Lesson 3. Why resilience matters.

This is the third Lesson from my next book 50 Lessons for Happy Lawyers: Boost wellness. Build resilience. Yes, you can. Resilience is vital to our happiness. And the good news is that we can develop our level of resilience throughout our lifetime. We are not stuck. There are strategies you can put use today to boost your resilience. Read on! And if you'd like to read more from 50 Lessons for Happy Lawyers before it is released later this year and meet other incredible lawyers and thought leaders, please join our online community - 50 Lessons for Lawyers Living Room.

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What – exactly – is resilience?

According to Dictionary.com, resilience is “the power or ability of a material to return to its original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched.” Think of how a sponge bounces back to normal after being squeezed. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as, “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” Resilience allows us to adapt when we are faced with adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other significant sources of stress — whether those stressors are deadlines in a case, dealing with a difficult client, challenges in our personal relationships, or facing our own serious health problems. Research tells us that we are better than sponges. We can develop the ability to bounce back better than normal.

Resilience is very different than being numb. Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt. You fall.

But, you keep going.

― Yasmin Mogahed

 What resilience isn’t.

Resilience isn’t a personality trait or a quality some people are born with and others are not. Resilience is, as Jean Chatzky notes in the quote above, a set of skills and behaviors that we can learn and develop. Just as we can strengthen our muscles through consistent exercise, we can strengthen our resilience by understanding ourselves and making small changes each day. I know that sounds simple. But simple does not mean easy. The key is to focus on small changes – noticing your thoughts, how you are feeling, and experimenting with practices that have been proven to increase resilience. This work may not be easy, but I can promise you, it is well worth it.

How your brain affects your level of resilience.

Our brains are constantly changing. Neuroplasticity is the term used by scientists to express this concept. The fabric of our brain – our neural pathways – is not set during our childhood. Rather, we have the ability to change our brain. We have the ability to affect these neural pathways throughout our life.

The brain is continually remodeling itself as you learn from your experiences. When you repeatedly stimulate a “circuit” in your brain, you strengthen it. You learn to be calmer or more compassionate the same way you learn anything else: through repeated practice.

– From Resilient How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness [3:1]  

 Strategies to develop resilience.

In their book, Micro-Resilience: Minor Shifts for Major Boosts in Focus, Drive, and Energy,[3:2] authors Bonnie St. John and Allen P. Haines outline five strategies – what they call “ the five frameworks” – that can help to build resilience.

Together the five frameworks create micro-resilience. Micro-resilience focuses on making small shifts throughout the day to create long-lasting increases in your energy, productivity, and well-being. Let’s take a look at how to apply each of these frameworks to your day.

1. Refocus Your Brain

Focus and resilience go hand-in-hand. The first step in building micro-resilience for you and your team is to change the interruption culture of your firm. Most law firms live in a culture of interruptions and distractions. In both your physical office and in virtual settings, there is a fine line between collaboration and continual interference. This continual interference is exhausting and is the enemy of building resilience. Build uninterrupted work time into your schedule. This is concept I devoted a number of Lessons to in my first book. In that book, I wrote about the cost of interruptions to your personal productivity. Research now tells us that living with constant interruptions impairs your ability to build resilience, as well!

Another resilience killer is multitasking. Limit or eliminate multitasking. The truth is our brains can only focus on one thing at a time. When we try to multitask, we are not more productive. We are less productive.

It is fine to perform two or more tasks at once if quality or accuracy is not a high priority. But the widespread belief that multitasking makes us more efficient in our busy lives is far more myth than science. At every business level, from the C suites to the front lines, we see rampant exhaustion and intellectual depreciation as a result of this misunderstood social norm.

– From Micro-Resilience

Try these additional strategies to refocus your brain and build your micro resilience.

• Simplify your routines.
• Create AND USE checklists.
• Resist the urge to micromanage! While micro-resilience is good, micromanaging is bad! When you micromanage your team, you are training them to bother you incessantly.  

 2. Reset Your Primitive Alarms

Understanding what “pushes your buttons” or “sets you off” is critical to developing micro-resilience. When someone pushes our buttons, our natural reaction is for our amygdala or lizard brain to kick into high gear. In his book Emotional Intelligence,[3:3] Daniel Goleman referred to this reaction as an “emotional hijacking.” If you’re paying attention, you’ll know when this happens. You may get flushed; your heart may race. Some people will feel the hijack in the pit of their stomach. People can react to an emotional hijacking in different ways. The goal is to notice and decide how you will react. In other words, don’t let yourself get hijacked in the first place.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to consciously interrupt what your amygdala is trying to do to you. Begin to take deep breaths to your diaphragm or belly – not your chest. According to Jeffrey Rossman in The Mind Body Solution,[3:4] “Shifting from constricted breathing to relaxed, natural breathing turns off the body’s fight-or-flight stress response. This balances the autonomic nervous system and produces a feeling of relaxed energy, mental clarity, and a physiological state that promotes health and vitality.” Learning to breathe from your diaphragm takes practice, but you can start by placing your hand on your abdomen and imagining that with each breath you are trying to inflate a balloon in your belly. Relax and begin to notice the rise and fall of your belly – not your chest – when you breathe.

3. Reframe Your Attitude

Our brains are hardwired to pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive stimuli. This propensity is referred to by scientists as a negativity bias. Our negativity bias essentially causes us to interpret all uncertainty as a threat. When our ancestors saw the leaves of a bush rustle, they instinctively thought, “RUN! It’s a lion!” While it may not have been a lion, if it was, they either outran it or became dinner. And while the negativity bias has helped us to evolve over the millennia, it does not serve us well in the 21st Century. In fact, research is clear that it is time for us to develop a positivity bias. Developing a positive attitude is essential to developing your resilience. It may sound cliché, but life is not as much about what happens to us, but how we react to what happens to us. More about this idea in Lesson 6. Don’t be so judgy.

