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Jordana Confino, Prolific Purveyor of Professionalism and Positive Lawyering
208 Plays1 year ago
Folks, it just doesn't get any better than this. There aren't sufficient words to describe how relatable, inspiring, brilliant, encouraging, and delightful our friend Jordana Confino is. You may think YOU are a successful Type A Perfectionist, but chances are, you've got NOTHING on this double-Yalie, clerkship-getting superstar.
She was hitting all the hot-spots on the highway to success and getting all the rings & accolades we are primed for in law practice--and yet she somehow realized that she wanted something completely different. The realization nearly wrecked her, as she shares in this lively discussion with Chris, but there's more to the story, and it has a more-than-happy ending.
Her course correction brought her a whole new level of joy and career satisfaction, but even better, her law students at Fordham University School of Law and her coaching clients are reaping the benefits and dividends as well.
And yes, this should be a 2 parter--but you know what, y'all have "pause "buttons, right? :-)
- Jordana's Coaching Website: https://www.jordanaconfino.com/
- Subscribe to Jordana's Blog, Chronicles of a Recovering Type A+ Perfectionist: https://www.jordanaconfino.com/newsletter-sign-up
- Values Discovery Guide: https://www.jordanaconfino.com/values
- Jordana LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanaconfino/
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to the new episode of the thriving lawyers podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Chris Osborne. Uh, today I have the distinct privilege of interviewing a person who's come to be a friend through the wonderful world of LinkedIn. Uh, she is a professor at Fordham law school. She's also a coach for lawyers and she has a fascinating journey through her whole process of going to law school.
00:00:35
Speaker
and figuring out her place in the legal world. It's inspiring and encouraging to me. I'm sure it will be to you as well. Please join me in welcoming Jordana Confino. Listen to me saying that like we have an audience, like it's going to cheer or something. Maybe I'll have to pipe that in later. Anyway,
Motivations and Misalignments
00:00:49
Speaker
Jordana, so glad to have you.
00:00:50
Speaker
Well, we can cheer ourselves. There you go. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I am a huge fan of the podcast. I am an even huger fan of yours and just really delighted to get to hang out with you this afternoon.
00:01:05
Speaker
Well, we appreciate you making time to be with us here, especially because the law school semester is still going on and you have lots going on, I'm sure. So thanks for making time. And so why don't you just start by telling folks a little bit about kind of your journey. I know a little bit of your story because we've talked, we've gotten to know each other through Institute for Wellbeing and Law type things.
00:01:26
Speaker
But tell the folks kind of what it was like being Jordana. When did you first know you wanted to go to law school? What was that like? And then what was the experience like? And we'll kind of go from there. Yeah, absolutely. So I went to law school for all of the wrong reasons.
00:01:42
Speaker
Um, which I think I'm not, I'm not unique in that. Basically the way that I ended up applying to law school was that I had always been kind of not always, but since, you know, early, early teenage years, early high school, a raging overachiever. And so I was overachieving in college. I did, I majored in psychology in college with a focus in
00:02:04
Speaker
focus on social psychology because I was absolutely passionate about it. But when it came to the end of college and most of my friends were going into either finance or consulting, the things that were interesting to me, so being either a therapist or I had taken a bunch of teacher prep classes, I was drawn to that. That just didn't seem shiny enough. So I kind of had this panic and
00:02:30
Speaker
People had always told me I should be a lawyer because I was so meticulous in type A. People say type A plus. And so I ended up taking the LSAT. I did pretty well on it. And you were at Yale undergrad, right? I was at Yale undergrad. And I had had the good fortune of making some friends at the law school. And Yale law school just sounded like this really cool, interesting place. So I applied there as well as some other law schools. I got into Yale.
00:02:58
Speaker
I just went straight through. I already had the apartment in New Haven, so I stayed there and went straight into law school. And at that point, there was this cognitive dissonance for me because I needed to come up with a better story of why I want to go to law school other than, well, it's prestigious and I don't know what else I want to do. So I had been
00:03:22
Speaker
involved in a bunch of nonprofit work focused on universal girls education and
00:03:29
Speaker
universal girls' human rights efforts throughout high school and college. And so part of that focused on anti-sex trafficking. And so it's so interesting. It's like the John Haight research on how our rational mind will come up with reasoning to support our impulses. So here it's like, I have to contrast this reasonable story for why I want to go to law school. So I actually discovered through a summer internship in college that there is this thing called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act,
00:03:57
Speaker
That was recently
Career Path and Internal Conflicts
00:03:58
Speaker
passed around that time. I did a little work with that. What year would that have been? Because when I taught law school, we had a student group that was trying to line up with that and do some stuff to lend some volunteer effort to the human trafficking prevention. Yeah. So I don't remember when it was passed, but the summer that I learned about it was the summer before my senior year. So I guess that was 2011. OK.
00:04:21
Speaker
And so I was like, oh, well, I've been focused on all this anti-sex trafficking work. I'll become a federal prosecutor in AUSA. That's a super, super prestigious job that lots of people at Yale Law School want. That's what I want to be. That's what I want to do. So I went into law school, basically guns blazing, as I had learned very
00:04:42
Speaker
well how to do, which is what's the goal that I want? What is everything that I need to do to get it? And I'm going to do those things. And so sure enough- And you would make a list. You are a meticulous person, so you would have an action plan for those goals. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So I spent my first summer at the US Attorney's Office in the unit that focused on anti-sex trafficking. Gosh. I looked around general crimes, which is the entry level unit. I saw that about 70% of the people had spent had... So all of them have clerked.
00:05:09
Speaker
And like 70%, it was crazy, had spent their time at Davis Polk before they went there. Interesting. Okay, so I need to go to Davis Polk and I need to quit. Noted. And so then I went back that summer. We had the interviewing going on. I got my job offer for a 2L summer at Davis Polk. First semester 2L, that was the year that the plan, quote unquote, died. And some judges were hiring even earlier.
00:05:33
Speaker
Before winter break of my second year of law school, having only one semester of grades from second semester 1L, which is all you get at Yale, I lined up my two post-grad federal clerkships. Wow. And at that point, I started to panic because- Okay.
00:05:50
Speaker
I, for the longest time, knew about myself that, first of all, I had pretty intense anxiety and there was nothing that made me more anxious than long, solitary writing projects. Nothing in the world. So much so that I actually wrote both of my major papers second semester of 1L year because the only way that I could make that anxiety go away was to make the paper requirements go away.
00:06:19
Speaker
And here, I was signing up for two years of just writing. It's like a writing process. Every time you're done, you just get another one. That's what a courtship is. Yeah, it's intense research and writing. Exactly. So here's when I started just freaking out at the beginning of my 12 year. I also, just looking back over this time, I
00:06:41
Speaker
My, I had approached law school with the same intensity that I, for my young adult life had approached, you know, everything that I was trying to achieve by basically giving it 150% at the expense of everything else. I had done that in college as well, but here, as will be no surprise to you, the stakes were higher and it took even that much time, effort, sweat, tears, all of the things in order to do it. And so I, oh my goodness, I will,
00:07:12
Speaker
I basically first gave up every other aspect of human life during that time in law school. I did make some wonderful friends that I would see like an hour a week for a nice
00:07:28
Speaker
meal. Many of them had other things going on in their lives. For me, that was the only thing going on in my life except for studying. I was just so lonely. I was so tired. I was so stressed. I remember saying to my dad that I felt like a
00:07:44
Speaker
hamster in a pressure cooker. That's how much stress it was. You change the metaphor. It's not just a hamster on a wheel. It's worse. It's like the pressure cooker is kissing the hamster. I literally felt it wasn't just that I was running. I felt like I was going to explode. And that's anxiety, you know, that feeling there. And so that and then the other thing that I remember saying was that I was so lonely that it physically hurt. And that was true.
