The Making of The Legal Athlete: Coaching to Fight Lawyer Burnout

Lawyers are--far too often--miserable.

Leaving aside the general daily experience of a practicing lawyer, with its high stress environment, client and organizational demands, and impacts on both personal and professional relationships. Even without these... "sub-clinical" impacts there's another well-known "secret" about our profession: compared to the general population, lawyers experience high rates of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease compared to the general population.

• Around 21% of lawyers struggle with alcohol abuse. This is about double the general population figures.

• About 28% of lawyers experience depression and roughly 19% of lawyers report severe anxiety, both significantly higher than the national average.

• Lawyers face an increased risk of heart attack, hypertension, and stroke compared to other professions, all of which are heavily impacted by the high-stress, highly sedentary, and long-houred professional lifestyle.

So many of my colleagues got into the profession of law for altruistic reasons. They wanted to help others in their times of need, to right wrongs, and to be protectors of justice. They wanted to create a successful, high-achieving professional life. But with all of this altruism and ambition, let's not forget too that law is a business, with its own demands and stresses and career ladders--and this all combines into a stew of cortisol, unhappiness, and illness for far too many of us. We don't put on our own oxygen masks first, and we burn out as our work performance declines, our relationships suffer, and our physical and mental health spirals into dark places.

But it doesn't have to be this way. And I'm on a mission to help change it.

That's my big news: after more than 22 years practicing law, in firms, and in house, from East Coast to West Coast to the Third Coast, today I'm launching my own professional coaching business to fight lawyer burnout and increase career joy: The Legal Athlete.

I've done my best to work on this mission in my in-house and firm roles throughout my career, and to try to be the leader, mentor and coach I would want to have, but it has never been my sole focus. Until now.

Now, I am so excited to be starting a coaching business to work full time helping my fellow lawyers unleash their potential, perform at their best, and most importantly: lead healthier, more purposeful and joyful careers.

I'll be sharing more science, techniques, and insights with you going forward that I hope will be useful, whether for you or for your friends, but as a preview, here's the crux of why my coaching and speaking business is called The Legal Athlete.

I'm beating the drum to get our professional knowledge workers to start treating themselves more like professional athletes. I want to help all of us apply well-established high-performance sports psychology and sports science to our intellectual professional lives. I want to help all you strivers thrive.

Green light, my friends - let's go!