In this special Well-Being in Law Week episode of Legally Bond, Kim speaks with Ashleigh Frankel, Co-Founder of The WiseMind Co. and practicing attorney, and Amy Johnston, Clinical Director at Urban Wellness, a mental health organization in Chicago. Ashleigh and Amy discuss the importance of mental well-being in the legal profession and explain that integrating rest ethic is vital to the sustainability of the work ethic required for today's hustle culture.
Learn more about The All Rise Initiative, founded by Ashleigh and Amy, here.
Episode resources:
In this special Well-Being in Law Week episode of Legally Bond, Kim speaks with Ashleigh Frankel, Co-Founder of The WiseMind Co. and practicing attorney, and Amy Johnston, Clinical Director at Urban Wellness, a mental health organization in Chicago. Ashleigh and Amy discuss the importance of mental well-being in the legal profession and explain that integrating rest ethic is vital to the sustainability of the work ethic required for today's hustle culture.
Learn more about The All Rise Initiative, founded by Ashleigh and Amy, here.
Episode resources:
Hello and welcome to Legally Bond, a podcast presented by the law firm Bond, chenek and King. I'm your host, kim Wolf-Price. One of my roles at Bond is to serve as the chair of the firm's Wellbeing Committee. I also serve as the chair of the New York State Bar Association's Attorney Wellbeing Committee. Wellbeing is an issue of critical importance and on this podcast we highlight the legal profession. Historically, wellbeing was not addressed or even acknowledged in the law but luckily, thanks to many attorneys and wonderful wellbeing advocates such as today's guests, that is changing. So on today's episode we'll be discussing wellbeing with the founders of the All Rise Initiative.
Speaker 1:This is important timing because this is Wellbeing in Law Week, which this year is May 6 through 10. And, of course, the founders of the All Rise Initiative. This is important timing because this is Wellbeing in Law Week, which this year is May 6th through 10th. And of course, the month of May is Mental Health Awareness Month generally, because mental health is important in all aspects of our lives. So our guests we have Amy Johnston, a licensed clinical social worker. She is clinical director at Urban Wellness in Chicago. She works often on issues related to the workplace as well as individual counseling on trauma and grief, and Ashley Frankel, an applied mindfulness and wellbeing specialist speaker, as well as a former practicing attorney. She's the co-founder of the Wise Mind Company, a mindfulness-based consulting and development firm based in Ontario. In their work together, they formed the All Rise Initiative to provide well-being plus leadership support pathways focused on well-being in the law.
Speaker 1:So welcome to the podcast, ash, and welcome back, amy. I'm so thrilled to have you both here. Great to get a chance to talk to you both and learn from you, as always. All right, so I'm going to be transparent at the start. Amy and Ash have presented at Bond and are presenting again in June. They're excellent teachers and facilitators and I am a big fan of their work. I've also worked with them through the New York State Bar Association and they even asked me to present with them last year at the Legal Professional Development Consortium. So this is an episode that will be chock full of my bias, as they are fabulous advocates for wellbeing andbeing and that well-being in the law is something we need to address and cultivate. So, amy and Ash, is that a fair disclosure? To start?
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Very good, all right. So I sent an email that said we'd be on the podcast with no other context, and, ash, I think you replied within a few minutes with a yes, without me giving any details. Why is this topic so important to you?
Speaker 3:the yes, without me giving any details.
Speaker 3:Why is this topic so important to you?
Speaker 3:Well, to be honest, kim, I found every conversation we've had to date and opportunity to work together to be inspiring and perspective shifting, and so I probably would have been a quick yes to any topic that with you and Amy, but the topic of well-being in law is particularly important to me.
Speaker 3:I'm from Canada and in 2022, we had our first national survey on mental health in the legal profession, and one of the things that really struck me besides the sobering statistics around our suffering when it comes to mental health and well-being was this statement in the report that says unwellness is an integral and normalized part of legal culture. Wow, I have been determined, and continue to be, to be a part of the team of people who are shifting that and really looking to explore ways that we can even move beyond exploring mental illness in law, which we've been doing over the last number of years, and take a broader perspective and look at what does it look like to thrive in this profession, how can we make well-being an integral and normalized part of the practice and working in law, and so any opportunity to dig into that is a welcome one to me.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Thank you so much. And Amy, we decided the three of us that your last topic that you presented for Bond was going to be the rest ethic which we talked about, and that that would be the topic for today. Do you want to give listeners a quick reason as to why rest ethic is our topic for Wellbeing in Law Week on this podcast? Quick reason as to why rest ethic is our topic for well-being and law week on this podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think rest ethic is a great topic for a few reasons. One is it's actually something that's really accessible to everyone and at the same time, it's something that most people haven't thought about much or maybe ever, right? So it's something that's like new and interesting and innovative, but at the same time, it's really practical and concrete and building your rest ethic is something that we can achieve, right. So people have heard of the term work ethic. We all know what our work ethic is. We work to build a consistent work ethic. We're very proud of our work ethic, especially as attorneys.