Self-Compassion and Value Discovery
00:08:07
Speaker
And because I just there was there was no time for me for anything but work. So all of this was kind of building up.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I'm curious, I have one question real quick because it fascinates me as well, partly for our listeners as well. Would people have said they knew this about you? Like how did you appear to other people or did you not? Because you're kind of huddled away studying. I'm wondering what people's perception would have been of Jordana the 2L, Jordana the 2L.
00:08:32
Speaker
So I think definitely like I've always been someone who wears my stress on my face. So they would think that I was stressed and I was, I was intense. Also I was called, you know, in, in, um, in college they call it like a section. I don't want to curse on your thing, but a section, a whole law school, they call it. Okay. A section asshole in law school. They call it a gunner. I was, I was always, you know,
00:08:58
Speaker
raising my hand participating, honestly, partially because public speaking has never been my fear. Writing, on the other hand, was much scarier, but also because silence and uncertainty made me so anxious that I was always just out there nervously participating. They definitely see that. In terms of the loneliness, I don't think that
00:09:23
Speaker
Anyone saw that pain and i didn't share that with anyone except my parents who who i shared that with and it's a hard thing to admit and it's also a very common thing it's it's it's a theme in some of my.
00:09:39
Speaker
journey the last several years, but also I've talked to a lot of different lawyers about that as well. And especially post pandemic, you know, completely. I mean, the way you're loneliness, but I think that it even goes beyond the pandemic for for me, it was so deep rooted in my
00:09:57
Speaker
perfectionism, and it became this chicken and egg thing because I worked so, so, so, so hard, which of course prevented me from nurturing social connection. And I remember even looking at friends in law school who would go out for
00:10:18
Speaker
dinner with their significant other or gasp, go home for the weekend or something, spend that with them. And I would have this feeling of superiority. Like, oh, they're just not as committed. They're not as driven as I am. So I've got this. But because of that, so you squeeze out everything. But then it came to the point where in law school, and this is fast forwarding, but I remember once I had my clerkships, once my grades truly did not matter anymore,
00:10:47
Speaker
I still felt the need to kill myself to get straight honors. That's how that works out. Yeah, because there was nothing else in my life that point except for my immaculate academic record. It sounds like it was the lifeblood. It was what was filling you up. Look, you're at a top law school. It wasn't filling me up at all. Oh, wow.
00:11:14
Speaker
But it was just that I had nothing else because I had sacrificed everything to get this thing. And so it's like, well, if I don't maintain it, then I literally have nothing. But in the effort of trying to maintain that, you're, of course, closing yourself off from cultivating anything else in your life that will do it. And just to show you the extent to which it wasn't my lifeblood, this was something that
00:11:35
Speaker
I happened to be in college. I remember there was this neuroscience class that I was in that was really, really, really hard, especially for the psych kids. And I had spent so much time locked away studying for it. And again, in college, I was super, super, super lonely. I was going through challenging social circumstances to which I responded by doubling down on my schoolwork. Because that was the thing that as long as I worked hard enough, I could perfect that and make that good.
00:12:03
Speaker
And I remember the teacher announced like, oh yeah, the average on this test was 60%. And they gave me the exams back and I hadn't a hundred. And I went home and I just burst into tears because that didn't make me feel good at all.
00:12:18
Speaker
all of this time focusing on this thing, I get it and I'm still lonely. That was all I wanted. Coming back to law school in second year, I was having this panic about the stress of the clerkships. I was still lonely. I was not well really in many senses of that word. Then I spent my too well summer at Davis Polk.
00:12:44
Speaker
I just remember I get there and I wasn't happy and I saw so many other people that didn't seem happy either. No one seemed to care. It was just accepted that that's what it was. That summer I had
00:13:03
Speaker
Basically, at the behest of my father, agreed to start seeing a therapist because I was like, all right, if I don't figure out something, I'm just like, this hamster is going to blow up during this. I need something to take the edge off of my anxiety. So I started working with a therapist, and it was a therapist whose training was really rooted both in cognitive behavioral therapy, but also mindfulness, which is something that I hadn't done at all.
00:13:28
Speaker
up until that point. And the one thing that she did, she did a lot of things. But the one thing that I view as being a really kind of pivotal moment in all of this for me was that she had me do a very, very basic values discovery exercise. Okay. Basically, she gave me this list of like 100 values. And she said, Check off everything that resonates with you, and then narrow it down to your top five, the things that are five things that are most important to you. And so
00:13:58
Speaker
I did that. And then she was asking me questions basically being like, all right, now let's reflect on to what extent what you're doing with your time and your life and your energy aligns with those and is furthering those. And that was
00:14:13
Speaker
a bit mind boggling for me because there was two things. So first of all, so my top values were things like love, connection, learning, trust, loyalty. These were all the top. Connection and love were the top two. Oh my gosh. And meanwhile, I am the loneliest person on earth spending 99% of my time working myself into the ground to become a criminal prosecutor. Right.
00:14:43
Speaker
There's no alignment there. Right. It's not a job in which love is
Transition to Academia and Positive Psychology
00:14:48
Speaker
one of the main characteristics they look for. I'm not saying you can't be loving as a prosecutor. Maybe you can, but it's not really... I don't hear achievement or justice in your top five there, which is what you really want to see for something like that.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah. And so the long-term goal didn't match up. And in the short term, I was sacrificing all of my values. So that was one thing. But the even kind of more mind-boggling part of it for me was I had never once in my life stopped to consider what my values were. It seemed irrelevant to me. Honestly, it didn't matter what I cared about. What mattered was doing the
00:15:23
Speaker
prestigious thing, doing a successful thing, looking good to others, pleasing others, impressing others. And I can relate to that part just for our listeners from a different perspective, but for me, the achievement and the getting A's and, you know, being co valedictorian of high school and all, it was serving a purpose. It was like, I just bought into that. And it's not that I didn't, you know, like academics. I mean, I did
00:15:48
Speaker
But I bought into all of that because it was sort of my ticket out. I went to school in a small town in South Georgia. And I'm like, how do I get out of here? How do I go to a good college? You sort of just buy into that all that kind of stuff. And like, this will deliver me and it does for a while. And you don't want to not, you know, getting to go to a good college and good law school. That's great. But it's amazing that you were able to get that sort of moment of, wait a minute, how did I get here? And is it where I want to be?
00:16:15
Speaker
So, and you're right, it is different because I wasn't trying to go, it was never a means to an end for me. It was always just like the next shiny star, the next shiny star. And then the scary thing is extrapolating out further because I dealt with that even once I stopped practicing law.
