Episode 34: Paula Davis-Laack, Founder & CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute

Jack Newton:

The emergence of COVID-19 has forced the legal industry to rapidly undergo a fundamental transformation. I’m Jack Newton, CEO and Co-founder of Clio, the world’s leading cloud-based legal software provider. In each episode of Daily Matters, we’ll explore what this new normal means for law firms, how legal professionals can find success while working remotely, and how lawyers can best serve their clients during this unprecedented situation. Today’s guest is Paula Davis-Laack, a trusted expert and lawyer who is the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute. Paula, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Thank you so much, Jack. I’m looking forward to it.

Jack Newton:

I’m looking forward to it as well. Paula, first and foremost, tell me how are you and your family doing? Tell us maybe a little bit about where you’re situated and what things are like there right now.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yeah. So I am in the Midwest, I’m in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And happily, we are all doing well right now. I was just mentioning that our shelter-in-place or stay-at-home order was supposed to expire on I think April 26th, and then just got extended to I think about the 24th of this month. But the governor is allowing some other non-essential businesses to start reopening in phases. So I can see how that’s had a ripple effect. And I’m noticing more people out and about, I’m noticing more traffic in the morning when I go running. And so it feels like we’re kind of starting to lift out of it a little bit, but certainly not in any huge amount.

Jack Newton:

Wisconsin is one of the states, I think, where there’s been more severe social distancing measures and more complete shutdowns than some other states.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Our governor jumped on the issue pretty quickly and shut down things in a pretty aggressive way. I know that a lot of people have had various reactions to that. But it seems as though it’s worked. We haven’t had, I think, that crazy, sort of peak that other bigger cities have noticed. So I think it’s—

Jack Newton:

Yeah, I think, we’re in Vancouver, BC, as you probably know, and similarly here BC had a very swift, very aggressive shutdown response. I think, on the flip side, we’ve seen a real flattening of the curve, and it’s starting to plateau, and hopefully starting to decrease in the not distant future.

Paula Davis-Laack:

I just need my sports back. I’m craving sports on some level. I planned my whole year about like, when the Super Bowl ends, and then I’ve got my law until the NCAA tournament, and so I’m ready for something.

Jack Newton:

I am on the opposite extreme, where I’m so out of touch with sports that I didn’t even notice there’s a shutdown and there’s no big games happening, and so on. So it’s been less of a challenge for me. Aside from sports, or the lack thereof, what do you find to be on your mind most right now?

Paula Davis-Laack:

So I would say, first and foremost, just the health of my friends and family. I mean, that’s the number one thing: I have a four-year-old. And so in my world, as long as she’s okay, and she’s cool, and she’s happy, then like that’s 98% of it. But I do have some close friends who are on the front lines. I have some physician friends and some nurse friends and family members. And so I’m usually trying to check in with them and just make sure they’re okay. And so far, everyone’s healthy. And so that’s good.

And then separate and apart from that, I mean, just thinking about my business and how I’ve really had to pivot, as most people have, and just thinking about what new opportunities could that open up. Just thinking about the evolution and what I had planned and how some things are accelerating, and other things are getting put on the back burner. It’s a very interesting time to be running a business, as I’m sure most people know.

Jack Newton:

Absolutely. An interesting time and challenging on a lot of levels, but with a lot of opportunities emerging that we may not have anticipated when we set out on 2020 and what we thought 2020 would look like.

Paula Davis-Laack:

I don’t think anybody thought this was going to happen.

Jack Newton:

No. Anyone who was fully prepared for this deserves a gold star for disaster preparation for sure.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Right. Exactly.

Jack Newton:

So let’s talk a bit more about your business. So the Stress & Resilience Institute: it sounds like something we need today more than ever, and the institute’s mandate is to help organizations reduce burnout, and build resilient teams, leaders, and cultures. This is something I’m super interested in talking about today. Not just because of the context we’re in with COVID-19 and the information we might have to share with our listeners.

But as the founder and CEO of Clio, I have an organization of 500 people, and this is exactly what I’m trying to achieve. We talk about building a human and high-performing organization that is able to achieve high performance but avoid the pitfalls of many high-performance environments, which are burnout and stress and all of those downside consequences of demanding high performance roles, or at least what can sometimes be the downside impacts.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yeah. For sure.

