Resilient people exhibit these features:
§
Positive View of Personal Future – optimism, expecting a
positive future
§
Flexibility – can adjust to change, can bend as necessary
to positively cope with situations
§
Perseverance – keep on despite difficulty, won’t give up
Pessimistic people
believe bad events result from permanent, pervasive, and
uncontrollable forces.
Overcoming negative thinking patterns requires:
§ Thought
Awareness
§
Rational Thinking
§
Focus on the Positive
§
Eliminate the Negatives
Conversations with yourself must be:
§
objective
§
factual
§
focused
§
descriptive
§
verified
Individual lawyers can work to become:
LESS More
Subjective Objective
Perfectionist Seeking
excellence, flexible,
reasonable
Impatient Patient,
Easy-going
Pessimistic Optimistic
Extremely Prudent Problem-solving
Procrastinators Actors,
doers
What can you do next week to change one of your negative
habits of thinking?
Seven Steps for a Depression-Free Life
1.
Identify and defeat the inner saboteur.
2.
Reconnect to your body.
3.
Create healing relationships.
4.
Elevate your self-esteem.
5.
Uncover your competence.
6.
Access the power of shared purpose.
7.
Deepen your spiritual life.
Authentic Happiness
§
the Pleasant Life -- having as many pleasures as possible
and having the skills to amplify the pleasures. But we also know that people
take more pleasure in experiences than in material possessions.
§
the Good Life -- knowing your strengths and using them in
your life to gain more flow.
§
the Meaningful Life -- using your strengths to serve a
cause you believe in.
Exhibiting Optimism
Try these three ways to demonstrate optimism
1.
Meet all challenges with a feeling of control. Decide how
you would like the outcome to look, and then organize yourself and plan for
success as in approaching any problem.
2.
Identify the benefits of the crisis, problem or
difficulty. Learn from each and every action you take- from both the positive
and negative results.
3.
Keep your energy level up and visible -- both to others
and to yourself.
The flexible optimist can take in both the pessimist’s
reality and the pessimist’s knowledge of opportunities and a bright future.
Creating Optimism, Murray and Fortinberry
Seligman’s six core areas of personality strength:
1.
wisdom and knowledge,
2.
courage,
3.
love,
4.
justice,
5.
temperance (forgiveness, humility and self-control)
6.
transcendence (gratitude and hope).
The five traits leading to lifetime satisfaction:
1.
grateful,
2.
optimistic,
3.
zestful,
4.
curious, and
5.
loving.
disputation process
§
Name
the adversity you are facing.
§
Identify
your beliefs about that (your interpretations).
§
Consider
the consequences of the adversity and those of the beliefs.
§
Dispute
the validity of those beliefs and the likelihood of those consequences.
§
Apply
your energy and focus to rethinking your automatic reactions and using the
disputation process.
Not
only are lawyers analytic, critical, and pessimistic – they are proud of it!
Lawyerly
habits Contrary
habits:
risk-adverse,
competitive,
workaholics,
perfectionists,
obsessive,
and
judgmental.
Others:
Lawyerly
challenges to optimism
Control pessimism and manage
prudence
Pessimistic explanatory
style: believing bad events result
from permanent, pervasive, and uncontrollable forces.
Prudence: Being careful
about one's choices; not taking undue risks; not saying or doing
things that might later be regretted
High Pressure, Low Choice
Low decision latitude in
high stress situations: Limited decision latitude coupled with high job demands is a recipe
for stress, depression, and heart disease
Win-loss
enterprise
the
adversarial system requires that someone lose, at an emotional cost to the
participants.
You
did not choose to be negative.
You
did not adopt a negative belief system.
You
did not install the inner saboteur – your gremlin.
You
can reprogram your thinking patterns.
You
can choose life-enhancing ritual.
You
can build a supportive circle of people.
Affirmations (Your new inner
voice)
Many
people benefit from positive affirmations. You can reprogram yourself, using
affirmations, to be positive and confident. Make your personal affirmations
simple and clear and base them on rational assessments of fact.
Affirmations
are meant to boost your self-esteem. Self-esteem is based on two things:
1.
your
sense of how valuable and lovable you are
2.
your
sense of your competence and talents
If
you are plagued by self-doubt, the best affirmations will be those you have
actually received from others who have acknowledged you in some way. Write down
anything good anyone has ever said about you. Make that your personal list of
affirmations.