00:16:36
Speaker
which was that every time I ever reached the shiny thing, I would then panic because, of course, this is all bound up in imposter syndrome. And it's like, well, how am I now everyone expects me to do the next shiny thing, right? And how am I going to do that? Like, how am I going to show them I'm not a one hit wonder was always exactly.
00:16:55
Speaker
reminds me of what they uh there were some famous quotes when Brady won I guess maybe it's his fourth or fifth Super Bowl and he sort of realized like and now what you know like got four rings and now what do I do or Dion Sanders kind of came out with some of that like I think he may have actually attempted suicide at some point in time if I'm not mistaken.
00:17:15
Speaker
um because it because of that pressure because it's isolating that's the other thing that kind of success can be sort of isolating because you get in this rare air and then everybody else is kind of you know gunning for for what they're after as well totally and so i was i'm just seeing all of this you know kind of flash behind before my eyes when i'm in law school and it was funny because i was one of the youngest youngest people in my law school class because i went straight through from undergrad which is
00:17:40
Speaker
That's rare. Yeah. Yeah. I think like 50% of the class was at least three years out, like 20% were, you know, five plus years out. There was a childcare on daycare on campus. And I had this moment because I just saw the writing on the wall because I had been so intense my entire life up into that point and so willing to just forsake everything for this, you know, pursuit of perfect that I realized was
00:18:10
Speaker
a road to nowhere, except burnout. And so I had this kind of like, if not now,
00:18:17
Speaker
when moment. If I'm not going to, at first it started with, I was like, okay, in 10 years, once I am the chief of a unit at the attorney's office, then I can transition out and do something that I really want. And then it was like, okay, maybe five years, 10 sounds like a lot. Or like when I have kids, you know, that'll be a really acceptable time for me to transition out. And then I was just like, you know what, I am doing these two clerkships. Two years feels like a really long time.
00:18:47
Speaker
after that, I'm going to do something different. And I was still in law school when I made that decision. And I remember this because I started telling people and there were very small number of people who were like, oh, that's really cool. And everyone else was basically like,
00:19:03
Speaker
Why? Someone that I really looked up to and respected at the time even said to me, Jordana, is this a guy problem? Are you afraid that, you know, men are going to be intimidated by a powerful woman? No, I just I just want to be happy. And so that was when it really when it really started for me, the quest for something different. And honestly, at first, when I was like looking for something different, I wasn't looking for anything
00:19:32
Speaker
in legal education or psychology relating to what I'm doing now, I was just looking for what is the job that I can find in law that will have required me to work the least number of hours per day so that I can be happy outside of work. Because I, at that point, honestly, I equated work.
00:19:50
Speaker
with unhappiness um work with some something that you have to do not something that you want to do and so i did a lot of asking because for me looking at the the path i was looking at which was big law and right office both of those things you know they kind of dominate your life and so i was right i'm not actually gonna you know
00:20:09
Speaker
Enjoy the work itself because it's not aligned with my values It's not along with my strengths makes me super anxious and i'm gonna have no time outside of it So let me find something that's at least containable and while I was having this existential crisis and talking to every lawyer who I thought, you know had a Decent work-life balance, which i'll say in the new york area is very hard to say Where did you go to find such? I don't know kansas like somewhere else was the was the answer truly? um and and so I
00:20:38
Speaker
just fortuitously, I ended up having a conversation with the Dean of Students at Yale, because I had been very involved with student groups, especially during my third year once I relaxed a little bit. And I basically realized that she was effectively the social psychologist or the psychologist for the law school, and she had a law degree. And I was like, wow, you know, this is something I can do.
00:21:02
Speaker
connecting with the thing that interested me before it's my JD won't be irrelevant. I want to be a dean of students. And so then during my clerkships, I did a lot of volunteering basically in any school counseling office that would take me and I was fortunate enough to get a job at Columbia Law School in student services after my second clerkship. Okay. But but I had to during my second clerkship, I was looking for jobs and I was looking at that time both at jobs,
00:21:29
Speaker
in law schools and then also in law firm professional development roles, which I viewed as, you know, could be a stepping stone for me to get to a law school if I couldn't get one at the time because I wanted to stay in New York at that point. And you're talking about a career in terms of professional development that was really just starting to catch and even be a thing at that point in time. That's when I was teaching law school around that time, around 12 to 15.
00:21:56
Speaker
But before that, when I was in a mid-sized law firm, we didn't have a professional development person. We had like 40 lawyers, but there was no such thing. And I didn't know about much of that at even the larger law firms. It was still kind of people were pioneering that to say there is such a thing.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, and there were no jobs. I remember I was reaching out to people being like, so I'm interested in doing this type of work for you. And they're like, we'll pay you three times that to come in as a third year litigation associate. And I was like, no, that's not what I want. And so I actually ended up turning down.
00:22:26
Speaker
the offer to return to Davis Polk before I had found what I was going to do. Which is scary. Which is a little scary. Which is scary. And then it was a lot scary. And also, I will say that applying for jobs in higher ed was the most humbling, maybe the most humbling experience I've ever had because I was a hotshot, I thought, in my mind. I was coming from Yale Law School. I had these two super competitive clerkships.
00:22:55
Speaker
No one cared about that in the higher ed world. They're like, but you have a master's in higher ed jobs that paid in New York at the time, $50,000 a year. And I just was getting ghosted left and right and left and right and left and right. And thank goodness I actually got ghosted for a lot of jobs that were nowhere near as good of a fit for me as the one that I ultimately ended up getting. And real quick before you go there, I'm curious, so how did you approach the clerkships given that you knew
00:23:23
Speaker
It was going to be very solitary. It was the thing that gave you the most stress and anxiety of just having to sit there and crank stuff up. Did you do anything different to make that tolerable? It's really interesting because I'm always telling my students that there are so many different stages of my journey of self-discovery and self-realization and self-actualization and self-betterment and all those things.
00:23:51
Speaker
I had come to this epiphany when I was in law school that was enough to make me kind of start taking steps to change course. But I saw all of my deep-seated perfectionism, workaholism, all those things were still there. And so the one thing that changed before the clerkships was that I actually had this magical period. So I took the bar in the end of July.
00:24:20
Speaker
and I didn't start my first clerkship until the end of October. I had that window. When I first came to New York after being in New Haven for seven straight years, I went on the dating apps. I was like, I am the world's loneliest person
00:24:40
Speaker
And there was no one in New Haven. I'm in New York and I just need to find someone. And I knew that bar setting was going to get intense. So like, I came back and I went on a gazillion dates and so many of them were horrible. Oh, let's just call it a thousand horrible dates. And I went on a first date with Zach, my current husband. Let's say he was date a thousand and one. I still remember it was June 2nd because
00:25:02
Speaker
There's another podcast in there, by the way. I think you can just do a podcast of just your journey through that. That would be interesting. It was horrible. It was so bad. It was so, so bad. But in any event, Date 1001, I met Zach. And this is June 2nd. It's the day after my birthday, so I remember, which is getting close-ish to the bar.
