Season 3, Episode 2 The Hypervigilance Loop: Why “Being on Top of Things” Can Become a Trap for Lawyers
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[00:00:00] Kathleen: Have you ever noticed that even on a good day, you know nothing catastrophic has happened and you feel like in your body that you are just really bracing, like you're really firm and you're stiff, and it's like there's a part of you that's scanning in the background, everything that you see.
[00:00:20] Kathleen: What did I miss? What could go wrong? What's going to come back to me and hit me? Now, that's not just stress.
[00:00:30] Kathleen: You'll probably recognize yourself in that at some points, like when you're tired or you're feeling pressured, it's a very familiar pattern. I think when we're in law, it's so easy for us to slip into autopilot and just get caught up in what you can term a hyper vigilance loop.
[00:00:48] Kathleen: Now, that's a bit of fancy language, but we're gonna use that concept today through the episode because it's where our mind stays on this kind of alert mode, even when what could be described as that immediate bushfire has gone out. And I think it's incredibly common. It's probably common for professionals in all sorts of areas these days when we've got so much coming at us all the time, and the world seems to get crazier every day, but at the same time, in the legal profession, I think there's very particular things that might exacerbate that for us.
[00:01:33] Carla: Yeah, and if you recognize yourself in that, I would like to begin with compassion. Hypervigilance is often a strategy. Your system learned in order to succeed and invitation here today, it isn't to get rid of that, it's to understand it and slowly build more capacity to choose a different response.
[00:01:57] 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.
[00:02:10] 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.
[00:02:23] Carla: My focus is on using evidence based approaches to help my clients thrive at work and in the rest of their lives. Together,
[00:02:32] 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
[00:02:44] Kathleen: life. Let's get into it.
[00:02:48] Kathleen: Well, welcome to the Thriving Lawyer. I'm Kathleen Brenner.
[00:02:52] Carla: And I'm Carla Ferraz.
[00:02:54] Kathleen: So last episode we went into quite a lot of detail about why lawyers so often can't switch off, and we talked about what we call the lawyer loop. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet. Highly recommend that you go back before you get to this one.
[00:03:10] Kathleen: This really builds on some of the ideas that we talked about and when we talked about this idea of the lawyer loop, what it was essentially getting to was this kind of common pattern that we seem to so often get pulled into, particularly under pressure. So what do we mean by that? Like, what does it look like?
[00:03:29] Kathleen: It's that kind of threat scanning. So this is where you're thinking, well, what could go wrong? What are the risks? And of course, as lawyers, that's what we're trained to do is identify and deal with those threats, open loops. These are the things that we've all got on our to-do list, those unfinished tasks that we can't get out of our mind and we keep holding them in, in our minds.
[00:03:51] Kathleen: That availability pressure, and this, I see so often in lawyers, it's that belief that we have to be responsive all the time to be competent. And of course we have to be responsive to our clients. If we weren't, we wouldn't be being good lawyers, but this is when we're taking it to that extra level where we're imposing on it ourselves all the time.
[00:04:12] Kathleen: Tech cues, these are the curse of life in this era. I think, the pings, those inbox checks that we just can't resist, let alone everything else that's going on. And then, finally the rumination where we are just, what are we doing? We are replaying everything that happened. We're forecasting after hours.
[00:04:39] Kathleen: So this is, you know, late at night when you find yourself with all of these things and you can't get to sleep, or you wake up at 3:00 AM and suddenly those thought patterns occur. Go back to that episode if you haven't already, to get that broader discussion.
[00:04:52] Kathleen: Today, what we are doing is going much deeper into one aspect of it, and so what we're gonna talk about is this idea of hypervigilance, and this is that constant scanning for risk that even when there isn't a bushfire, everything's going okay.
[00:05:08] Kathleen: If you were, if we were able to step back and actually see the picture more objectively.
[00:05:14] Kathleen: But we're stuck there.
[00:05:17] Carla: And we'll also revisit something that we have touched a lot in the earlier episodes around the perfectionism.
[00:05:24] Carla: You know, the perfectionism that is so common in the legal profession, not as a personality trait, but kind of a threat response that can keep lawyers stuck in the cycles of pressure and self-criticism.
[00:05:37] Carla: We'll also share a couple of practical ways to begin interrupting the cycle of hyper vigilance in a more realistic manner.
