It took me a while to understand the connection between wellbeing and success.
What helped it click for me was realizing that it’s an energy transfer. People are paying me for my energy. I only have a finite amount of energy in any given day. Once I wrapped my head around that, I was almost pissed I hadn’t understood it sooner.
I now attack my energy from all angles. The biggest thing for me is sleep. If I don't get my eight hours, I am cranky, I'm irritable. I have a headache. I don't function well when I don’t get enough sleep.
I examine all my habits, like my love for watching Netflix late at night. I need to exercise, I need to sleep, I need to eat well. The energy transfer thing - it's not just about me.
I always viewed self-care as selfish. I had a “I'll sleep when I die” mentality. I grew up with Midwestern parents who were in the military. “Just keep pushing, and you'll be rewarded in heaven.” Killing yourself physically with a Puritan work ethic. The wellness stuff was not for me. I push, push, push, and that's how I roll.
Then I hit a breaking point when I had my daughter. I was sleep deprived. I was commuting a lot. I was reaching a point where I felt like I was scaling a mountain every day to get into work. I now realize that was depression. I was always the type of person who would suppress negative things. I'm fine. Put the smile on, it's great. Then I had a panic attack, and that started my journey into the mental health arena. I had a panic attack while I was watching my daughter. She was still in diapers. Before bed she would run around and I'd have to literally pin her down to put her diaper on. It made me so mad, and I didn't want to be an angry mom. I want to be a calm person.
I started seeing a therapist for the first time who told me not to worry, I wasn’t dying. I was just literally holding my breath, and that's why I got dizzy and fell down. My therapist pushed me to see a psychiatrist, which I was hesitant to do.
After my first foray on my own, my friend guided me to find a psychiatrist out of network, with a recommendation from my therapist. It's expensive, which is the hard part about the mental health care system. Good mental health care is really only available to those who can afford it. That's the sad part.
I started taking antidepressants. Before that, I was probably angry 95% of my day. Irritability is a symptom of depression. I didn't know that. I just thought I was cranky all the time. I had a really short fuse.
You're short with people because you don't have emotional bandwidth. It makes total sense when you say it, but I did not know. You're like a snappy crocodile. That's not how we're supposed to be.
After I went on SSRIs, on Zoloft, my anger went from 95% to 5%. I had always been mad at people. I was mad at my husband and my colleagues. My colleagues asked me “What happened? You're happy now? You're so approachable now. What did you do? What's your secret?”
My answer: “Oh, I got on drugs.”
I posted on LinkedIn about how irritability is a symptom of depression. I wanted to share that with my network because I don't think many people know that.
One of my really close attorney friends called me maybe six months after seeing that post. She was a new mom and thanked me. She got on antidepressants after seeing my post, and now feels amazing.
A lot of people have opinions about Big Pharma and getting on medications. Different approaches work for different people. There is no one size fits all.
For me, it's been absolutely wonderful. But it's not like you just take this magic pill and everything's happy. You have to put in the work. And I still have a lot of perfectionistic anxiety, to the point where I can't go on vacation. It stresses me out too much because I'm worried that things will go wrong. I'm working with my therapist so that I can take a vacation and not feel like the whole world is going to come crashing down.
You see the outside of me, you see I’ve got a great law firm, coaching practice, mom. But none of it's perfect.
It's not hard to form your own law practice. I coach because I want to share with people how easy it is to start a law firm. I did not know that was the case. And that opened up a whole new world of possibilities where I could design my life and focus on the things that give me fulfillment and energy, and take away the things that drain me. The stereotypical attorney works long hours, does not devote time to their family. They sacrifice family for those long hours in the office, they are constantly at the client's beck and call, they are litigators in the courtroom, fighting the tough battles. That's the stereotypical attorney picture.
That is not what modern law is turning into at all.
The legal profession can really suck you dry if you let it, and it's up to you to put those boundaries up, and to curate and craft your career in a way that energizes you. The huge, huge problem with the legal industry is it sucks all that emotional energy out of you just by default. It's up to the individual lawyer to take their power back. By default, you get funneled to a big farm, where you're not going to have a life, but you will pay off your student loans. You get funneled towards places where you just don't have a lot of leverage and power. And stepping out on your own, I want people to know that there's another way to do it. Now that I'm on the other side, wow! More people need to know about this.
It's not a good fit for everybody. For those who want to build their own firm, I help them learn how to get clients. What works on LinkedIn, or really any social media platform, is not selling. We don't need to sell to people. We just need to tell what we know about the law, and about us.
Clients are buying our brains. You have to make daily practices to take care of your brain. Sleep is definitely my priority right now. And I do therapy. I connect with other people. I really like doing my Law Practice Queen group, I have a LinkedIn group for Law Practice Queen, it's over 500 members, where we do monthly zooms. I like to connect people, and I like that sense of belonging. I think it's very important to our mental health to help each other. You actually get a brain high from helping other people. That will lead you to fulfillment.