Jack Newton:

So can you just tell me, to start, a little bit about what the institute does, the work you do and we’ll go from there.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Sure. We do a lot. So pre-COVID-19, we were doing a lot of in-person training and workshops and different aspects of consulting for organizations and law firms in particular. I do work across industries, but a lot of my work these days is in the legal profession. And so that’s really now pivoted to a lot more virtual type of engagements. And so it runs the spectrum of talking truly just about burnout prevention. So really, what is burnout? How do organizations go about preventing it? And there are, like you mentioned, there are so many cultural factors that play into that.

Paula Davis-Laack:

So I think that one of the things that people sometimes get a little bit wrong about burnout is that it’s really an individual type problem, and so a lot of the ways that organizations choose to address it is to do individual type well-being, stress management-related programs, and there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Those things are needed. But what we know from the research is that burnout is largely created and driven by systems, workplace systems. So at the leader level, at the team level, at the organizational level, all of the values and processes and structures and systems that go into kind of running an organization.

So meaningfully being able to address burnout means you have to sort of attack it at all of those levels. So you need a very systemic response to that. So that is a challenge that I work on with a lot of organizations is, first of all, just getting them to realize that this is really what we know causes this problem. And what’s interesting is that this was such a huge problem pre-COVID. And now I think it’ll be interesting to see how COVID either expands or accelerates the problem, or maybe takes it in a different direction. It’s been interesting for me, just with my one-on-one coaching conversations that I’ve been having during this time.

I do a lot of work with people on a one-on-one basis who are burning out, and they’re actually kind of happy right now. Because they’re like, I don’t have to go into work every day, I sort of have this sort of space and this autonomy to kind of just hang and do my work on my own. And so they’re noticing that, from a burnout standpoint, in some respects, it’s actually getting a little bit better, which I find interesting, but not surprising. So that’s interesting. And then on the resilience side of the house, resilience plays into, it’s not the sole kind of factor, but plays into and certainly helps with burnout prevention.

I’ve been teaching resilience strategies at the individual level for so long, and what I started to notice from the folks that I was talking to, again, was this, hey, what about culture? Hey, this is great, but the leader on my team could really use this too and is part of the problem for why we feel kind of stressed. What do you say about that? And again, just kind of back to this whole systemic need to start to talk about these topics and address these topics. Which is why I started to expand my work into not just teaching and training resilience at an individual level, but also at the leadership level, the team level, and then more broadly, at the organizational level too.

Jack Newton:

You talked a bit about burnout. But I’d love to dig there for a minute. Just because it’s such I think an important topic and misunderstood as well. I think there are so many definitions of what burnout is. I’m curious to hear what yours is. How do you think about burnout? I think you made an important point that sometimes you see it as more of an organizational-level thing than an individual thing. And maybe you can talk about what it looks like at both levels.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Sure. So this is an issue that I deal with a lot with this topic because we use the term burnout really loosely in our society. We use the term burnout almost as a replacement for stress. Like, “I’ve had a really stressful day, I’m just so burned out.” But really it’s the—

Jack Newton:

Or alternately is as being tired, just sometimes the feeling of putting in a good day’s work and being tired from that effort in the same way that you feel tired after a good physical workout, I hear being described as burnout as well and—

Paula Davis-Laack:

Totally. So that’s hard when you don’t have that clear language. And so that’s part of what I try to do. I try to follow the research as closely as possible when it comes to defining burnout for folks, and it’s really just the manifestation of chronic workplace stress. So the key word with burnout is chronic. So you don’t wake up one day and just say, “I’m burned out.” It’s not this sort of temporary one day, I’m just like, I kind of have this, this is over time. This is something that’s been happening. And the research is very clear that there’s three really big dimensions or components to it.

Paula Davis-Laack:

The first one is chronic, again, physical and emotional exhaustion. We all have tired busy days, weeks, months, and that doesn’t necessarily mean burnout. It’s this feeling like over time, I just can’t recover the way that I used to. And I noticed that with myself. I mean, that’s what launched me into this whole second career was that I practiced law for seven years and burned out during what became the last year of my law practice. I’m like, “I’m going to go back and study this.” I hope other people figure this out, because it was such a bad problem for me, and I really was in a bad spot for a while.

Paula Davis-Laack:

So there’s that piece of the puzzle, again, over a period of time. The second big warning sign or dimension is that there’s this sense of chronic cynicism. So everyone and everything just starts to bug you and rub you the wrong way. I talk about how I would go into the office, and I’d say hi to everybody. And I’d beeline it right from my office, shut the door, and just hope and pray that nobody bothered me for as long as possible. And that also included my clients. So outwardly, of course, I was very responsible and collegial and all of that. But internally, I remember a lot of times just this sense of, like, eye-rolling. Like, do we really have to talk about this? Like, can you figure this out on your own?