I wrote about the importance of positivity on brain function in the first 50 Lessons for Lawyers book.

Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.

- From The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work[3:5]

Decades of research across a variety of fields have also linked positivity to everything from earning more, to greater longevity, to improved health, to better relationships. Turns out, having a positive attitude also affects how resilient we are.

There are any number of ways that you can begin to cultivate positivity in your life. One of the most powerful ways, is to keep a gratitude journal. You can do this in a paper journal or on your phone or tablet. Each night before you go to sleep, write down three things that you are grateful for. This exercise asks you to look back on your day and notice the good things in your life. Also, it helps you to begin noticing things to be grateful for during the day. But don’t just write down three things, feel grateful. Feel the emotion. This is what triggers positivity in your brain – not merely the writing, but the feeling. I know this might feel challenging to some, but try it. Experiment with it.

4. Refresh Your Body

In The Other 90%,[3:6] author and neuroscientist Robert Cooper suggests taking what he refers to as “strategic pauses” and “essential breaks” as a means to boost energy and mental clarity. Now, we know that these pauses and breaks can not only boost your energy and mental clarity, but they can also help to build resilience. A strategic pause is no more than 30 seconds, and it is taken every 30 minutes throughout the day. A strategic pause gives you the opportunity to breathe and stretch. An essential break is just a bit longer, two to three minutes, taken at least two times during the day. I would recommend taking an essential break every 90 minutes or so, in response to your body’s own Ultradian Cycle.

Cooper suggests that the following components be part of any strategic pause or essential break:

• Deepen and relax your breathing. Focus on your breathing as you take 10 relaxed breaths.
• Change your view. Look out the window or at photos of loved ones. It’s important to give your eyes a break from staring at the computer screen during the day.
• Sip ice water. The refreshing cold stimulates energy production and raises alertness. Research has also found that sipping ice water can help to burn calories throughout the day.
• Get up and move! Every time you get up and move or stretch, you receive an energy boost and achieve increased mental clarity. I keep a few free weights in my office so that when I take breaks, I can get in a few lifts!
• Add some humor or inspiration. Stop for a moment to recall a fond memory or watch a funny video on YouTube. You’ll inject positivity into your day, which helps to boost your creative thinking.

Another important component of refreshing your body is nutrition. Be mindful of what you put in your body. Eat those foods that energize you and make you feel good. While there are some universals with respect to nutrition, i.e. limit your intake of sugar, watch your carbohydrates, look for good protein snacks, don’t drink too much caffeine, etc. You have to know your own body. What foods create a sense of optimal health and well-being for you?

5. Renew Your Spirit

In Micro-Resilience, the authors talk about renewing your spirit as analogous to discovering your purpose. They specifically note that this framework must “be approached differently” from the other frameworks in the book. In order to renew your spirit throughout the day, you must first know your purpose.

Discovering your purpose is essential to not only building your level of resilience, but to your overall level of happiness. Discovering your purpose can be a lifetime pursuit. Unfortunately, neither law school, nor the legal profession, itself, places much importance on discovering your purpose. As Steven Keeva noted in 1999 in his book Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life[3:6] “Caring, compassion, a sense of something greater than the case at hand, a transcendent purpose that gives meaning to your work – these are the legal culture's glaring omissions.”

Keeva’s quote resonates today, decades later. But while finding a “transcendent purpose” may be one of the legal culture’s glaring omissions, it needn’t be one of yours. Discover your purpose. Know your purpose so that you can work each day to renew your spirit and build your resilience.

Once you know your purpose, that purpose will impact every aspect of your life and your practice. If you are true to your purpose it will impact the clients you choose to work with, the matters you take on, the team who surrounds you, even how you decide to market your practice. The very act of living and working in concert with your purpose will energize you and offer you countless opportunities throughout the day to renew your spirit.

Using Micro-Resilience to Build Macro-Resilience

The five frameworks outlined in Micro-Resilience provide a wonderful starting point to build resilience. But they are only a starting point. These micro habits support broader habits – like getting the right amount of exercise, nutrition, sleep, and other components of a healthy and happy life. If you’re ready to dig deeper, read on!

Living the Lesson 

• Experiment with the five frameworks throughout your day.
• Take small steps! Start by focusing on just one framework until it becomes part of your routine – just like brushing your teeth in the morning.
• While the five frameworks are not necessarily presented in order of importance, I’d suggest starting with the first one on the list – Refocus Your Brain. When you can begin to do this, you can do anything.
• Wherever you start. Just start. And be kind to yourself along the way.

[3:1] Hanson, Rick, Ph.D., Hanson, Forrest (2018). Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness. Harmony Books.

[3:2] St. John, Bonnie and Haines, Allen P (2017). Micro-Resilience: Minor Shifts for Major Boosts in Focus, Drive, and Energy. Center Street.

[3:3] Goleman, Daniel (2006). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books

[3:4] Rossman, Jeffrey, Ph.D. (2010). The Mind Body Solution: The Breakthrough Drug-Free Program for Lasting Relief from Depression. Rodale Books.

[3:5] Achor, Shawn (2010). The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. Crown Business.

[3:6] Cooper, Robert K. Ph.D. (2002). The Other 90% - How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life. Crown Business.

[3:7] Keeva, Steven (1999). Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life. American Bar Association.

Other Resources

Greater Good Science Center

Anxiety & Depression Association of America