Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host Jolene. And with the Legal Learning Center, I help prospective law students save $300,000 on law school. Legal Learning Center members will be invited to a live webinar offering strategies that could save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on law school. Visit legallearningcenter.com to join the waitlist.
Today, we are talking with Dr. Christian Heim who specializes in preventative mental health. He’s going to share with us some mental health findings from the American Bar Association and share with us how we can help ourselves stay grounded in this fight-until-you-win culture that we lawyers live in.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Thank you very much, Jolene. And it’s my pleasure to be here today and look yes, my name is Christian Heim. I’m a clinical psychiatrist, which means that I have the privilege of working with people one-on-one but part of my journey has actually been into law because our son who’s now 25 is a junior lawyer. He went into law school and so we, we made that journey with him and as a clinical psychiatrist, I know that lawyers have particular needs in mental health and it’s not just that they suffer so much depression and addiction, anxiety, and suicide and all of that. It’s also, they are gifted people. They are highly intelligent. They are often perfectionists Jolene. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So the reason that I’m saying this is because before COVID hit, my plan was to actually do a tour of the United States going from law firm to law firm, talking about mental health in law, because as much as law is aware of mental health issues, it’s still neglected. Just because your hours are so precious and your time is so valuable. So mental health still gets neglected.
So yeah, aside from that Jolene, I have some music in my background. I have a family of two boys. I live on the beach. I love going for walks on the beach. I like fresh food. I like love what can I say? You know? And that kind of keeps me balanced in the midst of what can sometimes become a very trying life because my subspecialty is actually personal trauma and that’s a, that’s a difficult area. So I like to keep balance by having music in my life, by having performance in my life. And by talking about things that we can do to get out of the problems that a lot of us get into in this thing called life.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah. I think a lot of lawyers need to take a few notes on what you do to keep yourself sane, because I think the way we try to keep ourselves sane is just to work a little harder that doesn’t work.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I understand that too, because working actually feels good because you will get rewarded not only with money, but also with praise and that feeling. And this is one of the most underestimated feelings that life has to offer, that feeling of being useful in life and lawyers, they get that. As a doctor. I get that. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who do not get that feeling, but lawyers actually get too much of that because they are overworked. And so we will get into today how that actually works and how you can take these beautiful teenagers, put them through law school and all of a sudden they’ve got all these problems. How does that happen, Jolene? We’ll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah. I know I had my first anxiety attack in law school and I had never had that problem before. So there is something that happens during that journey that changes. And I know this applies internationally, but I know the American Bar Association says something like 30% of attorneys suffer from depression and another, at least 20% suffer from addiction. And I know a lot of that’s tied, not just to how many hours we all have to work, but also to our, yeah, our own perfectionism that you mentioned, do you have any ideas? I feel like that’s a chicken and an egg. I feel like we start out as somewhat of perfectionist and that’s why we become lawyers. And then once we become lawyers, we are required to stay perfect all the time.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yes. Yes. Okay. I just want to clarify the stats. Okay. What you said was totally accurate and they come from a study in 2016 by Patrick Krill. And that was a survey of almost 13,000 lawyers. And we had stats like that before, but this particular one, because it was such a big study and it allowed lawyers to say what was actually going on in their lives. It was like the whole law industry stood up and went, wow, we’re in trouble. Right. And that was already five, six years ago. Right. And we haven’t been making progress.
In fact, it’s been getting worse. So you’re talking about perfectionism. All right. So perfectionism, it’s a good thing. All right, Jolene, you’re a perfectionist. I’m a perfectionist. Most everybody that we will be talking to today is a perfectionist. Almost all of my colleagues are perfectionist and perfectionism is valued in our society because we need to get it right. Okay. You want to embarrass them in court to be able to remember all those details. You want a neurosurgeon to be able to make that incision just in the right way. Nobody wants to go and have an operation from somebody that says, Oh, look, I’ll give it a go. I’m not sure how it’s going to go, but I’ll do my best shot. Nobody wants that.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
So the world wants perfectionist. We want to be perfectionist. So I’m saying on the outset, there’s nothing wrong with being a perfectionist. The question is, how can we use perfectionism to work for us? Not against us, because after law school, what happens is perfectionism starts to work against us and we go, Oh my God, how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah. That makes sense. I can see that because as far as up until that point, you’re using it for your own advancement. You’re using it for your grades, to get by. But then when you’re in the working world, there’s no end. It just keeps going.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yes, yes, yes. But there’s something that happens even before the working world. Right? So the, the stats on law students show that there’s hardly any depression before law. After one year, it’s like 9% after three years, it’s 40%. And there are some law schools. In fact, my son was basically told on his first day in law, 85% of you are going to suffer a major depressive episode. Wow. Okay. So welcome to the real world. You’re all inspired. You’ve made it into law, you’re at your first lecture and they hit you with those realities, you know, and the good thing is he’s never forgotten that. Right. And so he’s taken steps to make sure that that sort of thing doesn’t happen to him. All right. So, so let’s, let’s talk about the profile of the person who gets into law. Okay. Because your average law student has either been school captain or captain or sports captain, was good at a musical instrument or at a sport or both. All right. Learn two or three languages was highly competitive, was liked by all the people around them. Okay. And you’ve got a big smile on your face because it sounds so familiar. Right.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