Paula Davis-Laack:

No, that’s not the way to approach people who are coming to you with sophisticated challenges. And the problem with the cynicism is that it makes you less empathetic. It causes you to detach from kind of caring about the people who you’re tasked to help. And that’s a big problem. And then the last dimension is a sense of inefficacy, is what the research calls it. So I call it the why bother? Who cares? Like, why are we having this conversation? You’re not going to listen to my advice anyway. So why bother? Who cares? Kind of a thing. And it’s that swirl that kind of comes together into what we know burnout to be.

Jack Newton:

Interesting. And then when you commented on seeing this more as an organizational-level thing, in some cases, does that look different? Or how do you recognize, is this an organizational-level problem? Or is this an individual problem? How do you decouple those two things when you’re looking to manage people through it?

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yeah. So the research is very clear that … So it’s both. It’s an organizational issue and an individual issue. Much larger if you’re going to kind of divvy up or allocate the responsibility in a pie. It will be much, much more of an organizational issue than an individual issue. But it is a system, and so everything is sort of interwoven or inter- kind of connected. And so the way that we look at it is that we look at it as job demands compared to your job resources. So a job demand is anything about your work that takes consistent effort and energy. It’s not a bad thing. They’re not bad things. Some of them actually do good things in terms of helping our motivation.

But when we have too many of them, and we don’t have enough job resources, so the job resources or the kind of energy giving, motivational aspects of our work, that’s when we start to see a problem. So job demands are things like having low-quality relationships with her colleagues, I don’t have enough autonomy in my job, I don’t have a lot of leaders’ support, I don’t get a lot of feedback or recognition. And then key job resources are some of the opposite of those things. They have a lot of meaning and impact in my work. I love coming to work because I love all the people who I work with, and that kind of “I’m plugged into what I’m doing.”

So that’s really the analysis that we look at when we talk about thinking about how do we help. Some of those things can be helped by helping individuals get better at managing stress and just recognizing where they might need just some additional skills or what have you. But most of that swirl comes in at the leader and team and organizational level. And that’s where you really see the impact.

Jack Newton:

So in the work you’ve done, you’ve worked with major organizations, including Walgreens, Harvard Law School, Coca-Cola, the US Army, among many others. You’ve worked with a real diversity of companies and entities. First of all, in the work you’ve done, I assume you haven’t encountered an organization facing the kinds of challenges that COVID-19 does.

Paula Davis-Laack:

No. I was thinking about this and thinking that really the … I think the closest thing I’ve seen to kind of this intensity in terms of the swirl of stressors was really from my military work. Because when I was doing the work with the army in particular, which was from 2011 to about 2014, they were still in such a high op tempo with all of the things and the wars going on Afghanistan and Iraq, and just dealing with all of that. And so there was a lot of intensity about the challenges that the soldiers were facing and that they were bringing to the training and what have you.

But this is so different. I mean, the military is in the business of people, as the soldiers would say, but we think about the military as kind of being in the business of war. And so that’s kind of what they do. I feel like this is not something … This has nothing to do with what we do, this COVID crisis. This has completely upended really every aspect of how we think about working about thinking about our health—there’s just not a facet that’s almost untouched. So no, it’s been very unique and different.

To help organizations navigate this challenge, you recently published an online guide and checklist for organizational resilience, something that can hopefully help organizations navigate this crisis. This document, I think, is extremely useful, almost as a self-assessment tool, but also to prompt the right kind of thinking around how you’re approaching the crisis with your organization, what your mindset should be, and so on. Can you walk us through a little bit about what you’re trying to accomplish with this document? And what you’ve seen, maybe something more practical exercises for folks to be?

Sure. So first and foremost, I love a good checklist. So when I’m doing a training or a workshop, my going in position is always like, “Okay, how are you doing? Now let’s assess, like, what’s going on now.” So we can start from a concerted, a very intentional entry point to figure out what’s going well and what’s not so we know kind of how to chart a course of action. And that’s really what this was intended to be for folks. So kind of in the early, the initial part of the handout is a little bit more teams focused.

So I wanted to give leaders and organizations a little bit of a structure in terms of thinking about that there are some very specific things that you can start to do before a crisis, during a crisis, and after a crisis to help usher you through it in the most resilient way possible. So we’re already in COVID-19, so I don’t know. I think we kind of missed the boat before that piece of the puzzle. But it’s there so that organizations know. I mean, this, certainly, I don’t know that we’re going to have a bigger challenge than this. But this certainly isn’t going to be the only challenge that organizations face.