Speaker 2:I feel like exhaustion can often be seen as a status symbol of how hard I'm working, or at least the norm, right. Like people used to say, how are you feeling? And you'd say fine. And now people say how are you? And you say exhausted, it's just, it's the norm now, right. So when we think about that work ethic mentality, Ash likes to talk about how work ethic and rest ethic can be like the inhale and the exhale right. So it's really accessible in that way, because we can only hold our breath for so long, right. You can only inhale for so long before you need to release that. So rest ethic is a great topic because it's something that people haven't necessarily thought about, but once you do, it's just like an avalanche of ideas and insights and information about how we can really take care of ourselves in a very practical way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, Since I started speaking with you both about it. It just makes complete sense and it makes our work ethic better if we take that exhale part.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, we have to balance it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, so rest. Ethic is our topic for today, but on the podcast I like to start by asking guests to give some background on themselves. I think listeners appreciate knowing a bit about who's speaking. So would you each mind giving us a bit of information on who you are? Amy, would you mind starting a little bit about yourself, a bit of?
Speaker 2:information on who you are, amy, would you mind starting a little bit about yourself? Yeah, absolutely. I am born and raised in Chicago. I am a licensed clinical social worker.
Speaker 2:I went to Northwestern and University of Chicago for my training so rival Chicago schools, but both here in the Midwest and I, shortly after finishing all my studies, moved to Dublin, ireland, for a while. So I lived there for five years and I worked in some really tough environments. First was child protection, so I actually worked really closely with the legal profession. When I was living in Ireland I was in court a lot of the time with different types of family court situations. Then I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital for a while and that's where kind of the link between legal and trauma really connected with mental health and mental illness and what that looked like.
Speaker 2:And then I moved back to Chicago wow, about 12 or 13 years ago now and I worked at Lurie Children's Hospital, which is our big children's hospital here in the city, in the intensive care unit and the emergency department. So doing a lot of work with doctors, nurses, families around compassion, fatigue, grief, secondary trauma all the challenges that come with working in high intensity environments which I now kind of put into my work in workplace well-being. I also have two kids and they take up all my time when I'm not working. They're eight and 10, a boy and a girl and, yeah, if I'm not working I'm Uber driving them all over the Chicagoland area.
Speaker 1:I know, I think last time maybe you taught us about the world of hurling, but now I hear it's musical theater and jujitsu on the agenda for this week.
Speaker 2:Kim, it never ends. So hurling and Gaelic football are the Irish sports they play. That starts up next week also, so we're getting back onto our Irish sports soon. But this week my daughter is the lead role in Matilda the Musical and this weekend my eight-year-old is competing in a jujitsu tournament in Atlanta against international competitors.
Speaker 1:Amazing, you're going to have to get that rest ethic going after this.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I always say social workers are the kings and queens of do as I say, not as I do, because I really do need to build some rest in after this week.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely Well. Thank you so much for introducing yourself, and now, ash, it's your turn. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, school, family, whatever you'd like to share?
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Yeah, so I'm from north of the border, actually not far from Buffalo, new York. I grew up in Hamilton. I actually used to learn ski in Ellicottville in my childhood and then I went to the east coast of Canada for my undergrad and spent some time in Halifax, nova Scotia, with the kindest humans ever if anyone has ever been over there Just the sweetest people and then came back to the big city of Toronto for law school at the University of Toronto. I actually left Toronto. I was there for quite a while after law school and left, fortunately eight months before the pandemic.