I have letters in multiple things and, you know, I was in every club one year, I was on almost every page of the yearbook. Yeah. I hear this.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Okay. And that all feels good. All right. And the nice thing is until you get to university or college, you’re kind of in this safe bubble of a world where responsibility is taken by your parents and you’re allowed to be who you are. Okay. And the wonderful thing about all of that is you can be who you are, you’re exploring who you are and it feels good. And you’re in this world that basically says, you know what, you’ve got a few gifts that other people don’t have feel good about it. You know what? You could do something like law or medicine if you want, and you go, Oh, that would be nice. And then you start doing that. That’s when things change.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yes. I can feel all these feelings coming out, it is a time of exploration. And again, when you’re in kind of an overachiever, almost anything you touch, you’re going to do at least halfway well at. And so people are always praising you. And then yeah, you get up to that higher level. And suddenly it’s a lot more focused. It’s a lot less fun and the memories are still there, but then you start to feel like, well, I don’t maybe deserve it as much because I’m not doing as well.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, that’s right. That’s right. And so a few things happen when people get into law or university medicine, these are people that have not failed. Right. It’s, it’s rare that they failed the test. You know? I, I think I started failing as soon as I got to university. That’s the first time that I failed an exam that I failed a piano exam. Oh my God. That, that never happens to me. All right. So, so here’s the first thing. First of all, you get to be a fish that gets taken into a pond with other fish like you. So all of a sudden, you’re not on the top one percentile or the top 10% or whatever you happen to be in, all of a sudden you’re with a whole lot of people that were also in the top 1% or the top 10%, because all of our law students and medical students are chosen on this one, strange parameter called intelligence. Okay. And okay. It has to be that way, but it means that all of a sudden, if you’re at the bottom of the class, okay, you start to feel really bad, even though you are still in the top five or 10% of your peer group population for everybody in the world. But you see, you don’t get to feel that anymore. You get to feel like you’re at the bottom, right?
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah. It’s very true. You forget about the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
There’s you do you do because your aim is actually to get into another pond as a fish that only a few fish get into. All right. So you may have a goal, like I want to get into the first class honors pond. Okay. Or I want to get into a top tier firm pond. Okay. So all of a sudden you are competing with all these brilliantly gifted fish around you. Right. And some are going to make it into those top tiers and some are not. And the ones that don’t get to feel bad and they start to think, Oh my gosh, there’s something wrong with me. Right. But as you know, somebody has to be in the top 1% and somebody has to be in the top 5% and we start judging our worth by numbers, by university results and all the things that seem to be going against us. Whereas this was all going for us when we were in school. Okay. We’re at the top, right?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Yeah. So how can we prevent this? Or how can we stop this from continuing to snowball?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the real problem because this happens in medicine as well, obviously. And that’s why there’ll be this rivalry between law and medicine because human beings, as you know, in law, are naturally competitive. Okay. And sometimes that can be a lot of fun, but sometimes I can be very hurtful as well and even detrimental to ourselves. So it’s not even the competition. I believe that causes the problems in, in law school. It’s a strange thing. I believe that’s called the culture and I’m just going to go to a study to back this up. They actually looked at the difference in happiness levels between law students and psychology students. Okay. And how satisfied they were with the law course. And you know what the lecturers are doing a great job, the law course itself couldn’t be better.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
It was something else that was going on. And so I’m going to bring this something else down to one word and the word is going to be culture. So you’ve got your information. You learn about the philosophy of law. You learn about all the different torts and all your different things that you need to know. But underlying all of this is a culture that you are being introduced to. And it comes through subtle messages from lecturers, from peers, from senior students from people who are already in the workplace. And they give you these messages that this is just how it is. All right, you’re going to go through this. All right. Working is really difficult. Winning is everything all right, but you’re going to be paid well, and you’ll feel better if you get more money. All right. And I’m actually convinced that if Magna Carter had put together a law system that was based on, you know, we’ll have a judge a couple of lawyers and some lay people, and we’ll all sit around in a circle and we’ll all work out what the best outcome for everybody would be here.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