00:25:22
Speaker
And I thought we were never going to go out again at the first few days. I was like, never going to work. It's never going to work. In any event, somehow, I just keep doing it a date a week because that was the most that I would let myself do during the prep for the bar exam. And I ended up really liking him. And then after the bar exam, I knew that I had this window. And I was like, all right. And I said to myself, not him at the time, I'm going underground come October because I knew that my
00:25:48
Speaker
The judge that I was clerking for is one of the most intense judges on the Southern District and that I was not going to see the light of day for a year. Wow. And so I said, I got to make this guy fall in love with me before the end of October so that he can, you know, is fine not seeing me for a year. Yay for values alignment though. Yay for values alignment. You knew, hey, I need to do something with this window.
00:26:12
Speaker
Well, I remember talking about this with my therapist actually in this period leading up to it. And I was like, I wish I hadn't. And this was like right before the clerkship. And this is one, so I made them fall in love with me. We're doing good. But now I'm going to this clerkship. And I actually had to say, I wish that this relationship
00:26:29
Speaker
didn't exist because now I'm panicking about what to do in my clerkship because normally I would go into the situation and really just say, all right, goodbye world. I'll see you in a year. This is going to take every ounce of everything I have. But here for the first time in at least seven years, I have something to lose. What in the world do I do with this?
00:26:51
Speaker
What does it look like to make room or make space for another person on the regular? And what I'll say is I made very little space. I just had the world's most patient and wonderful husband. I made very, very little space for him that year. But I made just enough to keep him around until afterwards. But I will say that that year, because of the way that I am wired or that I was
00:27:21
Speaker
you know, raised to be, even though I knew that I didn't want to pursue law beyond those clerkships, I gave them 150. Right. You were not capable of mailing it in. Like I remember a friend, a friend of mine went later in life back to seminary and he had been a pretty high achiever during undergrad. I think somebody, but he had gotten married and now he's in school and somebody told him, Hey,
00:27:46
Speaker
You might, it's okay if you don't get age, you know, like there's not like people necessarily judging you, you know, and it's getting not saying do crappy work, but what if, you know, is it worth it? Just raises that question. Is it worth sacrificing the other parts of your life that are important? And now that you have something else that's important,
00:28:04
Speaker
What does that mean? And so what I did, honestly, was I mean, I gave I in those clerkships, I really ended up sacrificing a lot of myself because that was the first time so my brain had been sending me danger signals for years now. I told you about the anxiety. It was in the clerkships that for the first time my body started sending out physical flares. What was that? And what did that look like?
00:28:27
Speaker
chronic pain, GI issues, all sorts of things that like a 25 year old shouldn't have. And so those were things that then honestly I ended up having to address because my body was just saying, nope, you're pushing us too, too, too hard. And that was a lot that
00:28:50
Speaker
When I, so it was during the clerkships, I think it was during the second clerkship when that all happened that I, my, again, at my therapist, a lot of my best, my best life decisions were recommended to me by my therapist. And that was when she introduced me to the concept of self-compassion, which I had never
00:29:08
Speaker
thought about before, never heard before. I subsequently,
Curriculum Development and Student Engagement
00:29:11
Speaker
once I survived the clerkships, then that's when I did the positive psych certification. I learned a lot more about these things, but she just introduced me to this concept of self-compassion. And that was at a point where I was really burnt out and broken down during my second clerkship when a bunch of the physical things were wearing their ugly heads. And I just
00:29:32
Speaker
try to react to it in the way that my brain is always wanting to react to. When things aren't going right, just push harder. Just try harder. That's what I was doing with myself. One of the things I relate to about that is it literally feels like it's in the last few years that I have gotten the concept that
00:29:50
Speaker
The brain is actually consuming energy, okay? If I go and do a workout and I like punch a punching bag or I lift weights or something, I feel it. My muscles tell me you're doing something we haven't been doing. This hurts, you know? I know tiredness from physical, partly because the physical is always harder for me growing up. I was not the greatest athlete. I do some stuff now. But thinking and
00:30:17
Speaker
writing and arguing and talking always came so easy and they were my stock in trade but i never really grass the concept yeah but those are taking energy to your brain is actually spending energy and i remember when somebody introduced me to cut up your spend attention attention is a finite resource and you might spend it all and then you're out and i'm like what
00:30:37
Speaker
Not even just attention, but take all of that energy that you're expending by working and then put on top of it the fact that you're beating the shit out of yourself mentally the whole time. You're not working hard enough. You're not doing well enough. Like that, that itself. So it's like there was a one thing, it's like the working yourself to death, but it's also beating yourself to a pulp simultaneously. Then when you start to stall out,
00:31:06
Speaker
most, many people in this camp, they'll just be trying to beat themselves into submission. Well, and if you don't do it to yourself, oftentimes in law, there's going to be somebody else who come along and either say, hey, to keep up, you really got to do this, or that's not good enough, darn it. Where's your A game? Totally. And so the internal and external pressure combination, I mean, that hamster is now like a nuclear reactor.
00:31:29
Speaker
You know, and it does not work. And what my therapist said to me was she said, Jordana, if you had a racehorse that had physically broken down and could not move from exhaustion, would you just keep whipping it to try to get it to get up and go faster? And I was like, No. And she's like, Okay, then then then why? Why are you doing that to yourself? And that's a really interesting question. And so basically,
00:31:55
Speaker
She ultimately persuaded me again, so many of the times when I've given these things a shot, it was because nothing else was working and I was desperate. It was like, why not? To try adopting a self-compassion practice. And that actually was the very earliest entree into a lot of the stuff that I'm now teaching to my students and doing
00:32:17
Speaker
Doing in my in my coaching tell us a little bit about that. So the first you you were you had mentioned trying to get into higher ed Law school it sounds like you were even in other things besides law specifically. Yeah. Oh, yeah How did you finally get your way into something where you could pursue? Kind of teaching and some of the psychology things you love that sort of thing
00:32:37
Speaker
Totally. So I actually, I temped at Columbia the summer, that summer when I was making Zach fall in love with me, I wasn't just making him fall in love with me. I was also temping at Columbia because I had, this is something I often people come to me now for coaching on.
00:32:53
Speaker
career transitions and things. And so I had a very methodical approach to, I made a list of 60 people in the city with jobs whose jobs interested in me. And I informational interviewed them. And one of them at the time was the clerkship director at Columbia law school. And she basically offered me to come temp in the office of student services. So I did that, ultimately got a job in the office of student services after my second clerkship.
00:33:16
Speaker
Okay. What was that first job? What were you doing actually? It was the assistant director of academic counseling. And so through that I did academic advising and student personal counseling, which is the personal counseling that I really, really wanted to do. My second year at Columbia, this is kind of ironic. They ended up needing me to serve as the acting clerkship director, which is just funny given knowing my whole, my whole history. And so that was honestly something that I didn't love because I really wanted to be in student services,
00:33:46
Speaker
the student-facing work. I was still there, but I was doing this other work too.
00:33:52
Speaker
during the first year at Columbia. So during my clerkships, actually earlier than that, during some point, actually during my clerkships, right after law school, I was Googling how to be happy because obviously what else do you do when you're totally unhappy? You Google it. And I discovered this thing called positive psychology, which is basically the science of human happiness, human flourishing. And I became obsessed. And so I was always reading for my spare time, all of these positive psychology articles and books and things like that.