Speaker 3:I had this very random sort of intuitive hit that it was time to take my family on an adventure and we moved for a rural lifestyle three hours out of the city. And the pandemic hit eight months later. And I understood what that intuitive hit was all about the mom of, and probably more accurately, the student of, three not-so-little littles that also keep me wildly busy and actually have really inspired the focus on rest ethic, unrest ethic, my own journey. But also I have one daughter who has my perfectionist tendencies and was noticing that all the praise around her hard work was actually maybe not the wisest thing. So we started exploring, instead of working hard, what working well looks like, and so she helped me keep this topic central. You know, in our family that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:They really push us, they challenge us, but they do teach us so much as well. You mentioned skiing, but this ski season wasn't very good. Here in New York, there wasn't a lot of snow. How about on your side of the border? What ski season.
Speaker 4:Exactly.
Speaker 1:I know it's so strange if we're in Ontario and New York and saying no, not much of a ski season.
Speaker 3:Mother Nature was really temperamental and unpredictable this winter, and we didn't see a lot of the white stuff.
Speaker 1:Yep, Same thing here. Well, I want to say thank you both, because sometimes especially, as you know, with anything law related we sort of skip the human component. So I think it's important that we start the podcast this way. So thank you both very much for sharing. All right, Ash, I'll start by asking do you want to expand a bit on Amy's introductory comments on rest ethic?
Speaker 3:What I'd like to say about rest ethic, just to get us started, is that one of the things so I really love spending time exploring the core skills, so those skills that actually live at the intersection of well-being and leadership and performance, and one of those core skills is rest ethic. So I love that. It facilitates our well-being but at the same time also facilitates exceptional leadership and performance, so it's enhancing in all those capacities of our lives. So I think that's one of the things that I like to start out by sort of centering rest ethic beyond well-being into those other spheres as well. And and I also think it's important to acknowledge that, while rest ethic is very accessible, it can also be really hard, particularly because we exist in this hustle culture.
Speaker 3:So in North America and perhaps beyond but I'll just speak for North America we're in a system and a culture where that overvalues productivity and sort of what adds to that challenge is that we not only overvalue productivity but we misunderstand the best ways to be productive, and I think for many of us, our worth has been very tied to how hard we work and being always on, and it has had really significant implications for us as human beings, and so it's an important area to focus, but it's important to also acknowledge that it's really challenging, and particularly for some demographics more than others, those who have been marginalized more than others, those who have been marginalized, rest has not been accessible and has not felt safe, and for really legitimate reasons. So I think that we want to hold that in our minds and our hearts as we dig into the topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, excellent points. Thank you so much. And Amy, you know, as Ash was saying, it's the hustle culture. So we live in a world where we were always on, so are we always tired?
Speaker 2:Short answer yes, mostly so. I mean, when Ash and I give this workshop, we always ask our audience like how many different ways can you be contacted at any given time? Right, and when people are throwing out, but it's like text, google chats, slack channels, email, phone call, cell phone, home phone if you may have one still, your desk phone. You're getting mail like paper mail. It's endless, right, the opportunities for people to find you and connect with you are endless.
Speaker 2:My 10-year-old the other day was, like mom, back in the old days, before you had cell phones, how did people get in touch with you if you weren't home? And I said they didn't, and her mind was blown right. The idea that, like, you might leave the house and nobody could contact you until you came home again, like, was an unbelievable reality to her. And I think for us, like it wasn't that long ago that most of us here in this space I'm not sure if our producer is old enough to remember those days we did live in a time where we weren't contactable 24 seven, but it's become the norm so quickly, right? So I think from a workplace point of view, we're always on, and that's been exacerbated by COVID and there's been so many kind of double-edged swords that have come with the pandemic, but one of them is this idea of flexible working arrangements work from home, work from anywhere.
Speaker 2:On one hand, it's made my life so much more manageable and that I can get my kids where they need to be, I can get to my doctor's appointments, I can run errands or, you know, help my mom with something or whatever it is that needs to be done during the day.
Speaker 2:I can fit it into my day. And at the same time it means I'm often working at 5 am or at 10 pm because I'm flexing my time right, and that can be so beneficial in trying to make everything fit into our day. It also means there's a real blur between when do we work and when do we rest, and not that same level of being able to shut off your computer, turn off your screens and your devices, put it away and focus on you. So yes, I think there's always non-culture you know there's pros and cons of it, but but it's nonstop. And then it's also our personal lives. It's not just a workplace issue. Our friends and our family and our kids, like everyone, expects access to you all the time. And when I do try to maybe like turn my phone off, put it in a drawer, turn my notifications off for a while. You know my sister will be blowing up my phone, being like where are you?
Speaker 4:Why are you ignoring me? What's going on? I?