There are going to be multiple mini challenges that have come and will continue to come because of this. And then just separate and apart from all of the other challenges that businesses face because they exist. So knowing that there are some things for them to start thinking about, some questions to start asking, thinking about your team’s capacity, how are their stress levels? What are they working on? Do any of those things need to be adjusted? Do we have to have conversations on the front end about any of that so that we’re prepared for when something happens? And then when we’re in the middle of it, what can we do? How do we be transparent? How can we still have and keep our same routines that we always have?

And then when it’s done, who do we have to thank? How can we recognize people? What did we learn? This is one of the things that the military does really, really well and a big lesson that I took from my work with the military, is that they have what’s called after action reviews a lot. So they’re constantly checking in with each other about what did we intend to do? What actually happened? What went well and what would we do differently? I feel that’s a place in the legal profession and in organizations generally, where we can really up our game, and it’s simple. There’s research talking about how it helps team resilience, and also reduces burnout, which I think is really interesting.

So that’s the first part of the download—is that really wanting to give people that framework to think about from a team’s perspective, how can we start to build a more fortified team, an intentional team when it comes to crisis management? Then also at the organizational level, how did we do? How are we doing or how did we do? And so I adapted a tool to help organizations start to look at and pinpoint specific areas that they should be focusing on, that we know build resilience at the organizational level. So we know that resilient organizations are really innovative.

They’re thinking about past challenges, what did we learn from them? And how can we develop and build new processes, new procedures, new tangible resources to help us with future challenges? But they also have people who are really engaged, we’re really plugged in, who are willing to kind of dig in and think about new ways of dealing with challenges generally. So you’ll see in the download that there’s 10 different places, again, for organizations to take a step back and look at organizationally, how did we do with the first five on that list being what the research shows is really, really key to having a resilient outcome versus a less than resilient outcome.

Jack Newton:

Right. And maybe, as with the idea of burnout, I’m wondering if you can just spend a minute talking about resilience and definitionally how you think about resilience. I think that’s another important word to spend a few minutes on, just understanding how do you look at it, and what the spectrum of not-resilient to world-class resilience would look like.

Paula Davis-Laack:

World-class resiliency. I spend a lot of time talking about resilience myths, because I think a lot of people come to this topic with a preconceived idea about what they think resilience is from what we’ve heard from other places or what we see on TV, or we think about Olympic athletes and things like that. And what makes resilience different from other topics like grit, or mindfulness, or well-being generally is that it involves adversity. It’s all about how you handle and respond to adversity, challenge, change, failure, setback. So if we’re talking about resilience, that part of the equation has to be present. There has to have been or there has to be a failure or a challenge, a setback, or something that you’re going through or just went through.

So then I think a lot of us think resilience is bouncing back. So how do you bounce back from that? So how do you respond? But a lot of my work is involving not just getting back to zero, but how do you grow from those challenges. And educating people and talking to people about how there are growth opportunities from setback and failure and challenge, and that aspect of resilience is also really important. So it’s not just getting back to zero, it’s how can we leverage growth from that? So the key aspects of those definitions are the same, whether you’re talking about individuals, whether you’re talking about teams, or whether you’re talking about organizations. We want to help the bounce-back factor happen more quickly, but then also pivot to the growth aspect as well.

So there’s wonderful—and this is part of the reason why I’ve chosen to kind of expand my work in these areas—there’s been a long about four decades worth of research in the resilience as applied to the individual intersection, blooming areas of research in the last 20 years or so around how we develop this at the team and organizational level. And so knowing that there’s kind of a research efficacy behind each of those pieces, I think, is really important. So this isn’t just what I think factors into building this, it is really things that have been tested. And so the building blocks kind of change a little bit, whether you’re talking about individuals, teams, or organizations—but the outcome, what we’re looking for, is really the same.

Jack Newton:

It’s interesting, it sounds a little bit like some of the concepts from anti-fragile, as well, where we’re talking about the idea of the fact that this isn’t about just grit and kind of gritting your teeth and bearing through it and having that fortitude. But more the idea that, look, you’ve been knocked down, you’re going to get knocked down again, what’s your process for standing back up again as fast as possible, but also growing while you do it to get that much better the next time it happens?

Paula Davis-Laack:

And that’s so important. I’m glad that you mentioned that because I think a lot of people … Especially a lot of the lawyers who I talk to, you think that the expectation is that I have to have this invincibility or this invulnerability about myself. And this is just a covert effort on the part of the firm to make me bill 400 more hours and just make me into this superhuman robot type of thing. And I’m like, if that’s the message you’re getting about resilience, that’s wrong. So let’s change that narrative pretty quickly and squash that.