00:34:22
Speaker
And I discovered that there was this six-month certification program in positive psychology that was being offered at this place, the New York Open Center in New York City. And it was a weekend intensive program. So you would go for an intensive weekend every month for six months, and then you have in between an online learning things. And I did that. It was
00:34:43
Speaker
the fall semester of my first year at Columbia. And I was the only lawyer in the program and everyone else was, you know, healthcare, teaching, nurses, coaching. And it blew my mind because basically I was presented with all of this rigorous scientific findings that showed that literally everything that I believed about
00:35:10
Speaker
happiness, well-being, success, peak performance, everything was totally wrong. Upside down and backwards. No one had ever told me these things before and I was 99% sure that every lawyer and law student that I'd ever met needed this and didn't have it and no one was giving it to them. As my capstone project for that class, for that program, I developed a
00:35:35
Speaker
what I called a positive lawyering syllabus, which is basically a syllabus for an academic course on positive psychology. Oh, that's wonderful. And that at that point became my dream. I was like, I want to develop and I want to teach this course. And so at that point, you know, I just stowed that away. It was there as like a sort of a pipe dream, but then fast forward a couple of years and I had gotten super involved with different committees at the city bar and
00:36:03
Speaker
the wife of the chair of one of the committees I was on happened to work. She was a dean at Fortnum Law School. Okay. And through committee networking events, she knew that I was super passionate about lawyer wellbeing and the positive psychology for law students. And so we connected a few years later and she said, listen, Fortnum just came out with this new strategic plan and
00:36:28
Speaker
They want to create a whole office focused on student professional identity formation, including well-being. They want someone to come help build out that program. Yes. You should talk to my boss. And so I did, and I learned more about what they wanted to do. I learned that they would be supportive of me developing and teaching classes, and it just seemed like
00:36:51
Speaker
a tremendous opportunity. Also, the year before that, I had worked with the... So just around this time, it was perfect timing because this is all in 2019, then I went over to Fordham. Two years before that, the ABA Task Force on Lawyer Wellbeing had issued its groundbreaking... Yes, yes.
00:37:15
Speaker
with a whole bunch of recommendations for employers, law schools, all the same. Right. High at that point was the member of the ABA Collapse Law School Assistance Committee. And what we did was that committee did a nationwide survey of law schools on what were they doing to basically heed the task force's recommendations for law schools. Right. In other words, the ABA task force had come out with
00:37:39
Speaker
And it was very comprehensive with all these recommendations at every phase. They weren't just saying individual lawyers do this. They were saying law firms do this, legal education, continuing legal education. I was in CLE, still am at that time. And we were devouring this going, okay, this feels great. This is like a mandate for what Michael and I had been doing with real time for a long time. And so you're measuring and going, okay, here's what ABA wants to see. Who's doing anything that's anywhere close? And what did you find in looking at that?
00:38:07
Speaker
And so I found that some schools, there were a handful of schools that were doing really, really innovative, cool stuff, often in different buckets. Some schools had really interesting courses. Other schools had really interesting orientation programs. Others had really great resources. So there was all of these different recommendations that different schools were doing.
00:38:30
Speaker
cool things. And then a lot of schools were doing like, you know, one or two things. And so basically, what I was charged with doing was going through all of this data and one first writing up, you know, what percentage of schools are doing these different things, but then also doing a deeper dive, doing interviews with people at all of the schools that were really leading the charge in these areas to identify those particular methods and all.
00:38:56
Speaker
Totally. And shining light on best practices. So I wrote this super lengthy article. It was published in the Journal of Legal Education. It was basically like, here's all of the- And it's a great article, by the way. I have read it and it is actually fantastic because there's almost nowhere else that does this. You would think there would be some kind of comprehensive clearing house or a way of looking at this stuff and measuring it, but there's really not other than this real study that you guys did.
00:39:19
Speaker
Well, I'll say that and it was super valuable for me too because here I am coming into this new job at a school where they're basically like develop this program from the ground up and I had just written this lengthy article on all of the best practices. So I had so many ideas and I found myself in this unicorn of a school that was so excited and so committed to this work and so supportive of
00:39:45
Speaker
you know me helping me do it and galvanizing the community to build it and so that was just you know the best moving over in that way and taking that role has been was such a tremendous opportunity that has allowed me to do all of
00:40:01
Speaker
all of the incredible work that really I've been able to do since then. And what did they call the position? Tell people what is your position and what's the class that you taught that you got to get that syllabus out that you had developed. Absolutely. Tell us about that class.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah. So at that I was hired to be the director of professionalism. And so they created this office of professionalism. I'm now the assistant dean of professionalism and an adjunct professor. And so at Ford, I'm in addition. So in my assistant dean of professionalism role, I oversee all of our co-curricular offerings that we have this robust mandatory curriculum for one else now on professional identity formation. There's a lot of wellness components, big
00:40:45
Speaker
into that. And then in my adjunct professor role, I teach two different courses. So one is a course on peer mentoring and leadership. And the other one is the positive layering course. And teaching that class, developing and teaching that class has hands down been the most amazing thing I've done professionally.
00:41:04
Speaker
to date with the exception of now I experience the same rush when when I'm doing doing the coaching work and it was a class that led me to it and I'll tell you more about that but the class basically what it does is it walks students through the fundamental insights and strategies of positive psychology
00:41:27
Speaker
presented in the context of the legal profession and the unique stresses, challenges, all of the things that make wellbeing that much harder in the legal profession. And importantly, it shows them not... So the material that we study, it starts by showing them the link between their personal wellbeing
00:41:53
Speaker
and they are academic in their professional performance. So you start with like, why should we care beyond just a humanitarian issue? And then it walks them through the fundamental elements of wellbeing. And so things like meaning and purpose, engagement, relationships, achievement in a values-based way, positive emotions, and how to cultivate those things. And then another thing that I've brought into it is a lot of work that it's not,
00:42:20
Speaker
I lump it together with positive psychology because I consider it foundational elements for human flourishing, but it's not just straight positive psychology. It's a lot of stuff from coaching and from CBT. And so this is one of my favorite things to teach is
00:42:36
Speaker
unpacking perfectionism and reining that in and cultivating self-compassion as a mindset and looking at so many of the limiting beliefs and tendencies that hold high achieving professionals and lawyers back not only from being happy, but actually being as successful and as effective as they possibly could be. And so teaching this class is just, oh gosh, it's been
00:43:07
Speaker
It's been so wonderful. And the best part is seeing the transformation that the students have over the course of the semester. And because they
Positive Psychology in Legal Education
00:43:16
Speaker
come in, now the class has garnered a reputation. And so it caps out super, super quickly. And students really want to take it. But still, they come in skeptical on the first day. Sure. Sure. They're still like, what is this going to be? Right.
00:43:30
Speaker
So what is this going to be? Do you have to believe in it in order for it to work? This is a little woo woo, especially in certain classes more and more than others. And then just seeing how it impacts them over the course of the semester. And virtually all of the evaluations say the same thing. They say this is not anything I've ever taken in law school.
00:43:52
Speaker
And this is more important than anything i've ever taken this class should be mandatory for every single because you're still dealing with high achievers people i mean if you've gotten the law school at fordom you have knocked it out of the park you succeeded at a level so you get a lot of people who you can.
00:44:10
Speaker
What I love is you can recognize your young self in them. And you have this passion to want to like, hey, let me save you some of the challenges. Let me save you or give you some tools to deal with some of the challenges that I know you're going to run into. That's part of I think what about everything you do that resonates with me. That's sort of my passion as well. My CLE business came about because it's like there are so many things I didn't learn in law school that are really important, that really make a difference.