Speaker 2:asked you a question, so it's become a norm and I think it's going to take us some time to turn the cruise ship and get back to a place where maybe being always on isn't the way that we practice all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are excellent points and I think that a key is noticing and trying to find tools that work. Yes, and I don't want to go back to the days where I have to be at my desk from 9am to 5.30pm. That doesn't work for me either, but just noticing is that important point? Noticing when you're on and how do you protect time to be off?
Speaker 1:Yeah, important, all right, so I posed a few questions to the two of you as we were preparing, so I think that the first question is will you describe the relationship between rest and resilience? I don't know who wants to take that one and resilience.
Speaker 3:I don't know who wants to take that one. I can kick us off and then you'll chime in because you may have things to add. I would just say essential. But to elaborate on that I like to just turn to, to start, this article from a number of years ago by Sean Acor. He's a happiness researcher. He was working out of Harvard for a while and he co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review and the title, I think, speaks really poignantly to the relationship and he says resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure.
Speaker 3:Oh, yes, it's so important because I think that we often misunderstand resilience. At least when I started practicing law, if you had asked me if I was resilient, I would have given you a resounding yes. I would have referenced all the all-nighters I pulled the grit that I had and he speaks to this in his article that we often take this grit approach to resilience, article that we often take this grit approach to resilience. I would have looked at the 19 other students that I was articling with that year that we have in Canada before we're called to the bar and said every one of us was resilient and we all got hired back and I would proudly say I even have a couple of friends left at the end of all of this. I must be resilient.
Speaker 3:But what I was missing and didn't notice until 10 years into practicing law, when I experienced burnout and debilitating depression. It wasn't until that point and I looked back that I realized I was looking at resilience as kind of just white knuckling my way through stress and I had missed that there's actually a qualitative component to resilience. It's not just about getting through the adversity and the stress. It's about how we get through right. What's left of us, who are we as we get through the stress? And in other words, resilience is about growing through adversity, not just white knuckling our way and getting there at the end like barely recognizable to ourselves and with that in mind. Then we have the stress. But we have to add the rest to the equation to get resilience. Otherwise we get what I got potentially not everybody which is the burnout or sort of some more serious implications. And so in that way I would just say that the rest is an essential component of that resilience equation.
Speaker 2:Covered it so well.
Speaker 1:Well, amy, let me ask you like so and Ash had mentioned this, and so would you like there's leadership and performance pieces, so rest can actually help us achieve more than white knuckling through at times, can it?
Speaker 2:help us achieve more than white knuckling through at times, can it? Definitely, rest is not just sleep or giving your body some downtime so that it can get up and keep going again. We really like to think about rest from lots of different angles. And when you're well-rested, among other things, you're giving your brain the literal capacity to be creative, to be innovative, to come up with outside of the box solutions, to engage with others in collective problem solving, right. So rest is actually filling us up in a way that really sets the stage or builds the foundation for all of these other really important workplace and performance-based wins to happen. Right.
Speaker 2:But if we're depleted, if we're not rested, if we haven't given ourselves what we need in lots of different kind of boxes of rest that we'll probably talk about, we don't have the capacity to even engage with people in those creative and innovative ways. Right. If we're just white knuckling it, we're basically in that fight, flight, freeze mode of like, let's just get through this any way we can. We've got this protective armor up just trying to, like, make it through, and when you're in that state, you're not thriving, you're just surviving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's interesting to me because so often you know lawyers because that's who we're talking about but counselors and CPAs and doctors and others, they'll be really great about working out, physically working out, and taking their rest days, but not on the mental health and mental endurance side of things. But it's a similar approach in many ways, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is. I mean, for anyone listening, who is a long distance runner. First of all, please tell me your secret, because I would love to be someone like you. How do we love running? Please tell me your ways. But it's you know, whether you're a long distance runner or you're a weightlifter or you're any type of competitive athlete, you would never just say, okay, I'm going to run a marathon, so I'm going to get off the couch today and run 26.2 miles every day between now and the marathon to get myself ready and anyone who runs with laugh at you. If you said that, right, it would be ridiculous to think that that would be the best strategy.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're trying to to power lift, it would be ridiculous if you told someone that you were just going to start throwing up your maximum weight every day, all day, right Like there's a very kind of scientific process behind managing how much energy you're exerting, that you're fueling your body with the right nutrients, that you're getting enough rest, that you're heating or icing or whatever it is that you need to do to take care of yourself. But that doesn't tend to translate over into mental wellness in the same way that people already get it when it comes to physical wellness. So I think it's an easy bridge to cross once you see that connection right. It's so similar. If you're trying to build your capacity for resilience, to build your capacity for work ethic and hard work and good work, it makes perfect sense that you would need to not just practice the work but also practice the nourishment. And when we talk about rest ethic, we really think about all the different ways that you can nourish yourself through different restful practices.