[00:05:45] Carla: So Kathleen, how would you define hyper vigilance in the legal terms, like hyper vigilance for lawyers specifically,
[00:05:53] Kathleen: how does it show up?
[00:05:54] Kathleen: These ideas that we're talking about, of course, will be the course of modern humans in this world.
[00:05:59] Kathleen: They'll show up for all sorts of people, and even if we just stick to thinking about the professions and white collar kind of work, you know, I think these things will be very common, but I think in law there is something very specific about the way we are trained and about the role that we perform that makes it very easy for us to really fall into these patterns and actually have, and I know I was like this for a long time, no self-awareness about the degree to which we are stuck in those patterns, right?
[00:06:38] Kathleen: Because as lawyers, like when you think about what. Our role is, regardless., you know, there's all sorts of types of law that we can be practicing, but at the end of the day, whether we're a barrister in court, an in-house general counsel, a government lawyer, at the end of the day in terms of providing advice, we're trained to anticipate problems, to identify risks, and then we're expected to be able to as far as the law can involve, solve those problems or protect the interests of our clients, always like we have an ultimate duty that we swear to the court in terms of acting in our client's best interests, giving legal services to the appropriate standards. So we're trying to, you know, always prevent future problems.
[00:07:31] Kathleen: It's literally the job, right, now, that job is really important and it's so crucial. We wanna, you wouldn't want a lawyer, right? I've said this probably many times on the podcast. You wouldn't want a lawyer who didn't identify your risks.
[00:07:51] Kathleen: But on the other hand it can be taken to extremes where we fall in these patterns and the whole way that the system works in a lot of legal workplaces, I think, is that because identifying risk is the role, we are rewarded and praised for identifying the risks that nobody else saw. Now that's all well and good.
[00:08:23] Kathleen: But where the problem comes in, I think is where we transfer that way of thinking in environments where it has no business being, and I see it a lot in lawyers where you can start to begin to apply that lawyer mindset to all areas of our life.
[00:08:46] Kathleen: Also to our legal work in a extreme way or like the way that we're interacting with people, the way we're interacting with our clients.
[00:08:53] Kathleen: But I think, you know what, it's that old kind of conundrum that for all, every strength that we have will always have a corresponding weakness. Right? So it's the mis deployment of the skill that causes the problem.
[00:09:12] Kathleen: So what might that seem like? There's a whole lot of ways, even in the work context that it might show up. I can definitely, when I think of these, I'm reminded of times that I've fallen into that trap myself.
[00:09:28] Kathleen: The times when you've got an email, you've already proofread it, it's fine, but you've proofread it, and check it another two or three times just because you're absolutely wanting to make sure that it, it meets the need. And really you could have sent it after the first proofread
[00:09:47] Kathleen: When you go to your email excessively just in case something has landed. Um, now sometimes you might need to do that. Sometimes we really are waiting for urgent advice and we need to action it. I had a case of that last week, but a lot of the times it's just too extreme.
[00:10:07] Kathleen: It's when we're looking at the conversations that we're having and we go into overdrive and interpreting their meaning, the subtext, what's going on.
[00:10:17] Kathleen: We might then end up in this pattern where we are like repeating the conversations that we've had over and over in our head to kind of think about, whether there's something different that we could have done where we get to the weekend and instead of being able to switch off and engage in other parts of our life, we just find ourself kind of really restless and unable to relax. You know, we're feeling edgy when things are quiet sometimes it's really tricky to even analyze that because it can begin to feel normal, right? You're still functioning, you're doing your job, you're living your life. You're probably achieving pretty well, but you've got that tension, right? You are, you're still slightly braced.
[00:11:04] Kathleen: Carla, how does that kind of resonate with what you see in some of your coaching?
[00:11:13] Carla: Yeah, all of those examples really describe, like fits in with with the literature around stress and attention because in those examples, like your brain is perceiving a threat, so your attention narrows and then you can feel triggered, and in that moment is really easy to slip into the automatic responses.
[00:11:36] Carla: Usually we're more reactive, more external driven, and more focused on how can I control this situation? And it can become really hard to access the part of view that can pause, that can prioritize, it can take perspective, that it can choose how you want to respond. So we can begin to describe this cycle here in a more compassionate way.
[00:12:05] Carla: Hypervigilance is your system trying to keep you safe through the anticipation? But the trick part is here that even doing law, you get rewarded for that when you're, you know, doing your legal work. Um, what makes it hard to question, it looks like diligence and looks like excellence, but hypervigilance can become chronic.