00:44:37
Speaker
in addition to the subject knowledge and all the argument and persuasion all that and that's how i start doing silly programs is like we should tell people this we should find a way to let them know you gotta have some emotional intelligence you gotta have a radar for what your values are because what are you gonna do when those values come into conflict with one another and you can't have them all.
00:44:57
Speaker
And people often say, oh, are you telling us all that we should leave the law? And I say, no, absolutely not. I want to tell you, teach you what I didn't know before you burn out and feel like you have no other option but to do. Because the truth is that I think that if I had approached
00:45:16
Speaker
my work with a different mindset and with different tools, I could have been happy doing it. I could have been happy and I could have been healthy doing it. Part of it is when you're thinking about values work is like, oh, well, what job do you want? But so much of it is just like, how do you treat yourself and how do you show up in the world regardless of where you are or what you're doing? Really, it's fortifying them to be able to do this work that they came here to do.
00:45:44
Speaker
And so say a bit about we have some listeners who are going to hear positive psychology and know what that is. We may have some who are like positive psychology is that like it's like Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and like like be optimistic about everything is it I'm just positive and like you get you know crapped on and some terrible happens like but it's okay it's not that right it's more robust than that can you kind of distinguish that for folks.
00:46:05
Speaker
Definitely, definitely more robust than that. The term that I get the most is, is it toxic positivity? Absolutely not. I often tell my students, first of all, just explain what positive psychology is. Basically, it was created in the 90s by Marty Seligman, who was then the
00:46:21
Speaker
president of the American Psychological Association. And up until that point, all traditional psychology had surrounded around the disease model. So diagnosing and treating mental illness. Yes. Disorder-oriented. Exactly. Disorder-oriented. And what Marty Sullivan said, he's like, well, we need to expand our focus beyond just treating the negative and look
00:46:39
Speaker
I start studying the factors that give rise to optimal human functioning or to flourishing. And so instead of just focusing on bringing people from negative 10 or a depressed anxious to zero neutral, how do we get people from zero to five or even to positive 10? And really importantly, cultivating
00:47:00
Speaker
positivity or promoting optimal human functioning or flourishing, it doesn't at all involve ignoring the negative or denying the negative. In fact, so many things show that for theories like post-traumatic growth in order to go on after a trauma and actually
00:47:23
Speaker
Build a more meaningful, fulfilling life, which is what they call post-traumatic growth. You have to first acknowledge and nurse the pain and support is essential to that. It's not one or the other, but it's like, how do we bring more positive into our life? Because if you think of it this way, if you have something that's negative and so it's
00:47:47
Speaker
I mean, it's negative. So it's draining, draining something, right? There's if you add positive in addition to it without pretending denying that the negative is there, you're still increasing the level of positivity overall. And so we can learn how to cultivate
00:48:06
Speaker
positive, we can increase our well-being even without obliterating the negative, which is good because we can't always get rid of the negatives. Sure, sometimes we can, and that's great. We should do that. But there's ways to cultivate the positive separate and distinct from that. And so things like
00:48:25
Speaker
social connection, finding ways to have feelings of meaning and purpose in what we're doing, like we're doing mattering. If you're doing something that is hard and painful, but you have some sense that what you're doing is rooted and supporting one of your values, or that by doing it, you're somehow connecting with another person in a positive way, it makes it that much more
00:48:50
Speaker
bearable, that much more powerful, even meaningful and worthwhile. And so it is focusing on those types of things and benefits in doing so. So some people like so for instance, I thought that you know, what's the what's the point of like relationship seems frivolous if
00:49:08
Speaker
as did doing anything that just, you know, positive emotions that made me happy, that I thought were funny, things like that. I was like, Oh, that's a waste of time. That's a gluttonous, you know, I have to put off all of these things that will give me a sense of joy and fulfillment in the moment.
00:49:24
Speaker
in order to get where I want to go. And what the science shows is that all of those things actually turbocharge our engagement and also see our productivity and our performance. Also something that I think is so important, going back to what we were talking about before with the chasing gold stars, scientifically shown hedonic adaptation or the hedonic treadmill effect, which is that external achievements or changing our external surroundings, setting these external goals
00:49:55
Speaker
They do not actually make us happy for any mean amount of time because even if there's a very, very, you know, brief increase in happiness, when we get what we want, it ultimately goes back to baseline because we acclimate our brains actually acclimate and then we're on, we recalibrate and then we want. And you've got to get a dopamine hit, you know, to put it in the science terms, you got to get a dopamine hit the same way. Sounds like you're building a lot on the work of people like Larry Krieger down at Florida State.
00:50:24
Speaker
and Sheldon who did, they did a landmark study on what is it that makes lawyers and law students happy and they first have to rescue, hey, that's not a crazy goal. It's okay to actually want to have a happy life and happy doesn't mean happy, happy joy, joy. I don't notice that, you know, that stuff is happening. It's more resilient, it's related I guess to resilience and adaptability.
00:50:46
Speaker
Totally. I mean, if you look at, um, there's so many studies in the area of positive psychology that show when they measure people over time, people that were happier at point one, follow them 10 years later, they're making more money. They're more successful in their careers than people who were less happy at that time because
00:51:05
Speaker
these elements of well-being actually drive success rather than the other way around and the people that have those breakdowns when they're just totally depressed because they've spent their entire life chasing these goals. They've gotten every single one of them and they're still not happy. It's often because they've been making their worth and their fulfillment contingent on these extrinsic things and ignoring all of these other foundational
00:51:35
Speaker
Elements of well being in the process and so like a question that this is something I heard in my when I fast forward did my coach training program and so it was just you know bringing things full circle here it was teaching the positive layering course and recognizing that I was spending like.
00:51:51
Speaker
20 hours a week in office hours with my students talking about how they could apply these things in their own lives. Couple that with the fact that when my students graduated, they were calling me and being like, A, I would not be surviving at my law firm if I didn't take your class. Two, we need more support like this out in the world. So all of that- Because what you're talking about is not just information that you receive. Okay, now you have to kind of practice-
00:52:19
Speaker
Oh my gosh, yeah. But some of these changes of mindset or how you deal with things when something, you know, a challenge comes up and maybe you get kind of an equilibrium that's working, but then you get a different set of circumstances. You have to maintain it. You've got to adapt to that. This is why my blog is called Chronicles of a Recovering type, A plus. Right. Because when I don't practice these things, I lose it too. Right.
00:52:41
Speaker
I mean, it's almost selfish that I love teaching this so much because whenever I'm teaching it, I practice it so much more myself because it keeps it top of mind. Oh, but I was mentioning the coaching. So in my coach training, they said something I thought was really profound. They said, what is your goal? And they asked us to state whatever the goal is, the thing that we are going for. Sure.
00:53:03
Speaker
And then they said, and how do you expect that you'll feel when you achieve that goal? And so, you know, and then they said, the thing that you said to the first question, your answer to the first question, that's not your real goal. Your real goal is that feeling. Oh, interesting.
Leadership and Work Environment in Law
00:53:20
Speaker
And if you ask yourself, you know, how many times in the past did you say, I'll just have that feeling when? Yes.