One of the pieces that we talked about with the soldiers a lot is that sometimes resilience just looks like muddling through. Like, I’m having a bad day, I’m not getting out of my pajamas. I’m just going to schlep along today. I’m not going to do any work. And that’s fine. I tell people, I wrote about this in one of my Forbes articles, that resilience also looks like getting in your car after getting groceries and having a cry. Letting the emotions out and processing the emotions and labeling them and dealing with them is a very important aspect of resilience.

So it is not about perfection. It’s not about always having to make the right choice. And I’ll tell you, when I was burning out, if I had just stayed the course and put my head down and tried to keep persevering, I would have run right into a complete breakdown. So part of what resilience is, is recognizing when you’re doing the wrong thing or you’re on the wrong course and you have to take a step back and figure something else out.

Jack Newton:

Let’s talk a little bit more about law firms. You talked about one anecdote from working with a law firm client. You work obviously with a large diversity of clients from many different industries, different spaces. I’m curious what you see around lawyers in particular and maybe some of their challenges with respect to both burnout and resilience.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yeah. One of my favorite aspects of my work has really started to develop just within the last six months or so. So what I started to do with some of my longer-term law firm clients is that I wanted to pilot some workshops, pilot some coaching, some one-on-one coaching after my workshops. And what I was hearing from lawyers is like, this is great. These workshops are a great first start, but they’re not addressing like specifically what I’m going through. And that’s impossible for me to do in 90 minutes—to try and tackle what or thinking about what all of the breadth of challenges they’re going through.

So what it’s really allowed me to do is hear very in depth and keenly some of the really specific and tough challenges that lawyers are facing right now. I kind of cluster them into four different buckets. So first and foremost, we talk a lot about stress, we talk a lot about burnout, the 24/7 always-on pace, I can’t predict my schedule, and so that makes it hard to go to my cousin’s wedding and have fun and enjoy it without, like, constantly being on my phone. We talk a lot about that. We talk about one bucket, I still don’t quite know what to call it. I call it leadership.

But it’s: I don’t know what’s expected of me. I don’t know exactly if I’m on the right track. I don’t get a lot of feedback. And I hear this from both associates and partners. So this isn’t just a young associate thing—I’m hearing this across the board. And then a lot about connection. I don’t feel like I’m very connected to colleagues. I’m worried about maintaining a relationship with my significant other and my kids. And being in such a high-pressure environment, trying to square all of that together, then a lot about culture. I mean, lawyers are not shy about talking about the cultural aspects, again, sort of back to our initial questions that play into all of these factors that we end up having deeper discussions about.

Jack Newton:

Tell us a little bit how you work with clients. We didn’t talk about that in much depth, but you’ve talked a bit about workshops and one-on-one coaching. How does a law firm or any other client typically engage with you? And what does that process look like engaging with you and helping manage through some of these challenges?

Paula Davis-Laack:

I mean, by and large, it’s usually through some type of workshop format—at least, that’s the initial entry point. I think I’ve now talked to every single type of level of lawyer and program that exists, but a lot of partner retreats, women’s summits, just general, “Hey, we want you to come in for this workshop series that we’re doing,” some tied to well-being, some more tied to leadership development. So it really just kind of runs a range. and then from there it’s just really me being able to talk to them about some other avenues or pathways that we can build off of from an initial workshop.

So that could be one-on-one coaching, that could be maybe expanding and doing a part-two type workshop, which I’ve done a bunch, it could be kind of taking it again into more of the systemic realm. So a lot of leaders and teams-based programs. So that’s an area of my business that really grew last year— was talking about the intersection of resilience in teams. And so being able to explore with them kind of how all of the different ways that we could sort of touch the system when it comes to these topics, both burnout prevention and on the resilience side as well.

The coaching, I’m also expanding, and this is part of my … Again, when I was talking about how my business is shifting a little bit, starting to think about more on-demand type options. So I keep thinking about the lawyer who might be up at 11 o’clock at night feeling really stressed out and doesn’t have access to pick up the phone and call and things like that. And is there a little 15- or 10-minute module of something that they can listen to or that they can watch that might give them a skill or a technique or something to be helpful. So those are other areas that I’m thinking about right now.