For a while I had an existentialist “why am I here? What's the point of it all?” kind of feeling. Now I've come full circle. I'm here to help the legal industry. I'm here to help ME five years ago. And me five years ago was doing a lot of things in my career that were a waste of time. Time is our non-renewable resource. It's all we have. So that's what I try to do with my coaching practices, save people time.
In terms of wellness routines, I pay attention to sleep, water intake, and diet. I try to add rather than subtract things. For example, I love getting massages. It's a big stress reliever for me. So I have a massage chair that I bought at the beginning of COVID. Me five years ago never would have bought that for myself. The internal judge would have been like, who are you to buy that? I think a big part of succeeding in your career is not caring what other people think, not doing it for external validation. Do it for your own internal validation. The more you're chasing external validation, the more you are setting yourself up for utter disappointment.
We need to trust ourselves about the directions that our lives are taking. I have found fulfilment through seeking internal feedback as opposed to external.
So many people always want to make partner. Partner, partner, partner. It's big firm summer job to partner, and none of the steps in between get talked about except for billable hours. People are asking me all the time, how did you make partner? It's not like when you make partner you're suddenly like, “I am on top of the world now!” You have more responsibilities. It's just a title at the end of the day.
For people who are fixated on becoming partner, I think that can be really toxic. There are other things that you can achieve. Now, in my own firm, I love being able to make decisions for just me. This is what feels right, therefore I'm going to do it and just execute on it.
I didn't realize how worried I was about getting fired, with no factual basis to support that anxiety, until I was my own boss. I could feel my whole body relax. No one else has control over me anymore.
I think we can help people who are in the legal profession by empowering them. I empower my employees. When I make a big decision, they're in on it. I don't want to rule something out if it's not going to help them. If I'm putting my employees first, then my clients will be best served.
The traditional law firm hierarchy is: bottom line comes first; then come the client relationships; and then the employees are these fungible things that can be changed out. I think that’s backwards. Employees need to come first, then clients, then the bottom line. If you put employees and clients first, the bottom line will take care of itself.
Being your authentic self is huge. Being an underrepresented member of the legal industry, whatever that means to you, what it meant to me was being a female lawyer. I tried to be like the male partners that were at my firm. I cut my hair shorter. I started wearing pants suits. I wasn't feminine. My husband called me out on it.
It's this concept that being feminine in the corporate world is a distraction. When I started doing my inner work, I realized that if I’m not being my authentic self when I'm posting on social media or putting myself out there, then I'm not going to attract the clients that need me. I need to just be my authentic self. There's a lot of freedom in that decision. It is scary, right? The number one thing that my clients have me coach them through is how to put themselves on social media. There are a lot of fears that people are going to say mean things. “I'm afraid to get on video, because, what if I look bad?”
It's not about you. It's about the person you're serving. You are a vessel for information and for your talents. Think about the person you want to serve. If you don't do that, what will happen to them without you?
We have this feeling that somebody else is already doing it and saying it. Not true. They may be talking about the same topic, but only you can speak to a certain person who needs your help. You have a duty to put your ego aside, to put your insecurities aside. Or don’t put them aside, and do it anyways.
As women, we want to please, we want to conform. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable stepping into our own power. Once you can be authentically you, it is super powerful. You will make more money.
As lawyers, we have a heightened duty because there's unequal access to justice. Law is Power. This information we’ve learned, this skill we’ve learned, it is power. We have to help our community understand. If you don't have a good positive working environment, you can't function. These things are instrumental to our well-being. Being you and being authentic, that's huge. Without that, you're wasting your time. We don’t need the fake version of ourselves out there.
One of my favorite mantras that I use with clients is Make it Easy. It's really hard pretending to be something you're not. If you're afraid that if you post something, then a firm won't want to hire you. There's a lot like wrapped up in that thought that applies to a lot of things. You train people how to treat you. It comes back to self-love. It's important for you to share that stuff with the broader world, because then people can get exposed to it, “Oh, she's doing it, so I can do it too.” It's important for us to know how each other's lives are, that's how we learn about each other. We learn to respect each other.
Going back to the self love concept. This is a weird year, with COVID and everything. There's been a lot of fear. I think through it all, we've realized how little we actually need to thrive. We don't need all the extras, we don't need a huge broad network. The more we can love ourselves, the more we can give to others and serve others. If you're not taking care of yourself, you're passing your negative energy around to everybody else.
COVID has helped us realize that it's okay to have more work-life balance. In fact, you can get more done in less time if you focus on getting into a flow state and not just whether you're at the office all the time. It's not efficient, it leads to burnout.
Katie Lipp is a law firm owner focusing on employment separation counseling for companies and employees in DC, Maryland and Virginia. Katie also leads Law Practice Queen, where she advocates for female attorneys + law students to level up in their legal careers. To connect further with Katie or Law Practice Queen, please check out the resources below.
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