Speaker 1:That's great, and Ash, so rest matters for resilience and performance and all of it, doesn't it Very much?
Speaker 3:And you matter. We matter as human beings and I think we're not human doings, though we forget that we're human beings and we matter and because of that, rest matters, because it's an essential component of our capacity to thrive as human beings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much on teaching, giving people takeaways, giving people real, grounded things, which you've already done in our conversation today. But I know you have some power, principles for renewal and I wanted to give you a few minutes if you'd like to share a couple of these or give us a general overview.
Speaker 3:I'll start with a general overview and then I'll hand it over to you to maybe kick us off with some of the power principles. I think what's important to sort of remember as we think about rest ethic from a high level perspective is that, as we've mentioned, rest is not just about sleep and it's not always passive. So rest, when we're talking about rest ethic, we're talking about active rest as well as the passive rest and as well as the sleep. It's really about prioritizing inactivity and activity that restores and renews us, so that this idea is that we can design rest for greater impact. And that is part of what really inspires us and inspired these power principles, because they ultimately are designed. They're there really as guideposts, because what restores and renews each of us is going to be different, but the power principles you can think of as guideposts that help us design rest for ourselves that is restorative, and so I'll let Amy share a couple of her favorites of the power principles with you.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's always so hard to choose a favorite because they're all so important. I think what's essential when you're considering the power principles is that you kind of have to do a little bit of groundwork yourself to figure out which of these resonate most for you, right? So I'll run you through them and then you know. I really encourage folks to think through, like is that something that's impacting me? Is that something I need to pay more attention to? And not all of us need to give all of our energy to every principle. It's like a buffet of options and you choose the one that you that you're most deficient in or the one that you really enjoy the most, right?
Speaker 2:So we talk about permission, really reframing your relationship to rest, right? Do we actually need to sit back and say it is okay for me to do this? Because for a lot of people, rest is considered a reward. We're allowed to rest only when everything else on our to-do list has been accomplished. When we've achieved our goals, when we've done everything, then we get to rest. But how many of us are ever actually finished with our to-do list? How many of us have ever accomplished all the goals, crossed everything? Never. There is no time that I can remember, at least in my adult life, where I've ever sat back and went well, it's all done, like well, done me. That doesn't happen. So the idea that we can give ourselves permission to rest and that we can make it part of our routine, right, that it's not something that we only do when everything else is finished, but it's something that we do in order to resource us so that we can continue to do the good work and to cross the things off the list. Another principle is pace, so really paying attention to our rhythms, and there's some great research that you know the more frequently you go into a restorative state, the less time you need to spend there. So if you're taking small but meaningful opportunities to rest and restore, that really is going to kind of keep you going for longer and keep you going in a state of wellness. Right, if we go. You know I've had someone the other day tell me that they haven't taken a vacation in like four and a half years and they're excited to go on this like weekend trip away. Well, this is going to be a really great weekend trip and I promise you that you're not going to come back feeling like a hundred percent refreshed and ready to go because the rest deficit is so deep, right, so if you're going into a restorative space more frequently, you can kind of avoid that rest deficit.
Speaker 2:We talk about pleasure really finding the things that bring you joy, the things that like give you the belly laugh that puts you in that state of like flow, whether it's something creative, whether it's like hanging out with your kids and having a dance party in the kitchen, like what are the things that make you feel that true sense of joy in yourself, because that can be really restorative. And I think that's really great for busy parents or people that have a lot on their plate. I don't have a lot of downtime or people that have a lot on their plate. I don't have a lot of downtime, but I spend a lot of time with my kids and finding ways to bring joy and laughter and that silliness into, like what we're already doing in our busy day is a great way to weave rest into a car ride or into making dinner or whatever. It is right, like if we're being silly together even if we're also doing another thing, it can really fill me up.
