[Music] the problem in this regard is that I see a lot of I a lot of challenges when it comes to my name is and this is Monday Le so when you're doing the coaching for the lawyers you're going to be talking or discussing a lot of things related to the career but then a lot of career steps or career decisions that uh happens to be instrumental in someone's life it will as I say affect their life as well and this will affect their um stability or life in general in and their mental as well uh Readiness whether they are ready for that step or for that career step or not and u i I just want to understand whether th this requires a certain set of skills from the lawyer to be able to cope with these kind of changes well the first thing would be to admit that we are we are a whole a person uh has different aspects of their life there's career there is your personal lives your friendship your health your finances your spiritual commitments uh even even the amount of fun that you want to have there different aspects of a person's life and it is normal to see see a shift in one area of our life that impacts other areas of Our Lives the career is very important to most lawyers because that's what we spend I would say 80% of our time trying to develop and what we feel is going to nourish other interests and the and the and and the well-being of people that we care for uh so it is very normal to see a lawyer that is experiencing a significant amount of stress in their career uh transmit that stress and have certain attitudes in other areas of their lives however we also see that when we're trying to work on improving the quality of not I'm saying not the time but the quality of time spent in other endeavors other than work we can also see a shift of how that actually translates in well-being and helps a lawyer be you know more creative or more social or more enticed and able to cope with the stress that is already there and hasn't changed in a different way so we can talk about career we can talk about personal life but there is there is deep connection between the two of them I I totally agree but I understand as well on like like how I how I grew up and how I started in this career it's a very competitive job and it's not just I'm not I'm not just competing with with my colleagues I'm sometimes competing uh or in in with with with the counterparties in every case to competing with my client to prove all the time that I'm doing the better work competing with myself to see if I really can achieve what I promise myself to achieve it it it really affects and I understand that I see some professionals getting a nervous breakdown or something that is really affecting their mental stability because it's really a stressful job why is it are we too weak or vulnerable because this is a new trend this is a new thing mental health and all this uh new um or I believe it is a new thing I when I grew up no one spoke about mental health at all in the professional life why is it so much of a many topic now sometimes ago some years ago nobody was talking and now we're talking about and that can also be felt as an evolution in in how actually we are now enabling everybody to be uh open about the vulner this and able to address those issues right uh there was um there was a study done by the international bu Association about uh lawyers and how they perceived their career as it affects their life and then one out of I think one out of five is saying that it has a negative impact on their life if in a in a in an index if you know 50 is more or less you know like the I am worried line for well-being like lawyer were well below that line women lawyers were even below uh minorities and people with disability they're not having a great time so we cannot really say as a society that being a lawyer is now where the most fun is being had okay but it has always been a stressful um profession but maybe now we're talking more about it maybe now we're taking uh note that it doesn't really need to be that way that there are things that we can do to live our profession in a different way now yes a profession has always been stressful but there are now new stresses and there are now different challenges that our profession did not face before and as we accommodate to the new era it is normal to to feel this this squeeze of the circumstance okay um in-house departments have grown a lot and with that the role of a of a lawyer that is now challenged to be not only technically Savvy but very close to business and be able to do both at the same time and to measure that distance and that diplomacy in in a very Dynamic way right um lawyers are now facing new technology coming in there's Ai and what's going to happen to all of us right and people that are in our students are in law school now will find a completely different market and completely different profession in five years and all of us that are here today are adapting and learning now the profession of a lawyer always had adapting and learning in it because regulations were always changing but now regulations change much faster we're regulating and we're investigating in new eras that we were not doing before so that adds a stress this the wheel is spinning faster than before and it is spinning in directions that we didn't know before and it is normal to experience more stress than the generations with Str were feeling before um and with that I think it's a positive thing that we've decided to talk about it we're not weak here we're just facing higher challenges and that maybe we're actually becoming emotionally smarter in being able to collaboratively uh you know lift each other up and you know handle that stress as a community of lawyers in a better way and do you believe that U more and more lawyers should address this issue by um by by immediately admitting to coaching or admitting to be more aware of the mental health or the the effect of the profession on their mental health so they have to um do I don't know a checkup well there there are different ways of support and I I would say that yes having a a checkin not a checkup but a check in with yourself from where you're standing as regards the mental health uh lawyers of people that are perfectly able to cope with the normal stresses of Life uh they are and they're looking at their future they're looking at how they can do better and the challenges that that they want to uh that that they want to go and you know um try themselves at they will be looking more for Mentor or for a coach or for training but lawyers that are not having a good time in managing their stress that are feeling the negative impact of their profession uh destroy what they've been building and jeopardize that effort maybe best suited not for coaching but for uh for a psychologist for psychological Aid and it is very very important important to talk about coaching in a in a responsible way coaches are specifically at least I am specifically licensed and specifically accredited by an International Federation not everybody can call themselves a coach and do that work appropriately and coaches are subject to a code of ethics which obliges them to refer certain issues to a trained mental health specialist Okay so is very important to deal with people that are trained and that will be ethical enough to support that lawyer with what they need if they if that is what they can do or support them in finding the right professional to assist with their issues if that is what they're actually needing so there is it's a very important uh issue of Ethics in in coaching and especially for lawyers and that's what I thought my particular training as a lawyer and you know our ethic code of conduct and membership to bars you know makes us uh at least there are other coaches that are out there also coaching lawyers but makes us specially attune to that um to that specific um matter um going back to the school days law school days and the education and you did your Masters as well and you you did further studies do you think we should have been informed early on that this job is that stressful so that we are ready well I think that exposure to the profession in the in the early years of our studies is is key so that you can actually visualize what your life is going to be like um it it wasn't the case where I study I think it's the case in in most uh universities nowaday to give some sort of exposure so that students may may shift course or may may have a most you know informed decision uh but ultimately you find out about it when when you're in it and also as we said the world is changing and it's going to be a different experience by the time that they they leave University and the final comment would be um no one told us when we were going to become parents what it was going to be like right and it keeps evolving and we're figuring out and it keeps changing as years goes by so um I think that's what we're going to have to keep doing figuring it out thank you very much for this amazing and interesting discussion I hope more and more uh people in this uh legal profession are aware of the effects on their mental health and they more aware of the how they feel and how they uh work and more and more people are open to coaching thank you thank you so much for having it having me here and uh yeah looking forward to being able to provide support to uh peers and colleagues out there uh that want to know more about how to uh how to to do more and how to get better amazing thank you so much and uh this is your do from Monday legal see you next week