers, and in fact, to really challenge this idea that leaders or managers were directive solely.
That directive attitude was their key modus operandi, but rather, instead that they should adopt a coaching mindset. Where they were enabling their stuff. Now all of that is true, but we limit ourselves if we can find coaching skills for professionals, including lawyers, to that context. And what occurred to me, and I couldn't find any literature on this as I started, I don't think there has been wool that much, but as I became.
More trained as a coach, more experienced, and then was developing my legal career. What [00:06:00] became clear to me was that at the very heart of what a lawyer does, it is about serving a client to serve that client, you need to get instructions from the client. You're trying to help them achieve a legal outcome.
Whatever the context, whether you're a criminal barrister. A trusts lawyer to a contracts lawyer to like me, a public lawyer. No matter what you do, you are ultimately serving a client who's trying not to achieve a particular aim, whether that's to achieve a policy outcome, get certain legislation, or keep outta jail.
At the end of the day, there is that aim that the client has. The issue is they often don't even know what it is that they ultimately seek or what would be a good outcome. Sometimes that might be obvious. Often it's not, particularly in the kind of work that I do in the government context where it's about helping governments identify policy options [00:07:00] or advise them on what particular course of action is lawful or how they might achieve a particular aim that would be very similar, although different in private sector agencies.
Again, as how do, how are you achieving the aims of the. Organization that you're in, whatever that organization is, or even if you're a private law firm serving those clients that you have that are paying for your services. But what I recognized was that using coaching skills could have a profound impact on that relationship building with the client and the way that you can clarify your instructions and better work with them to achieve an outcome.
So that's how I see this playing out, not just with your teams and colleagues, but in the very way that you show up as a lawyer with your clients because you can start asking really simple questions, which don't require you to do [00:08:00] what I've done and be midway through a master's of science in coaching psychology.
Everybody can use some basic fundamental coaching skills to start applying this straight away, and it might be as simple as asking something like, what is the real challenge here? That's a simple question. Doesn't have to be complicated. Yeah. And that's so powerful, right? Because especially in the legal profession, when you were trained to give the solutions where you are trained to answer the questions.
I'm glad you've touched on that because lawyers are trained to be experts in the law and then they share that knowledge. So it's very easy for us to all in the mode of I already know the answer. Whereas actually, if they just stopped, took a stance of curiosity and took a little bit more time, they might actually get a different picture of the problem.
Which will transform the solution that's actually required in the [00:09:00] moment. There is a tendency to be what Michael Bunge Stanier, who's an Australian coaching expert and has written foundational books on the topic. I think one's called The Coaching Habit, which would be a great water call. We'll put the links in the show notes to that.
But he basically talks about your advice monster, that your tendency to be the expert. To suddenly jump in and give the answer, and we've probably all had that friend, right? You sit down for a coffee, you just wanna chat you, and then suddenly, whether it's a friend or your partner, gives you a big, long lecture of exactly the things that you should do, right?
We've probably all been there, and that's an example of that advice monster coming out when perhaps it just needed to be a bit quiet and pause for a moment. Do you have any examples? What's one small change you saw when you started applying these skills in your practice? Yeah, look to think, I can think of multiple occasions where it's been helpful.[00:10:00]
There's been times, for example, where a matter has been incredibly complicated. There's multiple conflicting policy considerations and demands. There's issues around what the law actually provides and permits. There's timeframes that are very limited involved. People are getting stressed sometimes.
There's no easy way to navigate through that. You've gotta go straight through it. It's ride holiday says the obstacle is the way. But using these kind of questions has meant that you could just really explore with the clients. The real nature of the problem, what would be a good outcome for them? How it would look, starting to map out how to measure a good outcome, looking at what might be possible, like very simple coaching questions.
None of it was difficult or [00:11:00] rocket science. It was very simple. But it was really digging into the instructions. Now, I know a lot of lawyers listening to this will be very experienced. They think, but what? What? I already know how to get instructions from my clients. I'm sure you do. I'm sure you're very good at it, but I think just taking a little bit more of this coaching mindset might open it up even further.
