Finding Patterns in Your Practice with Awareness Exercises

It may Improve Your Career Like it Helped Mine

I knew this law school professor hated me, but shouldn’t I apply to the legal internship with her anyway? I need all the experience I can get, and I can handle working with people who don’t like me. It won’t be the last time in my legal career, I rationalized. Then I applied. That’ll show her, I thought. Why would I do that?

I thought I was being brave. Resilient. I always heard that word, resilient, when people described good attorneys. So back then, I made what I thought was a resilient choice. In case you’re curious, I thankfully didn’t get it. I’ve written about that here: kkthanks.com/the-first-time-the-mental-health-stigma-struck-my-legal-career/ .

Looking back, it seems like SUCH a ridiculous decision. Why would I deliberately attempt to work for someone who already made my life hell in the classroom? Why would I want to volunteer more of my time to her? Would the woman who gave me a ZERO on an essay because “my opinion was wrong,” really find any value in my legal research and writing after school hours? For all of the obvious reasons I shouldn’t have even considered applying, I still know why I chose to try. But I didn’t figure it out right away. I found out by practicing awareness and discovering a behavior that started in law school and followed me into my legal career and to my law firm jobs. Tracking my awareness helped me destroy this unhelpful behavior.

I was trained to believe I had to be the best or I couldn’t be an attorney at all. That was actually the ONLY advice I got upon receiving law school acceptance letters. YOU MUST BE at the top of the class, or you may as well not bother with a non-ivy league law school. Turns out, law school was hard.

“Think like a lawyer” closely followed that first nugget of advice. I didn’t realize the damaging pattern this began until years later. To this day I still uncover harmful parts of lessons I learned back then that seemed perfectly innocuous at the time. Some unhealthy patterns trickled from law school into my legal career without me knowing. I unconsciously trained myself to accept disrespect and extreme anxiety as part of job. Without noticing, I conditioned myself not to expect genuine relationships, training, and mentorship. I prepared to try my best to teach myself, and if that research didn’t lead me to the answer, my only other option was trial and error. I became accustomed to partners berating me, refusing to teach me anything, and ripping up my work instead of providing constructive criticism. Back in law school, I had subscribed to the belief that it displayed strength and courage to do things like apply to internships with professors who already make your life difficult in the classroom. No wonder I later came to believe these types of behaviors eventually built good attorneys. But really these types of unhealthy expectations should have stood out as red flags. I didn’t know what to look for.

 I didn’t realize I had been exposed to toxic work cultures at the time because I had no idea what the warning signs looked like. Red flags surrounded me at every court appearance and in every law firm I worked, but my skewed expectations made me colorblind. They didn’t look red to me until way later. By the time I discovered that many of my work environments had been toxic and unhealthy, it never crossed my mind that anything that happened at work could link back to my past experiences. I almost never found out that some of my preconceived notions I developed when I started “thinking like a lawyer” had such a negative impact on my career. But after I implemented some of the tools I learned in a CLE course about stress management for lawyers, the damning evidence made it obvious. 

I initially planned to do three write ups on lessons I learned directly and indirectly from this course, and I am finally now getting around to the second installment. The teacher of the CLE placed a huge emphasis on awareness logs, and I planned on explaining how to make an awareness log and then to show one of my own. The purpose of these awareness logs is to pinpoint stressors throughout the day so that attorneys can learn what causes them the most stress and plan how to better manage their stress and prevent anxiety and burnout. It sounded like a great idea to me, but in the middle of creating my awareness log the way I learned in class, I realized that I hated doing it. At first I found this discouraging, especially because I liked the concept, but I felt like I was forcing myself to do it and because of that, it wasn’t helping me. When I realized that, I was able to find an approach at the awareness log that worked for me. The way the teacher of the CLE presented it definitely helps other people as well, so I will briefly explain both ways. 

The teacher suggested creating a chart with columns detailing factors around stressful events. The columns provide information like the date, the stressful event, your physical responses to the event, your feelings and emotions about the event, your thoughts about the event, and how the cycle of stress ended. Keeping track of these details can help uncover patterns in your life and behavior so you can better plan how to manage your stress.

I personally didn’t like the exact method, because I tend to prefer a more creative spin for planning and note taking. I ended up creating an awareness journal page, because tracking the details in the chart felt too much like a chore I had to force myself to do. I still provided the same or similar information and benefited in the intended ways, but I got to do it in a way I enjoyed more. Now that I enjoyed the process, I found helpful information by studying some of my patterns.

Something that happened with a partner at work reminded me of the incident in law school with that professor. In some way, a partner made me feel the same way I did when I “was brave enough” to try to work with that professor who didn’t like me, years ago. This partner constantly tormented me and belittle me. She despised my work, but she just crossed everything out and her feedback took the form of rude remarks with nothing constructive. Often she would simply cross out my writing and scrawl a barely legible “STOP!” on the page. She never explained or provided an alternative. This example doesn’t begin to explain the atmosphere there, but that’s a story for a different day. I cried every day while I worked there and I desperately tried to impress partners who never planned to accept me. I didn’t know why I was doing it at the time. Now I have figured it out, and it will make my career better.

Thanks to focusing on awareness, I now have developed healthier practices and I know what I will and will not accept in the workplace. I know what I deserve, and I know that I’m not asking too much because I want to work somewhere that gives that to me. I recommend finding a method that you enjoy to practice awareness.