00:53:28
Speaker
And then how long did that feeling actually last before you move the goal post and so then the question becomes so how can we create that it's that feeling that we're all chasing. How can we create that feeling now because the answer is we can create that feeling now and if we can't and if we don't.
00:53:45
Speaker
we're never going to have that feeling in the future. We keep just saying, oh, if I get this thing, I will. And so it's looking at, you know, how can we take ownership of how we want to feel and then how can we start cultivating that both by designing our lives, but also really working on how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to the world around us, because so much of it is about mindset rather than changing external circumstances.
00:54:15
Speaker
And that's that is building very much on what Krieger talked about. I know and when I was a law professor, we tried to put that, you know, kind of instill that into the students as well. It's not just about the next brass ring, the next achievement for all of those reasons, because, A, you don't necessarily have control of whether you get the next one or the next job or whatever.
00:54:35
Speaker
And B, yeah, when you get there, it may not be all that you want it to be. And and then maybe it is for a while, but then circumstances will change. And so that all those skills, I love hearing that law schools are getting more and more open to focusing on that, you know, and that the ABA's recent mandate now is saying we want students to have meaningful opportunity for professional identity formation. And that has to include
00:55:03
Speaker
well-being as a component and strategies and meaningful opportunities. It's not just, let's tell them about it and make sure they remember it, but rather we've got to lab it. We've got to do it in experiential settings.
00:55:14
Speaker
Totally. Every class, there's the teaching component and then in between, the students always have positive interventions. Those are the things that they're supposed to go home and do and then reflect on in their journals. Every single week, they're doing that. They're turning in their positive intervention logs. Similarly, with my coaching, it's not just, we have a conversation, then you go. Then you go and there's always something to practice, to do, and then to reflect on because positive psychology is not a discipline where you
00:55:43
Speaker
Study it and you run it. It's you practice it and you have to fail I mean you have to yeah, you have to sort of fail and debrief. How did that go? Why didn't it go? Well, what were the obstacles you even learn about yourself as you do that? Um, yeah, I had a conference a conversation with a woman. I met a lawyer And another lawyer not ended up at a symposium that Wake Forest just put on it was phenomenal It was about the Wake Forest Law Review has symposium on professional identity development and the future of legal education experiential education all that
00:56:13
Speaker
Not this woman who basically had done lots of ip no sorry pharmaceutical related litigation done it for years and years and she actually was recruited to come to a different firm that was a competitor because they knew they needed somebody like her because she was not just a brilliant litigator but she was sort of had that
00:56:32
Speaker
kind of mother hen sort of nurturing of the younger lawyers and kind of supporting them and they realize they're like we don't have anybody who's doing that. We're all a bunch of barracudas and all we can do is be barracudas and we can tell this is not working for our young baby barracudas. They're like can you come and give them some hope and some guidance? Yeah. And she said when she told about real quick story one of the first thing that she did was a young associate comes in
00:56:59
Speaker
And it's like, I got my first deposition, you know, of an expert witness. And she's like, okay, well, how you feeling? She's like, I'm just really nervous. I'm really nervous. I'm really scared. And she said, well, walk me through, tell me what you've done. And she, you know, she had prepared and she had read everything. And this expert had been deposed a lot. And so the senior lawyer said, sounds like you're ready, ready to go. What are you afraid of? And she said, I'm just afraid I'm going to make a mistake. I'm screwed up. She said, well, you are.
00:57:23
Speaker
You are. I mean, that's okay, though. You know, that happens. Like, but you can't lose the case. Like, you're not gonna, you know, you can't make a mistake in this setting that's gonna, you know, wreck everything. But that's where her brain had gone. Like, oh, my gosh, so much pressure. And just somebody to be that messenger to say, Hey, look, there, you know, step back perspective, because you don't you can't do it when you're in it.
00:57:47
Speaker
Well, I think, I mean, you just touched on two really important things that are all both missing from legal education. So one is growth mindset. So no one teaches growth mindset, which I think is one of the most important professional identity formation skills for anyone, not just lawyers and law students are particularly tend towards fixed mindset and
00:58:10
Speaker
they avoid feedback. And law school is terrible with feedback. There's very few opportunities for feedback. And so for that reason, lots of law students graduate having received very little feedback, not wanting feedback. Looking at feedback is something to be avoided from or to hide from. When they get it, as opposed to unpacking it as a gift, basically a roadmap to helping you identify how you can get
00:58:32
Speaker
improved. So that's one real important thing. And I teach that in both of my classes and in our professional identity formation co-curriculum. The other thing that you're getting at though about the baby barracudas not being inspired and motivated by the senior barracudas is something that is so important
00:58:50
Speaker
for all law firms and all organizations to learn. And I teach this as a leadership skill because one of the key theories in positive psychology and Larry Kruger has written a lot about this is self-determination theory, which is what are the key pillars, not just of well-being, but of engagement, of what motivates people to do their best work. And it's not like a draconian Machiavellian type, you know, beat you into submission, scare you into doing your work, best work.
00:59:19
Speaker
Actually, people are most engaged. They do their best work when they have a sense of autonomy, mastery, relatedness. And that relatedness, like how do we give people a sense of belonging and connection, that sense of autonomy? How do we make them feel like they matter and that their work matters? And how can we give them a sense of mastery and competence? How can we imbue them with these positive things? And that will motivate them to do their best work, not scaring them out of their wit.
00:59:48
Speaker
that you'll get them to comply, but they'll be so anxious and so nervous that they can't possibly show up with their best selves. And they'll be so risk averse that while they might be able to execute on the basic task that they've learned over and over again, they'll never actually add value in any way and therefore can never actually be leaders or innovate or anything like that. And so it's so interesting as we
01:00:15
Speaker
you know, think about the future of legal education and innovation and future of legal. Like, if we want to be forward looking, we're going to have to give up some of these perfectionist fixed mindset tendencies that are keeping us in these locked little boxes of just kind of repeating the same thing over and over and over again. And we're also going to have to get rid of the idea of, well, I suffered through XYZ, so everybody should have to. Like, that's just nonsensical mindset.
01:00:41
Speaker
I tell these stories and I won't go into the details of it, but in a lot of our workshops, I worked for two law firms, one right after the other, and one was more of a criticism, negative. Notice how we're doing well and you're not. What's your problem was sort of the mindset. And I literally went from working in that environment to people who are the exact same experience level, very different for me in terms of what I thought I was more personally values aligned with the first people.
01:01:07
Speaker
And the other people, I'm like, oh, I'm not really personal values align with them. What's that going to be like? But they ended up being people who were positive, who were encouraging like, you did this great. This is really good. You know, there might be a few things I would tweak to make it better for the client, you know, just because of this or that. But really, I'm so glad you're here. And I literally was kind of shrinking and dying on the vine at one place and didn't even know it. In fact, when they
01:01:30
Speaker
They said, you know, we don't think this is working out. You need to work somewhere else. My first stop was to like a local grad school to like, maybe I'm just out of here versus I worked under these two similar people in terms of age and experience, but their mindset was so different, was so positive, was so welcoming. And I kind of came back to life. It's the
Future of Legal Education
01:01:49
Speaker
difference between, you know, white knuckling and just getting through and just, you know, fighting like everybody versus the idea of really flourishing. I love the class that you get to emphasize that.