A
sample of affirmations:
I
am equal to the task.
I
can achieve my goals.
I
am genuine, completely myself, and people like me for myself.
I
am completely in control of what I can control in my life.
I
learn from my mistakes and they increase experience on which I can draw.
I
am a good and valued person in my own right.
These
affirmations are taken from You Can’t
Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought: A Book for People with Any
Life-Threatening Illness Including Life by Peter McWilliams from
Prelude Press, Inc.
|
Lifetime
satisfaction and authentic happiness
Wisdom And Knowledge Cognitive strengths that
entail the acquisition and use of knowledge
Curiosity [interest,
novelty-seeking, openness to experience] Taking an interest in all of ongoing
experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating;
exploring and discovering
Vitality [zest, enthusiasm, vigor,
energy]Approaching life with excitement and energy; not doing
things halfway or halfheartedly; living life as an adventure; feeling alive
and activated
Humanity Interpersonal strengths
that involve "tending" and "befriending" others
Love Valuing close relations
with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated;
being close to people
Transcendence
Strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning
Gratitude Being aware of and
thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks
Hope [optimism,
future-mindedness, future orientation] Expecting the best in the future and working to
achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought
about
Take
the Signature Strengths Test at http://www.authentichappiness.org/perl/Strengths.pl
|
|
Lawyers
can learn to balance the demands of the profession with skills that serve them
well to re-craft their work style and to balance their lives and find long-term
fulfillment.
Lawyers
can learn to turn off their extreme prudence outside the legal transaction.
Individuals
must counter law’s pessimism with learned optimism. Learn to counter negative
thoughts with credible disputation. Flexible optimism can be learned – and in a
group setting in the law firm.
Individuals
can understand that they did not choose negative thinking patterns, negative
beliefs, and resistance to change. They were programmed in those patterns by
their upbringing and legal training. They can change their thinking.
Limited
decision latitude can be addressed by giving associates more control over their
work schedules and approaches to tasks.
Law
firms must allow members to redesign their work and reshape their jobs to
permit them to exercise their signature strengths and experience more positive
experiences on the way to a win-loss or to experience more win-wins.
Name
the Gremlin to Tame the Gremlin
“There
is a gremlin within you. He is the narrator in your head. He tells you who you
are, and he defines and interprets your every experience. He wants you to feel
bad, and he pursues this loathsome task by means of sophisticated maneuvers:
Just when you’ve out-argued or overcome him, he changes his disguise and his
strategy. He’s the stick sort – grapple with him and you become more enmeshed.
What he hates is simply being noticed. That’s the first step to his taming.”
Taming Your Gremlin: A Guide
to Enjoying Yourself, Richard D. Carson, Ph.d.
Identify your Inner Saboteur
My
main Gremlin’s name is:
My
Gremlin is fond of saying, or often says:
In
my family we use these Gremlin comments:
Inside
my firm, we use these Gremlin comments:
Use
the crayons to draw a picture of your Gremlin on the back of this sheet.
Take
Action
"When
we are the most overwhelmed, we are the least resourceful."
--Anthony Robbins
Consider
the area of your life where you feel most overwhelmed and spend a few minutes
reflecting on it.
Overwhelm
area: ________________________________________________
Then,
close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and ask yourself this question:
"What
one thing could I do to completely eliminate the source of my sense of being
overwhelmed?"
Write
down whatever occurs to you (no censoring your answers).
Pick
one idea for change that came to you and work on it this week.
1.
Try
it and see how quickly you begin to feel relaxed and resourceful!
Focus
on Gratitude
Name
five people or things for which you are grateful:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
How
does each of these affect your sense of yourself as a professional?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
How
does your gratitude for each affect your work?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Authentic Happiness: Using
the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
And
Learned Optimism: How to
Change Your Mind and Your Life
Martin
A. Seligman, Ph.D.
Why
Are Lawyers So Unhappy? By Seligman, M., Verkuil, P., and Kant, T. (2002), Cardozo Law Journal,
23, 33-35
Creating
Optimism: A Proven, Seven –Step Program for Overcoming Depression
Bob
Murray, Ph.D and Alicia Fortinberry, M.S.