Speaker 2:We talk about prioritizing. We have to schedule things in If you don't put it on a calendar, if you don't tell someone you're going to yoga every Monday for 10 weeks, people are going to check in on you about that. If you don't block it off so that people know you're unavailable because you've got something going on at that time, it isn't going to happen. Realistically. There's so much happening. So prioritizing rest as not just a nice to do but a must do. And then our other ones that I've really my favorite one actually probably is purpose. We ask ourselves is this numbing or nourishing? Because sometimes you're zoned out scrolling Instagram for longer than I want to admit on a podcast, and it doesn't feel great afterwards, right? Or sometimes you're doing something that really does fill you up, like having a conversation with a friend you haven't seen in a long time, or working on an art project, or trying out a new recipe Right.
Speaker 2:So, just and there's no judgment in that it's not good or bad to do something that's numbing or nourishing, but noticing is important and maybe, like, zoning out for 20 minutes is what you need right now, because you're overwhelmed. Maybe zoning out for an hour and a half feels less good, right. So being aware of how you're using your time. And then, finally, we talk about presence and really just being where you are, like showing up for yourself and being aware of what you're doing, why you're doing it. Yeah, I love all of them. I can't pick just one, but I'm sure Ash, maybe Ash can like narrow us in on what's the most helpful and important.
Speaker 3:I think, as you said at the beginning it's, it's about also releasing, like I don't want people listening to feel like, oh my goodness, now I have to start focusing on all of these power principles and designing rest so perfectly, which can be a tendency we can actually hold really tightly to an effort, full of effort for these practices that are now designed to help support our wellbeing. And so I just want to say that we take what feels resonant and leave the rest, or what's alive and true for you right now Like what do you feel you most need, and focus there. And also just on the last presence one, because I do love that one so much I just want to say that I love this idea that we can really get more out of something we're already just doing just by changing who we're being. So the presence piece is about inviting in mindfulness, if you will into something we're already doing and that can help us really amplify the restorative nature of something. So we will say that just because we've stopped working doesn't mean we've well, we know that we've stopped worrying, necessarily, or that we are restoring.
Speaker 3:And so I'll give you an example, just a simple one. I could go out and take a walk and if I'm out taking a walk and I'm worrying about work, I'm not restoring as much as I could. Same walk, same amount of time invested, if I can draw on presence. So if I can engage my senses in the walk and take in my environment and center myself and be there, I can get so much more out of that walk in terms of my restoration and renewal.
Speaker 3:So I just love because it is hard to start thinking about adding more things to our to do list or carving out more time in our schedule for rest. So I like to just think about can we shift who we're being when we're doing what we're doing just a little bit and actually eke out so much more renewal and nutrients, if you will, for our well-being, out of that experience? You know, like single tasking, the number of times that I've been playing a matching game with one of my kids and also checking my email and thinking about a problem at work. If I can just create some boundaries and focus on playing the matching game for 10 minutes, that game can be restorative for me. So who you're being when you're doing what you're doing is something that's really worth getting curious about my work brain off, right.
Speaker 2:Like I'm trying to play with my kids or I'm trying to go for a walk and I can't get out of my head, and sometimes we need help, right. Sometimes you need something to kind of kickstart you into that more present space. So, like, if you're going on a walk and you know that you're going to ruminate about a work situation, what about, like, hopping in your AirPods and having a playlist of songs that you can just like jam out to on your walk, right and get immersed in the music? Or go for a walk with a friend so that you're going to actually be building relationship, having conversation, engaging with somebody, and it takes it's. There's a little bit less space then for work. Worry, right.
Speaker 2:If you're playing with your kids, like, pick something that really helps you to get into that flow space or engage. I like doing Legos with my kids. I don't really love doing pretend play, right. So if I'm struggling to really get present, pick an art project or do a baking activity together or you know something that you know you can get into a little bit more. Don't pick your least favorite thing to do and it kind of gives you a little bit of a boost into being present, especially if you know that you're gonna struggle and also you can give yourself permission for that. You can say I'm gonna give myself 10 minutes to not think about this. I can come back to it in 10 minutes, right? You can even visualize like put it in a box, put it on a shelf, leave it for 10 minutes. I promise you I'm going to come back to you, but for right now I'm going to be in this space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's important for each of us.
Speaker 2:How we restore is important.