01:01:59
Speaker
And what I love from that example is so that's a great external example about how, you know, you didn't even realize maybe you thought you were broken when you weren't performing. I did. But then when you worked with people who nurtured you in that way and you saw we were capable of the same is also true, by the way, of how we treat ourselves. And yes, so many lawyers and law students think that they're successful because they are ruthlessly self critical and hard on themselves. Yeah.
01:02:26
Speaker
And they're ruthless perfectionists. And they think that they've gotten to this place because of that. And they're like, yep, I've given up some health, I've given up some happiness, but it's gotten me here. And what I want to just kind of hit them over the heads with, because I know this from my own personal experience, is like, no, you've gotten here not withstanding beating yourself up. Actually. It's a miracle that you got this far.
01:02:50
Speaker
You treat yourself kindly. It's not going to make you less, you know, committed to excellence. It's not going to make you less driven or less motivated. Actually, it's just going to help you and energize you to do all of that more. Your standards will be just as high, but if you don't beat yourself up whenever you have a setback, you'll be able to get back up there that much quicker and objectively look to see, you know,
01:03:18
Speaker
What actually happened? What went wrong? How can I fix it? Rather than just, you know, punishing yourself saying you're so terrible, you're so terrible, you're worthless. Like what value comes from that? Well, it's the same kind of thing you see in the mindset of litigators who feel like they have to be tough and ruthless and harsh and strong. And you know what? There's some great litigators who are kind, who are professional, who are like, they are going to eviscerate you with their arguments. They're no less prepared. In fact, they're wonderfully prepared.
01:03:46
Speaker
but they don't have to be a jerk in the middle of it and they actually they actually see things better and they're not caught up in this battle royale you know if i have to you know prove who i am and that i'm strong or i'm tough or whatever um but it's hard to make that mindset shift you're sort of just if everybody you see is doing that and you're used to doing that the the inner critic and then you know we basically if we don't criticize our insides we criticize other people those are
01:04:13
Speaker
great ways to escape you know shame and feelings of inadequacy really and so I love I just love that your class exists I love are there any other deans of professionalism are there is that a thing at many law schools I haven't seen that title very often I have not seen that exact title either what I will say is there's a there's definitely other
01:04:35
Speaker
There's a few, definitely a few other directors of professional identity formation things, a couple like that. We've seen more over the past few years. I will say that when.
01:04:46
Speaker
When Fordham created this office, I think maybe there was one other school, Penn had a center on professionalism early on. I think that was the only one out there when Fordham did it. Fordham was really, really cutting edge ahead of the curve here. And so now with the new ABA standard, I think, I hope we're going to start seeing more of these positions. Just like at law firms, we've started to see some more
01:05:11
Speaker
directors of wellness and things like that popping up. I'm hoping that this is a tide that is going to keep going in this direction, but I'm so grateful to have landed at Fordham, this place that was doing it even before the ABA standards or where anyone was saying that. There's Alayna Tabool there as well. Am I remembering that name right? I know. I've read her paper.
01:05:35
Speaker
Alina co-taught with me the first semester of positive lawyering, so I had connected with Alina. I was giving a presentation on finding your purpose at the New York City Bar Association, and she was going through her master's in psychic Columbia at the time. I was at Columbia
01:05:54
Speaker
at the time, but then by the time that Alina and I, she linked in, messaged me as, you know, we, you and I connected and we ended up meeting for the first time once I was already at Fordham. And so we put our heads together. She was doing our coach training that time. I was not yet doing my coach training. I was actually hearing about her experience
01:06:13
Speaker
Okay, gave me the coaching bug too. And so we co taught positive lawyering that first together and then she is subsequently moved to the UK is doing amazing coaching work there. And then I've taken on expanded peer mentoring to make it a at the time we just did as a one credit course. Now it's a two to three credit course really built it out since then. And yeah, I saw her with it.
01:06:37
Speaker
I saw the paper that she wrote that was kind of a coaching model, sort of a coaching model for the profession that she did when she was getting her positive psychology. I think she may have done it Columbia too, yeah. Absolutely. She was one of the leading coaches in the lawyer, people with both the lawyer and the coach training early on in this area.
01:06:55
Speaker
Well, Jordana, you are an inspiration both because you are in the trenches in academia trying to, again, effectuate what the ABA is saying we need, what so many voices have been saying that we need. And we're starting to see, again, with the next gen bar changing to be more skills focused, judgment focused, less memorization. Yay for that. Law school experience is actually, you know, skills at my law school, which I love my law school. I had a great educational experience, but there were
01:07:25
Speaker
I had maybe one or two classes that had a trial ad, but other than that, skills, training, negotiation, stuff like that wasn't there, and well-being wasn't discussed at all. It's becoming more of a prevalent thing. It's becoming more and more commonplace. But thank you for being a thought leader, a pioneer in that, and just sharing out of your own journey. I hope other people hear
Conclusion and Reflections
01:07:46
Speaker
it and hear something they can relate to and that you can get off the hamster wheel and out of the pressure cooker.
01:07:53
Speaker
and experience some joy, even still, you know, practicing law in whatever format. Where can people find you if they are interested in connecting with your coaching opportunities? You mentioned the blog, which is recovering confessions of recovering... Chronicles of recovering type A plus perfectionist. So it is, it's a mouthful. But if you want to find me, first of all, I'm on LinkedIn, Jordana Confino, you can find me there. And then my website is JordanaConfino.com.
01:08:20
Speaker
And if you want to subscribe to the blog, it's dridanaconfino.com slash newsletter sign up, but I'll give you the link for the show notes, Chris. And I will also give you, I mentioned the values discovery exercise that I did with my therapist that kind of set me on this winding path. I've subsequently developed it out into something much more robust and comprehensive that I use both as my students and my coaching clients. So I'll give you the link for that as well.
01:08:47
Speaker
So it's kind of, is it kind of your own thing? It's not like the VIA or the Gallup. It's like your own thing. And so you can pop that too, if anyone wants to do that for themselves. And thank you so much for having me today. It's been a real, a real pleasure chatting with you. Well, thank you for coming. And this is a, you can tell I geek out on this a little bit, partly because again, it's the same sort of thing. The things you wish you had known earlier, you wish you could have discovered. There's so much more we can talk about. We may have to have you back again sometime.
01:09:16
Speaker
Anytime, my pleasure. A couple different places. I'd love to go with it, but I want to be sensitive to your job. Is it going to be about my dating after law school? I think that's a whole podcast. I think that's a podcast if Zach's OK with it. Now, Zach's got to, you know, is it OK to dive into all that? Zach's basically a celebrity for my students now. So he's doing all my stories. Well, Zach gets to show up at the end and say, I was like 1 in 1,000. You know, how cool is that?
01:09:39
Speaker
He is one in a million. I'll give him. There you go. Well, congrats to you. Thank you so much. I am going to close us out here and, uh, listener, thank you so much for being with us as well. Thanks for listening to this episode of the thriving lawyers podcast. We love hearing from our loyal listeners, so please feel free to email us any questions, comments, suggested topics or guest recommendations at the following address, feedback at thriving lawyers podcast.com.
01:10:07
Speaker
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