Jack Newton:

So I’m curious: You’ve got this really unique vantage point of having been in this seat as a practicing attorney, and now you’ve built this incredible depth of knowledge around stress and burnout and resilience. If you could call your former self and give yourself one piece of advice, something to lean on that might have prevented the burnout you were experiencing, what would that be?

Paula Davis-Laack:

Man, just trying to think of one thing. So I call myself—

Jack Newton:

It can be more than one thing, by the way, but what’s at the top of the list?

Paula Davis-Laack:

So I call myself a recovering perfectionist, people pleaser, achiever-holic. And so I would have loved to have given myself some advice about taking … I have a hard time taking this advice even right now. But building in moments of pause and moments of reflection. Because I feel like, as a hard-charging kind of type-A person, I sort of went from undergrad right into law school without really thinking about it too much, and then into my career. I notice this with a lot of folks who I talk to, you feel sort of being swept away by what happens. You’re in your career, and all of a sudden 10, 15 years have gone by, and you’re like, what am I doing? And do I like this anymore?

High-achieving professionals are notoriously bad at just kind of stopping every now and again and putting their heads up and saying, “Is this what I want to do? Is this good?” And I feel like if I had done that more, I probably wouldn’t have run so quickly into the brick wall of burnout that I experienced. So that. And then also just recognizing too, I think back to the systemic conversation we’ve been having is that it’s not all me. So that’s usually also my going in position when something goes wrong and is right away like, what did I do wrong? I must have screwed up. It’s my fault.

But understanding that there were a lot of forces and challenges and pressures at play that were outside of my control and outside of anything that I could have done about it. So giving, I guess, myself a little bit of self-compassion, a little bit of a break with some of that would have helped.

Jack Newton:

No, those are both really, really powerful acts, I guess, really powerful tools to leverage if you’ve got the ability to do a bit of self-reflection. I think there’s a lot of professionals— lawyers and otherwise—that feel like they’ve just been shunted onto this really clear path and don’t have the introspection along the way of, “Is this the right thing for me?” And even basic questions like, “Am I happy doing this?”

Paula Davis-Laack:

Do we even allow ourselves to ask that question? Is that even an okay question to ask? And it’s funny that you bring that up, because it comes up in almost every coaching call that I have, especially with lawyers who have been in it for a little bit of time. Because their method, their process is sort of exactly what I did. You start, you put your head down, you do good work, you get recognized, you get more work, you get put on a certain path, and then your “set” and you’re good. And a lot of them get to a point at some point where they stop and they’re like, “I’m not sure if I enjoy this. Is this really what I want to do?”

I have some leverage and some clout built up now. Can I maybe take this out for a ride and see what does this look like if I decide to maybe pursue something a little bit different? So it comes up all the time. I think it’s just a fundamental need that we all have to feel like our work has impact, that we’re making a difference.

Jack Newton:

Right. 100% agree. We’re now heading into two months or so of really being in the thick of this pandemic. I’m curious through the workshops and coaching conversations and other interactions you’re having with lawyers as individuals and law firms as entities, what’s your take on how the legal industry is handling this crisis both at maybe a firm level and an individual level?

Paula Davis-Laack:

I think they’re doing as best as can be expected. I think you’re talking about … I mean, this is a once-in-a-century challenge that most of you who are living now have never experienced unless we’re talking about people who were alive during the Great Depression. I mean, it’s just such a complete game changer on every level. And I think that kind of back to the resilience question, I think just muddling through and every day just kind of taking the different challenges that come up. I know so many firms are talking about and thinking about still pay cuts and furloughs and layoffs. What are we going to have to do long term to really financially be able to make it through however long this is going to be?

So I wouldn’t say that I noticed firms handling the challenge any better or worse than other industries? I think everyone’s just kind of in the same boat in terms of let’s see what this day brings, and we’re going to try and deal with it as best we can. I think the firms that are being transparent with their folks who are reaching out, who are thinking about the person, being empathetic, expressing those types of needs, I think are probably faring a little bit better than just we’ve got to look at this from a bottom-line standpoint. There’s people on the end of this and we have to care about their situations too. So, yeah.

Jack Newton:

It’s interesting that comment you made around just muddling through it. I think lawyers, they aim for perfection in so many things, and being able to accept that, “Hey, the best anybody can do in this circumstance is maybe just muddling through it,” really runs counter to the grain for a lot of lawyers, I think.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Absolutely. I talk about perfection so much in my workshops, and definitely in my one-on-one coaching conversations, and this is really kind of the ultimate perfection buster, this crisis right now. Because no matter how well you were doing, you were probably thrown off course in a very big way, to a certain extent, and perfection just isn’t going to work to get yourself out of this environment.