[00:12:32] Carla: And then it starts carrying a really high cost because you can maybe lose perspective, you can lose creativity. Sometimes it even, you know, goes into our relationships. It can feel tighter. It can feel less useful, especially when we are trying to, um, assume what other people are thinking. And you can even, you know, start spilling into our recovery, you know, the ability to disconnect and sleep and it can do what we don't want it to do, right? Like the, it's not, you know, we don't want to impact our performance, but sometimes it can, the performance can decline because we are operating from a tense, threat based state, rather than the clear judgment. Like, rather than like, okay, what is the situation asking of me here?
[00:13:25] Carla: So the question that I like to bring attention to is like, when is the vigilance serving you in your legal matter? And when is it running you? When, when, when did you allow it to to come into the rest of your life when it's not the best response?
[00:13:42] Kathleen: Hmm.
[00:13:42] Carla: And how do we create the ability to notice, to create
[00:13:47] Kathleen: that?
[00:13:47] Kathleen: I think that's really important. What you kind of brought out to me that I'm reflecting on is how all of that has a positive intent.
[00:13:54] Kathleen: The hypervigilant, it's there for a reason, and the intent is to protect you, and it's also to try and ensure that you perform, right.
[00:14:02] Carla: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:02] Kathleen: And lawyers are a very skeptical bunch the way we're trained, right?
[00:14:07] Kathleen: I can imagine some really high powered, um, high achieving lawyers listening to this and thinking, but that is what makes me successful. It is that attention to detail. It's that constant scanning the, the, they might even say, but if I start trying to how to put it, if they, if, if I start trying to step back from that way of being, I'm gonna lose my edge.
[00:14:41] Kathleen: I reckon that would be the fear for some.
[00:14:44] Carla: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:44] Kathleen: And it comes to me, when I think about the way that we're trained, very much linked to this idea of perfectionism, right? Because there's all sorts of cognitive distortions that come up with that way. And what I mean by that is ways of thinking that are really not helpful.
[00:15:05] Kathleen: Some of them will be catastrophic thinking, you know, if I miss something, it's going to be a disaster. If I'm wrong, I'm not gonna be credible. I'll lose my credibility if I disappoint the partner, boss, whoever the client, someone senior, it's gonna come back and bite me. But all of those things, and this need to like, if I'm not perfect, I'm no good.
[00:15:32] Kathleen: That kind of all or nothing thinking as well. Right. So the interesting thing there though is when you actually step back and you hear those patterns. What comes up for me is that that's not just about wanting to meet your obligations to your client. It's not just about being a good performer or even an excellent performer.
[00:15:56] Kathleen: It's actually just pure out of fear, being scared now.
[00:16:04] Kathleen: The degree to which that is gonna be reinforced by the broader system is going to depend on lawyer to lawyer. Some legal environments will be incredibly healthy, where learning is encouraged . Others are going to be much more, cutthroat, for example. And so in those cases, the cost of a mistake might be really significant because the mistakes aren't treated as learning.
[00:16:32] Kathleen: They're treated as a matter of identity and your, you know, your your ultimate worth. This is where the loop becomes an issue, right? Because that hyper vigilance can often drive and perpetuate that perfectionism. And the perfectionism fuels the hyper vigilance.
[00:16:53] Carla: Yeah. And that distinction is really important, right?
[00:16:56] Carla: Because we are not saying lower your standards or start caring less. Um, perfectionism, like it's, you have higher standards and you strive and which can be adaptive as well. But perfectionism becomes a concern when you fear mistakes, when there's harsh self-judgment, when the sense of that others are demanding perfection of you, and they're all a bit unrealistic.
[00:17:27] Carla: In a sense we get caught up in them. We are not noticing. So the self-compassion aspect here is super important because we're in that cycle and we are not aware of it. But, but what we are inviting you to to pay more attention is to start noticing when there is the fear or I'm acting here, like the from out of fear when there is that self-criticism.
[00:17:52] Carla: This is where the cost can really start accumulating and perpetuate like you were saying before. So if you started building the capacity, you recognize when the perfectionism is becoming a protective strategy.
[00:18:13] Carla: Then the invitation here is like, and moving from I am my performance, or I can hold my performance with perspective.