All right. If that was the way we put together a law, then the whole culture of law would be very different instead. Okay. So my son is involved in a really big issue. That’s going on in Australia at the moment. And I obviously can’t tell you what that is, but it’s going to higher and higher courts. Okay. And here’s the thing, whatever the outcome, one side wins 100% and the other side loses a hundred percent and has to pay court costs on top of it. All right. So the stakes are really high and the culture is to encourage you this idea that you’re either totally right, or you’re totally wrong, right? And if you look at any case and okay, criminal law is probably a more straight forward, but if you look at transactions, if you look at contracts, if you look at taxation, if you look at negotiations, all of that, you know, you can see where one party could have taken some responsibility for this.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
And one party could have taken some responsibility for this. And some of it was just the circumstances that was going along in the world at the time. And some of it was untested territory. That’s why we’re in court, right? And there are all these complexities and perhaps somebody was responsible 30% rather than 0%. Okay. Maybe another party was responsible, 55%, rather than a hundred percent. And there were all these other things that we just didn’t think about. And we could actually learn about ways of doing it better. Now, if that was the way law works, then the culture at law school would become, we are here for you to develop, to be your best and to find out what the best outcome would be for the most amount of people. But instead, the culture is we’re here to make winners of you because winning feels good and winning is what law is all about. And so it becomes like a tennis match rather than a noncompetitive sport. Sorry, I’ll be going on a bit Jolene.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
I love that description though. It felt so calming to imagine that. And I mean, there’s mediations, there’s things like that where people do work together, but it’s not, you know, it’s not our everyday practice for most of us. We have to fight until somebody caves in or we go to trial and, and then again, we fight until we win or, or totally lost, but it’s very, very difficult. And, you know, I know in different industries we have different pressures, but there can be sometimes there’s volume businesses where we have more cases than we could ever possibly handle. And so it’s all just putting out fires. Then there’s other industries where we have less cases, but each little thing we do is so important and no matter what we do it, it does feel like we’re always set up to fail to not be that perfect thing we’re trying to be.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah. And that’s where the perfectionism comes in. All right. Because people, and I don’t want to say that this is exploitative, but people know that you’re a perfectionist and that you want to do well. All right. Which means that a law firm knows how to get a lot out of you. All right. And unfortunately, and I know this is something that you talk about a lot, the way that you’re rewarded is in money. Right. And you’re actually handsomely rewarded in money. Okay. And if the carrot gets big enough, then you will put in the hours because it just seems like the logical thing to do. And I’m sorry, I was 22, 23. I know what a figure meant to me when I got a certain paycheck, if that figure was higher, I felt better about myself. Okay. And so that becomes your carrot to produce more and more.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
And it becomes like when are you going to reach a limit? When are you going to say no? All right. And it becomes hard because if we reach that limited from, we say, no, we have to admit to ourselves that we have limits. And there are some things that I can’t handle in life. And look that goes on in medicine as well. All right. It goes on in medicine as well. And competition is part of the way we function. There’s nothing wrong with good, healthy competition. But if we start losing our lives, because of it getting depressed, then there is something wrong.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And that’s, I don’t have a statistic for this. I don’t know if you do, but I feel like a lot of the, you know, the student loan debt that makes us work so hard and the perfectionism within ourselves that makes us work so hard leads to this addiction and to the negative thoughts, the depression, I don’t know if there is a direct correlation, a direct statistic out there, but how do we know how often attorneys are looking at, you know, suicide and other serious thoughts, other than just, maybe I should just leave law and take a break and admit I can’t do everything.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so at the moment, we’re in the middle of the talk where we’re talking about the problem, and we’re going to get to the solution because we’re not going to change the law culture. All right. But the real problem is unfortunately suicide. And I’ve been personally affected by lawyers that have taken their lives. My son has been personally affected, right? Almost anybody in the industry does. And unfortunately it is a reality that people will end up taking their own lives rather than saying, you know what? I’ve got to get out of law. And on top of that jolly, I can’t say that law is causing suicides because in everybody’s life, there are other things going on in their personal life, in their mental health life, in their personality, in their family. It’s all very complex as to why somebody goes over the edge.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So law is a noble profession, right? And the thing is that in the day-to-day details, we lose sight of how noble it actually is. Right. And that’s actually why I actually brought up Magna Carta because it’s one of those inspirational moments in human history where we did that wasn’t done before. And you know what it is wonderful. Right? So rather than allow your perfectionism to become part of the machinations of day to day life, because the other thing is we live in a society that tells us the more money we earn and the more famous we are, the more successful we are as people. Right? So this is not just a law thing. Okay. And so it’s got to do with values. So the answer for me as a clinical psychiatrist, working with individuals, the answers will be in values because Jolene, there’s nothing wrong with you or me being perfections. In fact, we embrace it. It has helped us every day of our lives. We actually love it. All right. There are just some times when other forces can tap into it. So it starts working against us.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
