By Amy J. Lepine
At this time of year when everybody’s making New Year’s resolutions and setting goals, big and small, I’m making a vow to do something different every day. It’s a resolution I can keep, and one that will be good not only for my head, but also for my general well-being.
By Julie Thorpe-Lopez
Paradoxically, the pressure to be joyful during the holidays sometimes eviscerates the actual experience of joy. In addition to the regular stress of our jobs, family, and personal obligations, we are bombarded with pressures to celebrate, whether we actually celebrate a particular holiday or not. Adding to this already overflowing plate of stress is traveling or hosting guests, shopping, financial pressures, and spending time with extended family — with whom we may or may not positively connect. When things don’t go the way the holidays look in commercials or on social media (most of which is really unachievable unless your profession is “TV producer” or “social media influencer”), we feel a sense of failure. When our kids are going bananas without a regular school routine for three or four weeks, we feel like we are blowing it as parents. Plus, we’ve all endured a years-long pandemic and have been in fight-or-flight adrenaline overload for much longer than humans were made to endure. We still have tremendous political divisiveness permeating the media — another stressor that crops up with the extended family time we are expected to put in. It’s no surprise that joy and peace don’t always come easily during this time.
By Megan M. Moore
In moments of stress or frustration, you might notice you don’t want to feel this way and then double down by telling yourself that you shouldn’t feel this way, or that you got yourself into this mess to begin with. Now you’re feeling stressed and bad about yourself. Sound familiar?
By Heidi Weaver
It’s kind of a running joke here at the law school where I work that lunchtime can be feast or famine. Some days you’re lucky if you can grab a stale granola bar or some Pirate Booty from the snack tray in our department, while other days there’s leftover pizza, In-N-Out burgers, and yellow curry coming our way from all the midday programming events that are going on. Neither of these extremes is particularly healthy, but I’m always grateful for any form of sustenance I can get since I’ve never been great at making and packing a lunch for work. Such a thing for me connotes meal planning, and meal planning is an activity I’ve just never been drawn to. In my mind, meal planning means spending all Sunday at the supermarket and then being stuck in the kitchen laboring over cookbooks and a hot stove. A lofty goal, but never a practical one when I only have minutes to spare.
By Jim Eischen
“Seek mindfulness.” This persistent mantra echoes in the wellness community. Thought leaders in the business, healthcare, and yes, even legal communities, preach mindfulness as a necessary solution to nearly all present-day challenges. If mindfulness was a prescription drug, it would be proliferating our healthcare system as a zero-risk cure-all for every ailment.
By Marta Manus, Leadership Coach and Workplace Culture Consultant
By Amy J. Lepine
This single line from Desiderata expresses the basic reason I practice at wellness. The habits that we cultivate in our lives, whether consciously or not, are very powerful. Most often, we are not aware of the patterns of the mind. We’ve developed shortcuts for our perception that rob us of the true import of the moment. But in the same way, developing positive habits that bring us back to the present moment can erase those tendencies and bring us closer to reality, and wellbeing.
By Phillip Stephan
Pause. As attorneys, we are inherently attuned to the power of words. We seek to use them to persuade, to disarm, to indicate, and for other functions related to our practices. More than a few practitioners in our legal community have a way with words. The main goal of the words in this article is to persuade you to embrace the absence of words: not silence, but rather active listening, sincere consideration, and creating the space for dialogue by ensuring your partner in conversation has finished their thoughts and felt heard.
By Heidi Weaver
“Scenic Route.” Do you ever see those signs on the side of the highway and think to yourself, “I wonder where that road goes? I wish I had time to take the off ramp and find out. How fun and exciting would that be?” Time being the ultimate luxury, I can count on very few fingers the times in my life when I have spontaneously changed course and taken the scenic route. Recently though I have discovered that it only takes a couple of minutes to incorporate “scenic routes” into my day and in so doing to add a lot of sensory enjoyment to my workaday life.
By Megan M. Moore
When we become curious, we are more likely to listen deeply and learn from a neutral place. As we get more curious, we better understand our own and others’ behavior, as well as the positive intentions behind that behavior.