Speaker 2:How we go about it it is, and it's so personal, right, what works for me is going to be really different from what works for you, and so you need to be mindful about what fills you up.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we're so depleted or we're in such a routine and a habit of that always on, go, go, go that we may not even know what helps us to restore. We might not even have a great awareness of what helps to fill us up. So it can be a little bit of a practice to try things out and see and start noticing when deficient, but like, how do I feel when I do these things that that may help me restore? And then we start to build kind of a roadmap for ourselves, right, and we'll know, like, if I need to feel more energized, these are the things that help bring up my energy, if I need to calm down, these are the things that help ground me, if I need to, like, feel connected and engaged. What is that? So it is kind of making this map but, like Ash said, I don't want it to feel like overwhelming of oh my gosh, I have to do all these things. It's very organic, like, let's just try things out, notice how they feel and keep track of what feels good.
Speaker 1:Well, that seems like a very good point to tie this back into the law.
Speaker 3:So, ash, as the trained attorney in your duo. Why is this particularly important or maybe a particular challenge in the legal profession? That's a good question, both of them. You know there are a number of things about the profession that make us particularly vulnerable to overwork. I think and I'd invite you to chime in as well If I'm speaking and you come up, you're right in there still. So you may have some others, but what are top of mind for me include the billing structures. So we are getting more creative, for sure, but the billable hour makes it very easy for us to feel like our worth is only as good as how many hours we're putting in. So there's that.
Speaker 3:Then there's this piece that I think we sometimes overlook, but it's so important and I want to acknowledge so many people that come into the legal profession come in with these big, huge hearts that deeply desire to make a positive impact and be change makers, and with that comes like deep compassion, so much care, and when that is our kind of North Star, it can also drive us towards overwork and a lack of building in rest.
Speaker 3:So that can be a real strength, and there's a shadow side to the strength, right, because it does lead to some vulnerability. I think that for many of us, whether it's learned through the legal training or whether we come with it, this orientation towards perfection is another vulnerability. And you know, just overall, this idea that we get so much of our worth tied to our work I think those things for me are really important to acknowledge. And those vulnerabilities, if you will, are why I think this topic is so is particularly the skill, not just the topic. Right Beyond the topic to the skill. This skill is so essential for us because I think for far too long we've accepted this idea that we have to succeed at the expense of ourselves in this profession, and it's not true. We get to change that narrative, that it is possible to succeed in support of ourselves and that this is an essential skill in order to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, yeah, I agree. I also think it's being the problem solver People bring you. Here's the problem and you want to fix it, and so you become that in all aspects of your life as well. And so, turning pieces off and learning this skill, if I can step away, if I can recharge, if I can rest, I don't always have to be in that mode. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the All Rise Initiative. Would you like to tell us a little bit about how it came about and how did the legal profession become a focus for both of you in your well-being in the workplace work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Ash and I, although we come from different origin stories, we sort of ended up in the exact same place at the exact same time. So a little over two years ago I was speaking at the I Will Conference, the first virtual Wellbeing in Law Conference, and Ash was there as well and we met there. But what brought me to that point was I'd been kind of working as a therapist, seeing clients one-on-one, early pandemic times and a lot of my individual clients actually were attorneys and other very high stress professions as well. But I had a lot of clients who were attorneys for some reason and so many people were coming into their therapy sessions at that point with incredible burnout, you know, massive distress. The levels of mental illness or just unwellness were like nothing I'd really ever seen before in my time as a social worker and started talking with my leadership team about how can we support the mental health and well being of people on a broader scale, right, Like not waiting until someone is ready to quit their job or, at this point of no return burnout, crying in my therapy office, and instead started thinking about like how do we bring this message out to the workplace and start building cultures and spaces where leaders understand well-being, that people feel they can talk about how they're doing, that there's some openness and less stigma.
Speaker 2:So I started doing some research around what was already happening in the workplace and I saw that the legal profession was kind of on a precipice, sort of three, four years ago when I started thinking about this, being in a space where this conversation was really starting to take hold. The momentum was building and folks were really engaged in this. It felt like a very exciting time and then that, combined with my very first ever professional experience of working in family law and seeing firsthand the trauma that was going on in both the legal profession and the social work world and the intersection of that, yeah, it just kind of moved me in that direction. So when I met Ash at IWILL, she was just a kindred spirit and we were both in the same place doing the same work and thought, well, we could see each other as competitors or we could team up and really build something incredible together and we decided that was the better option. So but I'll let her give you kind of her run up to how she got there.