Jack Newton:

100%. So I interviewed Cat Moon on this podcast a couple of weeks ago. She actually mentioned, I believe, a podcast she did with you earlier, where you were talking about, I think, some tools to manage the uncertainty that we’re facing in this situation. One of the concepts she talked about was this idea of holding multiple potential futures in your mind, and just thinking about what those might look like, and thinking those through carefully and seeing what are the what are the commonalities, for example, between those potential multiple futures that might exist and ways that can help you navigate the uncertainty that COVID-19 crisis presents.

Jack Newton:

I’m wondering if you can just spend a few minutes speaking about that and tools, maybe more generally, that lawyers can use to navigate. I think one of the things that all of us find especially challenging about the situation is just the enormously large amount of uncertainty about what the future holds.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yeah. So a couple of things there. There are a lot of lawyers who I’m talking to, who I’ve talked to in just the last couple of months, and we know this from the research … So when people go through traumatic events, and certainly not everybody is experiencing this as a trauma, but some people are, this is a significant adversity for a lot of people. So we talk about resilience, we talk about the range of adversities, we have our little-A, everyday adversities and our big, A big, big challenges. I think this qualifies as a big-A challenge for a lot of people. But when we go through those challenges, we can be deeply impacted and changed by them—and the research actually calls this post-traumatic growth.

So a lot of us are familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder, but a lot fewer of us have heard of post-traumatic growth, such that when we get through, and we don’t like the situation, we wish it wouldn’t have happened, we may still be in pain, there’s nothing that suggests we love anything about this. But what we noticed when we get through it and start to come out the other end is that we notice different opportunities for our life. We notice deeper relationships, we notice maybe how we use our strengths in different ways, and could that be a springboard for us to do something different?

So I see that cognitive process kind of happening with the people who I’m talking about. They’re starting to have and deeply think about these types of things. Like, ”Am I meant to do something different? Is this still what I want to do when I come out on the other side of this challenge?” So that’s part of it, sort of imagining what a different future could look like for yourself. Then just generally, there’s a lot of cognitive tools that I teach, but that I think are really even more important for folks to know about now.

So just thinking about what we know in terms of counterproductive thinking. Counterproductive thinking tends to happen in vague and ambiguous situations, it tends to happen when we’re rundown, stressed out, tired, and depleted—when something that we value is at stake and anytime it’s the first time we’re doing something. Hello, like all those things.

Jack Newton:

Check, check, check.

Paula Davis-Laack:

There. That’s exactly what we’re going through now, which for me helps to explain why our anxiety is just off the charts, and why a lot of our emotions are off the charts. They’re higher and more heightened than they normally would be. So one of the little strategies that I talk about a lot is we call it real-time resilience. So in the moment—maybe it’s before you’re about to hop on a Zoom conference call or you’re going to go have a conversation with somebody that’s really important, and you’re thinking in a counterproductive way—how can you reframe that on the fly so that you can perform in a better way?

So one of the ways that I talked about with Cat and her audience is a contingency plan. So you can think to yourself, and this is good to do ahead of time, if X happens, then I will do Y. I used to think to myself, “Okay, if I trip walking up on the stage before my presentation, everyone’s going to laugh and I’ll make a joke out of it. Then I’ll turn it into a funny story for future presentations.”Today, we could think like, ”Okay, if our shelter-in-place order has been extended for another few weeks, then I will get my team together on a Zoom call and we’ll talk about how things need to be updated.” So it’s taking purposeful action toward a situation instead of spinning your wheels about something.

And then the other way that you can reframe is to try what we call “put it in perspective.” So just say to yourself a better way to look at this is. So I know I had certainly some moments of catastrophizing when this all hit thinking like, “Oh my God, is my business going to go away? And what’s going to happen?” And putting it in perspective meant for me to think about, okay, well, another way to look at this is that I can build some on-demand content, I can focus on writing my book, and I can build my one-on-one coaching practice. It’s not BSing yourself, it’s just simply allowing for a different perspective or even some optimism to enter the conversation. And so that becomes really helpful for us from a thinking process and cognitively when we’re dealing with stress.

Jack Newton:

Right. Super useful set of perspectives and tools there. And in working with law firms, I’m wondering—this is a tough question to ask you to distill a lot into one answer—but when you think about helping law firms become more resilient, is there a takeaway, kind of a take-home message that you’d like to leave our listeners with on that front, in terms of here’s how to start increasing your resilience and realizing the benefits of that resilience as quickly as possible?