[00:18:25] Carla: I can understand like this is being asked of me or here I'm thinking this is being asked of me and how do we start an experiment and it's a practice. Like the ability to notice as a practice that we build, like as we started working.
[00:18:41] Carla: So it's like going to the gym. You sort of go to the gym often enough to build that muscle, which is the same stuff here, like we started noticing and when is it serving and when it's not serving.
[00:18:54] Kathleen: Hmm. I think that point is really crucial. Because what I could see happening is, say a lawyer decides, right, this is an issue for me, that my levels of perfectionism and the hypervigilance, I'm in this constant state of hypervigilance, they might find they wanna address it.
[00:19:12] Kathleen: I could see them being very perfectionist about trying to address it and then perpetuating this cycle, being hypervigilant about trying not to be hypervigilant.
[00:19:21] Carla: Mm.
[00:19:22] Kathleen: Which gets us nowhere. Right? So I like what you said about treating this as a practice, and I just wanna emphasize like, we'll probably sound eventually a bit like a broken record for this, but I think it's always important to kind of remind people that whatever we are talking about on the podcast and everything that we do in the Thriving Lawyer is ultimately about adopting practices.
[00:19:51] Kathleen: And recognizing our human imperfection, just our humanness, that this is never going to be about a 100% cure or success. You know, it's not about perfection that. Of course we're gonna make mistakes. We're not gonna notice these things. We're gonna fall back into old patterns. But ultimately what we're trying to do is just notice a bit more and do the practices.
[00:20:16] Kathleen: Like, I really like what you said about going to the gym and building the muscle. 'cause it's a really apt metaphor, right? That it's about putting in the. Effort. And trying whilst never arriving at an end point. And it always just being ultimately a practice. But that does have benefits because you strengthen those muscles over time.
[00:20:40] Kathleen: So, okay, let, like thinking about that and like, well, how do we put this into practice a bit more? I think, if we just take the nature of our work, whether it's you're drafting a contract clause or that a client sent, or a client might have sent through draft agreement or another lawyer's checking a clause with you, or one of, you know, you've got a draft advice there, and you know, it's fine.
[00:21:10] Kathleen: You're being asked to confirm whether it can, can go out. You've done your due diligence. Like you've reviewed it, your judgment is yes. But you find yourself getting stuck on that send button. I know. It's certainly happened to me. I know I've written a good advice. I know it's like deep down, but I still can't, can't bring myself to send it.
[00:21:33] Kathleen: I be, I can think of occasions that get caught up in, you know, that proofreading the, the excessive number of times. So your brain goes,
[00:21:43] Kathleen: oh,
[00:21:43] Kathleen: what if it's not okay? What have I missed? What if this comes back later?
[00:21:48] Kathleen: You know, of course we, we wanna be proofing and we wanna be checking, but this is, you know, going beyond that where we're kind of reopening the document.
[00:21:55] Kathleen: We're checking it again. We're checking something else. We end up in some kind of rabbit hole, and we tell ourselves that you are just being responsible. You're fulfilling your duty.
[00:22:07] Kathleen: But you are, you've gone way beyond that point, right? And you're really stuck in that threat mode. Carla, what would you say?
[00:22:15] Kathleen: Where, where do we go when we find ourselves kind of getting down that rabbit hole? Because it's so easy, even when you know this stuff.
[00:22:22] Kathleen: Like I, since I've been in this coaching world, studying all things, learning about the science of human motivation and behavioral science, coaching, psychology. And I can still find myself trapped in this sometimes.
[00:22:37] Carla: Yeah. Like can we slow down that cycle for a moment? Right. Because when, when we build the ability to slow down and notice, we started being able to see those patterns, they become more visible. And when they're visible, we can then work on it. There is often a trigger.
[00:23:01] Carla: Like a late email or, or a vague request or some sort of uncertainty.
[00:23:07] Carla: There's something that is calling us, and then there is a meaning making moment. If I miss something, I will be exposed or I will lose credibility or they're not going to respect me.
[00:23:22] Carla: And then there is also a body response. There's a physical response to it as well. It might be your chest is tightening or you know, for some people, like they feel in their throat or they're bracing.
[00:23:37] Carla: Once you started noticing. What, what is the voice in my head saying, what, what is happening physically as well? And then from there, there is a behavior that, that makes completely sense. Like when, when you're in that cycle, it's maybe it's like checking the email again, or you scan or you keep working.