So it's useful to experiment with. Even just saying to yourself, what if I did one thing differently in my next client meeting and tried a new or a different question or approach and just paused before I jumped in and thought that I had the answer? Yeah. It's such a great example. Like I really, he you saying like it highlights the, that you're empower your clients, like you're not diminishing your expertise by any way, but it's actually enhancing it by building trust and a sense of collaboration.
I. A lot of lawyers will have heard this concept of the trusted advisor, particularly when you're inhouse counsel, [00:12:00] that relationship of you are not just giving the giver of the technical advice. You're meant to embody something much more broad in terms of the trust and the relationship that you have.
These are all skills that are really, are a really simple way to, in fact, create that relationship. Consider it a tool in your arm to enhance your legal practice. Yeah. Okay. So I'd just love to, just to touch a little bit, so we're talking about coaching skills. What specifically are we talking about? So we're just tapping just a few, just an example.
A few of the ones that we are sharing. So one of them, the main one is listen, like the active listening. So this is about like hearing beyond the words. Picking up on the emotions, on the concerns, on the unspoken fears. So listening for meaning except for what is being said, but also for what is not being said, [00:13:00] right?
It's, it's showing clients and colleagues, and even sometimes opposite counsels, depending the type of work that you do, that you were there, you're genuinely hearing them because that builds immediate rapport. It's interesting me say that too, particularly as more of us are working more and more remotely, but even in hybrid workplaces, I think about my work.
I'm on teams all the time. My people in my team are in Canberra and Sydney, so I have to be even more attuned to those things because I'm missing the cues in 3D. That's why it's so important to have the image too often to. Not miss the body language. I know that I've been in meetings sometimes when people have not had the video on, and it's been incredibly challenging to identify what are the dynamics in the room when I'm giving this advice.
I remember one time I had [00:14:00] to discuss a quite sensitive legal advice that I was giving in an oral environment and talk to a team that were having problems with the technology and knew that it was going to be difficult, challenging advice. It was so challenging with me. I couldn't gauge at all. I had to really pause and actually ask the extra questions about how it was landing to even have any understanding of that dynamic.
When coaching training, we usually are asked to do that exactly for that reason, to really practice asking the questions because you have, you can rely less on the imaging. You've gotta, what questions would I ask to understand? What this person, because you're just hearing the voice. Yes. Okay. So actively listening is number one.
The other one is clear powerful communication. So the way that you ask questions. So instead of asking closed questions like, did you file that document? We ask open ended questions like that, explore more [00:15:00] possibilities. So what is the most pressing obstacle in front of you right now? This invites for richer dialogue and deeper thinking.
It's not a yes no. Like the person has to dig inside themselves to be able to answer that. And another skill is the coaching mindset. And this is a big one. Like this is the mindset that you want to bring to the conversation. So a coaching mindset is a mindset of curiosity. You don't know the answers. The other person has some information that you are trying to work together for them to build a collaborative understanding.
So it's resisting the urge to jump straight into their advice. So it, it is creating that trust with clients, colleagues, or for the team so often, like this has valuable insights within the conversation. Like it creates more insights. It's a stance of curiosity. I think that is so fundamental that you don't have all the answers.
Yeah, you [00:16:00] actually need to ask the questions. Is that might also, to the extent that you do have the answers, it might even change fundamentally the answer that you give. Right. I wonder how do you experience that using, 'cause you are a coach and you are a lawyer, so you actually wear both hats like, so in your legal practice, how do you balance the coaching mindset?
The lawyering mindset. Yeah, absolutely. Look, it's not always easy when you get through in the lawyer mindset. I can be deep in my legal work and I'm in flow, and I've totally forgot about any coaching hat that I would wear. And sometimes I find myself like pinch myself in that thinking of thinking. If a client asked this and I already know the answer and why, and I'd have to catch myself and I, I'm human, I'm not always successful at it, but I think what this work has enabled me to do is, is to more often catch myself in that sinking and [00:17:00] make myself slow down and go, oh, okay, alright.