Paula Davis-Laack:

I think there’s a couple of ways to answer that. First and foremost, there’s a lot of science around the benefits of resilience. And so it’s one of the things that I lean on hard with lawyers and folks in the legal profession, because we love evidence, and we love well, to a certain extent, data, but we love evidence. So understanding and really bottom lining for organizations, the true well-being and performance outcomes that exist from developing this skill set. That’s what resilience is. It’s a skill set that we can get better at, that we can develop.

You talk about more cohesive teams, you talk about less burnout, you talk about a lot less depression, less anxiety, achieving goals quicker. And we know this from our work with the drill sergeants and soldiers, the officers who came through our course were promoted ahead of schedule, compared to the officers who didn’t come through our course. So they made the rank of a one-star general faster than their peers who didn’t come through the course. So there are—

Jack Newton:

Interesting.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yes. There’s goal achievement and benefits really attached to making these skills kind of just part of your everyday course. Then, separate and apart from that, I think that just punctuating the fact that there are and that you should expect, and that you should look for and there are opportunities for growth when it comes to crises of this nature. That it’s not always going to look like this. And that you should be actively kind of preparing and seeking out and thinking about what you want that future to look like. Because it will happen.

There is going to be growth from all of this. I mean, I think it’s probably one of the things that I’m looking forward to out of all of this, is how are we going to function better as a profession? How are we going to function better as professionals? And are we going to take that seriously? Because we have really quite an opportunity to make that happen out of this crisis.

Jack Newton:

I think that’s 100% correct. I share your optimism that there’s going to be a lot of positive impacts that it may take a while for us to realize were side effects of this crisis, but many long-term impacts that will end up being positive impacts for the industry. So we’re running low on time, unfortunately, Paula. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and the time has flown by. One item I’d love to spend just a minute on: In our pre-interview chat you mentioned you’re working on a new book. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Yes. I’m working on my first book, finally. I’ve been talking about it—

Jack Newton:

Congratulations.

Paula Davis-Laack:

Thank you. Talk about active resilience. When I started my business all these years ago, it was really one of the first goals that had … Like if I had to make a list of what I wanted to do, this was always toward the top of my list. And it’s been challenging to say the least. But I’m really excited about it. It is a book about burnout prevention, but again, looking at it through this sort of systems lens. And so I’ve decided to take a teams-based approach to tackling the burnout issue.

Paula Davis-Laack:

So I’m really excited about the new intersections and the new research that I’m finding as I’m frantically reading all of my studies. If I turned my camera around, you would see like gobs of Post-it notes and notes that I’ve got all over my office trying to organize everything. But yes, so tentatively titled, Teaming Up Against Burnout to be published by the Wharton School Press at the University of Pennsylvania hopefully early next year, but at some point in 2021.

Jack Newton:

Well, congratulations. And hopefully if there’s a silver lining out of shelter-in-place for you, it’ll be getting that book over the finish line.

Paula Davis-Laack:

That’s right.

Jack Newton:

Paula, really a huge thank you for joining us today. I’m wondering if there’s one parting thought you’d like to leave our audience with, speaking to them either as legal professionals or simply as people?

Paula Davis-Laack:

Sure. People always ask me like when you go through a significant challenge, are there any guarantees? Is there anything that you can say like, this will happen? There are only two things that I can think about, especially with a crisis that’s this big. I always tell people that it’s going to stink for a while. So we know that a hallmark of resilience is what we call embrace the suck. It’s going to stink for a while, and you’re going to have to realize that, but that it will and in that it will get better.

Paula Davis-Laack:

So those are always the only two things that I know that I can guarantee for people: is that it’s going to stink for a while, but that I guarantee you that it will get better. And so if we can kind of keep our eyes especially on the second part of that equation, I think we have a really amazing opportunity to elevate our work in this profession.

Jack Newton:

That’s a great note to end on. Thanks again for joining us today, Paula. I really enjoyed our conversation. So many valuable takeaways around the skills that I think all of us need to be developing in a time like this. Thanks again.

Paula Davis-Laack:

You’re so welcome. You’re so welcome. Thank you.

Jack Newton:

Thanks for joining us on Daily Matters today, a podcast from Clio. Rate and review wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Daily Matters is produced by Andrew Booth, Sam Rosenthal, and Derek Bolen and hosted by yours truly, Jack Newton. Thanks also to Clio, the world’s leading cloud-based legal technology provider for supporting this podcast. If you’d like to learn more about Clio, please visit clio.com