The feeling of anxiety is extremely common among legal professionals. Whether anxiety is part of your personal experience as a lawyer, you have friends and colleagues who struggle with it, or it’s something that you understand anecdotally, there’s been an increased awareness of anxiety in the field of law, especially during the pandemic.

 

There are lots of places anxiety can show up in various aspects of your legal practice, and it might be prevalent in your personal life too. From smaller day-to-day triggers to bigger-picture stressors, we’ve learned that the number of lawyers struggling with anxiety is significant. Today, I’m offering tools to help you navigate anxiety as it comes up. 

 

Do you feel like you’ve constantly got a full plate? Maybe it seems like you’re always running behind or there’s just too much to do and too little time. Perhaps there’s so much on your calendar that you’re often left feeling snowed under with no clue where to start making headway.

 

Even as a coach who spends her time living and breathing time-management strategies, I still find moments in my life where I need to revisit my own systems to address feeling busy and overwhelmed. Many lawyers and other busy professionals have multiple things competing for their time and focus. If you feel like you don’t have a clear idea of how to run your practice with a sense of calm, you’re not alone. 

 

One of the questions many lawyers reach out to me for is to understand what career options are available to them, and I offered my insights on last week’s episode. Another question that comes up just as often is about career transitions for lawyers, and this is what we’re diving into this week.

 

During the height of the pandemic, transitions were top of mind for many people. It was a theme we all dealt with in some form and it continues to come up in my practice. Transitions can be inherently scary, especially if you don’t know what to expect on the other side. However, we can all be more welcoming and excited about transitions, and this is what I hope you walk away with this week.

 

The question of alternative career options for lawyers comes up a lot in my work. What I often see are lawyers who are busy practicing in their day-to-day, trying to squeeze in their personal life, and aren’t entirely satisfied with their careers but find a large part of their professional community doing the same.

 

Maybe you feel like there’s a lack of information about what else is out there, or find it hard to access those resources. Maybe you start looking for alternatives and your initial discoveries aren’t that fruitful.  Perhaps everything has been lockstep in your journey up to this point, and stepping off the beaten path feels completely foreign to you.

 

Have you had a bad experience with mentorship? Do you find it intimidating to put yourself out there and approach people with a mentoring request? The truth is even if you’ve had a not-so-great experience with mentorship, it doesn’t have to stay that way, and it’s also a step that can accelerate your career trajectory.

 

This week, I’ve got two very special guests on the show. Jessica Forman and Sarah Ewart are both employment lawyers and workplace investigators who work at Forte Workplace Law, and they’re here to talk to us about mentorship. Jessica happens to be Sarah’s mentor, so you’ll be hearing the ins and outs of mentorship, both from the perspective of a mentor and mentee.

 

Last week, you heard part one of my conversation with Yanique Russell, Siobhan Lennox, and Gina Alexandris: three amazing guests who each has expert insights and unique perspectives to share on the topic of internationally trained lawyers in Canada. 

 

As we dive into part two of our interview today, we are getting into even more challenges internationally trained lawyers face while going through the process of qualifying and becoming licensed to practice in Canada. Yanique, Siobhan, and Gina are sharing their favorite strategies and resources to help you along. 

 

This week, you’re hearing part one of a two-part interview on a topic that will be an infinitely valuable resource for many of you. If you’re a lawyer trained outside of Canada and want to learn what the process is like to practice in Canada but don’t know where to start, you’re in the right place. 

 

There are so many internationally trained lawyers who are navigating the system, but when there’s no singular process that works for everyone, carving out your own path becomes extremely challenging. The good news is I have a panel of three amazing guests who each has a unique perspective on the topic of internationally trained lawyers in Canada, and I’m quizzing them on it all today. 

 

How are you currently engaging with social media? With a plethora of different platforms available to us, you’re likely splitting your time across them all. LinkedIn is probably one of those you regularly check, but it’s also very likely that you aren’t leveraging it for your business as much as you could. 

 

Louise Brogan is a LinkedIn Marketing Specialist for professional services companies who has over a decade of experience helping small businesses thrive on LinkedIn, and she’s also an international speaker, writer, and host of the podcast LinkedIn with Louise. She found that her time on LinkedIn resulted in not only closer connections but also more money far more quickly than other channels, and she’s here to offer her expertise.

 

Welcome to the final part of our series on executive function and time management! So, you’ve made your plan, gotten started, managed to stay focused on your task or project, and now, it’s time to finish what you started, which also ties in perfectly as I wrap up this series.

 

Even if you’re working on a task or project that you love, you might find it challenging to actually finish it. You’ve gotten so close to crossing the finish line, and yet, you feel discouraged, sidetracked, or bored before you do. Maybe you feel the desire to abandon the task altogether. Maybe you finish your task but start nitpicking and questioning if it’s good enough.

 

Now that you’ve heard how to save time before you start a task and how to overcome procrastination once you’ve started, in part three of our series on executive function and time management this week, we’re diving into all things focus and sustaining your attention. 

 

Whether you’re working on a long-term project that is going to take a few years, or a shorter-term project with a deadline soon, a lack or loss of concentration is extremely common. We all have distractions in our lives that pull us away from our task at hand, and this is where the executive functioning skills of sustained focus and impulse control step in.