[00:23:56] Carla: And there is usually a short term payoff. Like as you're proofreading the email three times, there's a sense of relief, right? There's control. I'm controlling this situation.
[00:24:07] Carla: Uh, but in the long term, there is a cost as well that your system never really stands down. It never turns off. So you're constantly in that kind of low grade vigilance and your brain is always, is coming for the next risk, for the next mistake, for the next thing that might be going wrong.
[00:24:30] Carla: And that can be very useful in the legal word like we mentioned. That's the part of what makes sense makes, you know, someone, a good lawyer, like the ability to do that. But it's when it starts spilling into the other areas of your life, like it's, when it starts like hindering your ability to disconnect and recover.
[00:24:54] Carla: You know, when you can't disconnect, at the end of the day, you'll see your mind is always running. On the background, like you replaying conversations, you are thinking about what you have missed, what we, you know, the lawyer loop that we discussed on the previous episode. So over time this can create a very strong feedback, feedback loop.
[00:25:19] Carla: What we are trying to really talk about here, it's not simply a bad habit or a personality flow. Not at all. It's more like a protective PanIN that we have. It has been reinforced over many years and through training and through sometimes the system, the culture of, of the workplace sometimes reinforce the data for us as well.
[00:25:41] Carla: And the very, um, the real pressures, the, the profession brings. But once you see it in that way, the question becomes less about stopping perfectionism and much more about learning how to notice and to gently interrupt the loop when that is not working for you and give your system the permission to disconnect.
[00:26:05] Carla: It's when it's useful and when it's not useful. You know, like. And we can't always sort of control what is going to be triggering us or you know, like if someone is going to be asking us of something or if a male comes in, but we can learn how to work, how we are making meaning of those triggers. And what and a good place to start is even noticing some of the body responses that we have and what is some of the behaviors that is attached to some of those triggers.
[00:26:39] Carla: So this practice I and about like, uh, suppressing the reaction, it's more about widening the space to notice the cycle, to notice what is a default response, the reactivity that we create and create a bit more space to choose differently. You know, like, and, and there are some practices that we can offer, like, to start noticing that for yourself.
[00:27:10] Carla: You know, one, the first practice is, you know, naming this state. Once you notice that you've been feeling overwhelmed or you feel triggered, or I am now scanning for threat. This is not a judgment, just an orientation. Sometimes I say, we can maybe say, okay, it's my system trying to protect me. That alone, a lot of the times can just reduce the grip that it has on you.
[00:27:37] Carla: So you started being able to see, or I am feeling overwhelmed, or it's maybe because I'm assuming this person is demanding something of me. Sometimes we can check. Another practice is creating a 92nd reset before you take the action. If you notice that you were there in that loop rather than, and you know that the default is to proofread another three times, you can just go, like, put your feet on the ground sometimes one slow, deep breath, and then ask yourself what is actually needed of me here?
[00:28:25] Carla: And this doesn't remove the risk, but restores your ability to think clearly and choose how you want to respond. And it might be that you have to read again, but at least you're doing that consciously. You're choosing. It's not an autopilot.
[00:28:42] Kathleen: It's ultimately like what coaching approaches are all about, which is interrupting that cycle between reaction and response.
[00:28:50] Kathleen: The, you know, the, the trigger and the response, right. That there's thoughtfulness and deliberateness between them.
[00:28:59] Carla: Yeah. What else Kathleen would you suggest here to other practice to interrupt a cycle?
[00:29:08] Kathleen: You've just beautifully provided a couple that are very good sort of general approaches that can work.
[00:29:13] Kathleen: I, I think what maybe I can add here is thinking about in the moment, what does acting in the best interest of our client and meeting our professional obligations actually look like?
[00:29:28] Kathleen: And you know, when hypervigilance wants absolute certainty. And often in law we are dealing with assessment of risk identification, assessment of risk, giving our clients options in accordance with the law.
[00:29:51] Kathleen: And so I think sometimes we've actually, particularly with the pressure and the workload. Really gotta think carefully about what is enough in the circumstances to meet the needs of our client. You know that client service always because of the special nature of our duties to the court, have to be paramount, but we need to be thinking about what that means without falling into this cycle of perfectionism, right?
[00:30:28] Kathleen: And of going like way, way, way beyond when actually for the client and what they needed doesn't make one iota of difference.
[00:30:40] Kathleen: I mean, I know that can be really hard. I'm not professing perfection in that at all. Ultimately, it's a matter of judgment.