Speaker 3:So but I'll let her give you kind of her run up to how she got there. Yeah, it was such a gift to meet Amy because instantly we could sense this really shared vision for moving beyond information to inspired action and integration. And information is important, but where we really are energized is by exploring ways to bridge the knowing-doing gap, if you will, and help us move more into alignment when it comes to well-being and this shared belief and commitment to the importance of connection. It's kind of a cornerstone to our capacity for thriving as human beings and so really centering connection and community in everything that we do and complementary skills and strengths. It's really a beautiful thing to be collaborating and to bring our different lived experiences and professional trainings together to be able to offer comprehensive support pathways For me.
Speaker 3:I actually stayed far away from the legal profession when I left law and began the work at the Wise Mind Company of working with courageous leaders to create well-worked cultures. So I worked in almost every industry and sector other than law for a solid six, seven years and it was only a couple of years ago, like shortly before Amy and I met at the IWO conference, that I think I felt a that the timing was right to bring this work into the profession, but also my own confidence it. Having grown up in law, I think it felt really and and as a recovering perfectionist, it was really important to me to feel like I tested these ideas out and built, hearing it somewhere else first. So it was beautiful timing and our work at the All Rise Initiative is also very much focused on raising the bar on collective well-being in law, on raising the bar on collective well-being in law. So that means looking at the individual teams, culture, systems, community and all the ways that we can start to facilitate well-being across all of those aspects of the legal profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think that's also important, and when you said that the two of you complement each other and your work and the experience you bring it, it's obvious. Also, I think this should be an advertisement for the next Institute for Wellbeing and Law Conference, because that's also how I met Amy, was through one. I met Ashley, so I think that everyone should make sure they're taking part of that. I'd be remiss if I didn't say I know that May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so how busy are the two of you as speakers this month? Is it pretty much nonstop?
Speaker 2:May is a lot, it's a great month, it's an amazing opportunity to get the word out and to bring this conversation into spaces that may not have already been having it, to inspire people to. On the flip side, as a therapist, as a mental health professional, and like this is important every single day of the whole year, right? So when I talk about mental health, a lot of times I'll say there's a statistic that, like, one out of five people has a mental health diagnosis at any given time. But a much more important statistic is that five out of five people have mental health every day, all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I kind of feel the same about Mental Health Awareness Month Like it's really important that we spend this one month out of the year highlighting it, paying attention to it, amplifying the importance and it does create some momentum, hopefully, for most firms and organizations that engage around it and, at the same time, like mental health awareness is important every day, all the time, and I don't want folks to forget about it when May is over.
Speaker 2:Right, like use May as a jumping off point, use it as an opportunity to launch a new program or to start developing something, but keeping it going on an upward trajectory throughout the year. So I think we love being busy in May, but we would love even more if we were busier in June, because we want to keep that conversation going.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. I think maybe that's when we have you coming back to speak again at Bond. It's June. Yes, that works. Perfect, ash. Is there anything you would add about Mental Health Awareness Month?
Speaker 3:I think it's an interesting opportunity for reflection, because A reflection about mental health in general for each of us, for our communities, our families, our teams, but also when we look at what happens because of the mental health awareness month. I do have to chuckle, because we get so busy, both as those of us who work in this space but also those who want to participate in all the beautiful things going on within their organizations, for example, that it does tend to add some stress in, and so I can't help but think of one of our power principles, which is pace and the importance of just remembering the value of pacing ourselves and prioritizing to just name another one these really important things throughout our day to day.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to both of you for saying yes when I ask you to collaborate, for sharing your power principles and for joining us on the podcast today. I know it's an extremely busy time of year for you both, so thank you and I do hope we can find a time to present together again soon. Thank you both for your work and listeners. Remember the show notes will have this link, but it's all rise initiative as one word, dot com. Thanks Amy, thanks Ash.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having us. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to speak with you both again this episode of Legally Bond. If you're listening and have any questions for me, want to hear from someone at the firm or have a suggestion for a future topic, please email us at legallybond at bskcom. Also, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to Legally Bond wherever podcasts are downloaded. Until our next talk, be well.
Speaker 4:Bond, schoeneck and King has prepared this communication to present only general information. This is not intended as legal advice, nor should you consider it as such. You should not act or decline to act based upon the contents. While we try to make sure that the information is complete and accurate, laws can change quickly. You should always formally engage a lawyer of your choosing before taking actions which have legal consequences. For information about our communication, firm practice areas and attorneys, visit our website bskcom. This is Attorney Advertising.