That's what I was doing. How can I think about this differently? And then. Reframe it, and when I go to the client meeting, make sure I've consciously adopted that curiosity kind of mindset so that I'm much more open to be able to go into a meeting with an open stance of curiosity so that you're not preempting what it is that you think is gonna be.
The answer to whatever problem is at hand. So it really is about that pausing and slowing down and reframe.
Beautiful. And how do you think lawyers can start using some of those coaching skills that we've been talking about here today? I think we've already alluded it's very simple that [00:18:00] start by slowing down, by really making that extra effort to listen. And maybe start thinking about some simple coaching questions that you might be able to ask.
And remember that coaching questions are often open-ended kind of questions. They're, they're not questions that invite a yes or no answers. And of course, you can join us at the Thriving Lawyer. Karla, perhaps you might say a little bit more about that aspect. Absolutely, and I loved what you just said.
It's much simpler. Then we don't have to become a full-time coach, right? Like it's listen more attentively. It's asking one deeper question, just one in a conversation. Like with the curiosity. It makes the difference. And then, and notice how it makes a difference. That is also important. We are saying it does, but try experiment for yourself.
And in the end of the meeting, I asked one question of how was that of a benefit for me? And see the [00:19:00] results they create. But yes, so we love to share like we, we have something really exciting, like we've just started our Lawyers Coach course. It's now available and it's designed to take everything that we've touched here in a much deeper way.
So the co, the course covers in how to adopt a true coaching mindset as a lawyer. Art of active listening, building real client trust. We go into different kinds of listening, explore that in in, in a much deeper way. And how to ask powerful questions that really unlock insight and solutions, practical frameworks that you can use straight away in your legal practice and how to integrate these skills in your everyday work when you're advising clients or mentoring junior colleagues, or even leading the team.
Do you have anything else to add, Kathleen? Yeah, just that. The other thing about this is that it's about an hour, so it's something that you can listen to and probably claim as one of your CPD points. [00:20:00] Now, of course, you have to check the requirements in your jurisdiction 'cause some jurisdictions have limits on the amount of prerecorded hours.
Like I know I'm in Victoria, and so it would fall within professional skills, but there's a limit for a year of a certain number of hours of prerecorded sessions. But nevertheless. You can probably do it. So check the requirements in your jurisdiction. The other points, I think why it's so important, which is I think it's becoming increasingly clear in this modern world of lawyering, that being technically skilled as a lawyer is a precondition, but not sufficient.
If it ever was the lawyers who are gonna truly thrive in this environment. Even more so in the future are going to be those ones who can combine their technical legal expertise with their strong human skills. These are the skills that Carla has just talked about. Things like deep listening, the clear communication, the emotional intelligence, having those coaching conversation that [00:21:00] empower others.
So you know, if you are ready to step into the that next level of your professional growth. To do not just great legal work, but really embody that idea of a trusted advisor who leads with impact. We'd love for you to join us. You can learn more and enroll in the Lawyers Coach [email protected] au.
We've designed it to be practical, inspiring, and immediately useful. There's no fluff in it. It's just real tools that you can apply straight away. And the other point that I would make is we'll put the notes in the show notes so that you can immediately link to it there as well. So thank you, Carla. Thank you Kathleen.
Kathleen: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the thriving lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz, if you like it, please share it with your lawyer friends and colleagues, and tag us on Instagram at @thriving lawyer or on LinkedIn via the links in the show notes. [00:22:00] And if you liked what you heard, please drop a review in apple podcasts.
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If you'd like to work with us, check out our free resources and our signature course, the thriving lawyer. Which you will find at www.thrivinglawyer.com.au. You can also download our free guide, the lawyer's guide to thriving: a sustainable roadmap for success.
It's filled with great tips and ideas so that you can begin to make real change. You'll find the link to that in our show notes.
We hope this podcast has given you massive value. And that you can use it to begin to create your own thriving life. A life where you can thrive as a lawyer. And in the rest of your life.