[00:30:47] Kathleen: We can only do the best in the moment that we can. I think too, some of it might be around taking the moment to think about what you can do. Like if a client is demanding something that is highly unrealistic, making clear about what it is possible for you to deliver in the time. And doing that. I mean, I know that that's one of the lessons I got from being a, from when I was a really junior lawyer about the art of the urgent advice, right?
[00:31:21] Kathleen: The urgent matter, caveating properly, agreeing with the client what you can provide in the time available and what would need to be. Given, you know, what advice, further advice would be needed if they want something more comprehensive, for example, in that time available. Coming up with the agreements with your client or your more, your other colleagues about what's required in the moment.
[00:31:46] Kathleen: And that comes back to agreements, right? Versus just unspoken expectations about what you're gonna do, which is where the trouble often arises. Um. So if you haven't, you know, that reminds me of our episode that we did some time ago last year about expectations and agreements. I think it was our last, one of our last ones last year.
[00:32:08] Kathleen: So if you haven't listened to that, we'll I do encourage you to go back to that. And we'll put the links, um, there just to remind you.
[00:32:17] Kathleen: Okay, so
[00:32:18] Kathleen: where to from here?
[00:32:22] Carla: I would like to invite our listeners to try a seven day experiment. You know, just once a day when you notice that spike, that urge to check, to fix, to reopen, or to overthink, just name it. I am in threat scanning. Just one deep breath and then ask yourself what is enough here?
[00:32:49] Carla: And choose the next action from that place. And also start noticing what shifts when you are able to do that. Especially around notice about your ability to disconnect from work. How do you switch off and notice when you started working again? How is your concentration?
[00:33:14] Kathleen: Yeah, it's ultimately, I think I really like that because it's something small.
[00:33:21] Kathleen: It's ultimately about noticing. It links to our next episode that we're gonna talk about shortly. But before I go into that, I just wanna say one final thing, which is what I also like about that is that it's just about. Trying to notice, you're not gonna notice all the time, right? Because you're human again and again, you know, to stress this.
[00:33:42] Kathleen: We don't wanna be perfectionistic about trying to beat this hyper vigilance because that's just gonna get us into another similar loop that we're gonna get stuck in. But I think it's also important to know that if, if you are trying these things and you're still having issues that. It's some it does go beyond you.
[00:34:04] Kathleen: You know, we all exist in systems, in complex environments, and the dynamics that exist in them are gonna vary infinitely depending on the cultural context of our particular workplace and broader culture. There'll be differences between, you know, we've got listeners in the US across the English speaking legal world, and even a few.
[00:34:29] Kathleen: In Europe as well as our main Australian audience and what, you know, I think that there'd be differences even between cultures across the board, let alone in particular workplaces. And you as an individual might not be able to change the whole system, right? Because you can only influence and tap into your part of the system.
[00:34:50] Kathleen: But what we're saying is these little tools can be helpful, okay? They could still make some difference. Now with all that in mind, I really encourage you to go ahead and notice and. Perhaps anticipate our next episode too, which is gonna be all about mindfulness. And this is gonna be, you know, much more kind of oriented towards attention control when we're under pressure.
[00:35:17] Kathleen: And so we will then give you some more micro practices that can potentially support this shift.
[00:35:25] Kathleen: So Carla, before I sign off, any final comments to add?
[00:35:30] Carla: When you started noticing, I think what, like, I loved that you say like, don't bring the perfectionism into this hyper vigilance loop. But what it does start changing is that we become better at noticing, and then with that we become better at choosing our response.
[00:35:51] Kathleen: Yeah.
[00:35:52] Carla: So it's very much about a practice. And then like anything we get good at, what we put attention towards, what we practice. So in the beginning, we might not be very good at it, but that's all right. Like we are starting from, you know, from that place. But bringing the reflection with it, it's so important as well.
[00:36:17] Kathleen: Well, thank you Carla. Thanks for listening everybody, and we'll see you next time.
[00:36:22] 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. And if you liked what you heard, please drop a review in apple podcasts.
[00:36:45] Kathleen: It really helps spread the word.
[00:36:48] Kathleen: 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.
[00:37:08] Kathleen: 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.
[00:37:17] Kathleen: 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
[00:37:25] Kathleen: can
[00:37:25] Kathleen: thrive as a lawyer. And in the rest of your life.
