What is THRIVING anyway? And why a Center for Thriving in Law?
I’m going to take a circular path to answer those two questions.
I don’t need to tell you that law is a high-intensity, high-demand profession. To sustain a long-term career, or more immediately, to get through a tough trial, a traumatic client event, or a difficult deal, we need tools and strategies that keep our thinking clear, and that sustain our energy and motivation over the long haul.
Let’s take a little trip down evolutionary-biology lane. When humans first roamed Earth, we were nomadic, on the lookout for predators and food, and we synced our activities with the rise and the setting of the sun.
Yet, fast forward many millennia, we live in a technologically advanced world designed by humans, but in a sense, not for humans.
Over the past century, since the advent of the industrial revolution, we’ve moved further and further away from our innate design. Unlike our ancestors, we sit for hours without moving, our attention is routinely hijacked by device notifications, and we work around the clock without regard to day or night.
We’re now working and living in ways that are out of sync with the way we humans were designed to live. That is causing us mental, emotional, and physical distress, and wreaking havoc with our wellbeing. This has accelerated in the last two decades in digital age, and we’re now engaging in work practices that don’t serve us, draining us of energy, focus, and enjoyment.
To put it in perspective, basic appliances like a toaster, a hairdryer or blender, that operate by plugging them in and the push of a button, come with a manual and instructions for troubleshooting.
Yet, we humans with our highly sophisticated, exquisitely synchronized and complex operating systems, have no manual–or at least, we’re not routinely taught how to operate the complex system that runs us, so that it’s optimized and working smoothly. Like a machine that is driven without being maintained, human burnout, a medically real, uniquely modern, and all-too-common condition, is on the rise.
But there is hope! With an understanding of human design–how our brains and bodies were designed to operate, then making minor adjustments to re-sync our current work practices with our innate design–we can radically improve our lives and our overall wellbeing.
So what does this have to do with thriving?
Life, and the practice of law, are full of surprises, not all of them welcome.
Thriving is a process for meeting the challenges of law and life affirmatively, and emerging from each experience, more resilient, mature, and vibrant, so that we grow and flourish, in other words, thrive.
This Center is designed to be a resource for tools, strategies and information that have the potential to improve (and possibly even transform) the quality of your life, professionally and personally. All of these tools are based on validated research in the fields of psychology, neurobiology, physiology, productivity, and others.
As with any new strategies, the more you use them, the better they work.
And as the saying goes, practice makes progress (not perfect–an unattainable objective that is the enemy of productivity and performance, but that’s a topic for a future blog).