That makes sense. I worked during the 2008 recession and where our workloads became higher and higher, and my perfectionism was put to the test because I could not keep up with that workload. It just, it got to an impossible level and I had to make a decision. Do I start to become a bit sloppy? Yeah. Goes against everything I believe in, or do I give up a hundred percent of my free time? And that goes against my beliefs as well. And so I decided that my free time was more important and I was just going to have to be sloppy for a while until, you know, the economy improved and we could hire more people. And that was just how it was going to have to be. And luckily I had a boss that supported that.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Oh, that’s so good. Because so many people make the choice. Well, I can’t be sloppy because in your industry, well, what I’ve heard from the people that I take care of, you get raked over the coals. If you are sloppy, like really raked over the coals, like getting a public dressing down from somebody in authority, it hurts your personality to the core. It’s not just, we don’t want you to do this anymore, but, but your whole integrity gets brought into question. Okay. And that’s what I mean by the culture. It is something outside of all of us. Okay. it’s something that has been created by all of us, but we are now bowing down to it. And so the answer is actually to separate the work culture and personal life. Okay. Because law is a game. Medicine is a game.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Anything that we do in life is a game. And so we have to put limits around us. It is not our life. It is only when we buy into the idea is that this is who I am. This is all of my life. That’s when we get into trouble because you actually narrow down your whole beautiful life into something that’s really quite small. Okay. So I will talk to lawyers who tell me that they are driven people. Okay. And I basically say, if you are a driven person, that means that you are not driving. Okay. Which means that you are not in control of your life. And then they go, Oh my God, that’s actually right. You are driven by agendas. You are driven by a hierarchy. You are driven by the will to win. You are driven by money issues, lifestyle issues, whatever you’re driven by.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
It’s not you. And so when I work with somebody in my office, the question is, okay, well, how do I get back to me? And this is where I talk about values. And I get them to seriously ask themselves, who am I when I was five years old? Because the five-year-old Jolene is right in front of me. All right. And the five-year-old Christian is with me all the time. And the five-year-old Christian had certain ideals. Okay. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing how consistent our whole life is. It’s just that we forget our noble ideals and we get caught up in the ideals of the moment. So if you look at who you were, when you were 5, 10 and 15, all before you got into law, that’s who you are. That’s the perfection of who you are as a person. And that’s, that’s all flawed.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
We all know that we’re all flawed. And so when I asked the people, what did you want to achieve in life when you were 5 or 10 or 15, they can actually write a lot of things. Okay. Some sound childish because they are, but some are actually quite profound. Okay. So it’s a matter of getting back to that and to do that, I encourage people to do what Carl Young called withdraw, just spend an hour, a week alone with your thoughts. How am I doing, what am I doing? Right. What am I doing wrong? Am I on track or every year to take a whole day and say, how did that year ago? Am I being my true self? Am I being authentic and being who I am? And, and that, that can then keep you on track
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Fabulous, that sounds so needed. I wish even firms would implement an hour a week or even half an hour, a week where they say, okay, this is our, you know, our thinking time, our self-reflecting time, because I think we fail to do that for ourselves a lot. And again, we, we have that focus on our business, on our reputation, on, you know, and, and not until someone official tells us whether it’s yourself or your boss telling us, you need to take a moment for yourself. You know, we, we tend to not.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
No, no, you tend to not do it because every moment. Okay. well, okay. You bill in six minute increments, right? That’s how valuable your time is. And every junior lawyer is looking for that elusive billable hour. All right. Because there are lots of bonuses attached to that. So to take an hour out, you can actually give me a figure as to how much that hour is going to cost. All right. So it’s actually very difficult to make the decision not to go there because that pressure is always going to be there. And that gets compounded and reinforced by everybody around you. Okay. In fact, even to do talks at law firms we in a way have to trick people to turn up and Jolene forgive me, but this is actually why sometimes I’m brutal in some of the things that I say, because I know that if I say something brutal, it will bring up emotions.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
All right. And it will be remembered. Okay. and because as a clinical psychiatry for me, the power of change is with the individual firms look, and I’ve got to say, firms are doing a lot of good stuff there. The American Bar Association have a whole lot of guidelines and countries are doing all of this, but it still comes down to the individual. And the individuals are not quite certain. If the firm’s being real or you just ticking another box, are you just doing this? Because this is what the bar association says you should do. Okay. I’ll play the game. And then I’ll get back to doing what, what you really want from me, you know,
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Sadly true.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
That’s right. That’s sadly true. So my number one tip for people in law school who are looking for a career in law please enjoy your career in law, but find somebody, it could be a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist a psychologist, a counselor, somebody with whom you can meet on, even on a monthly basis you can afford it. So to have that outside view where you can say things to somebody that’s going to be of no consequence, it’s not going to leave the office. Okay. And somebody can give you an outside perspective who is versed in mental health and work with you to make certain choices. And I had these people that they are well from a mental health point of view and have been well for many years, but they still come to see me because there are things that I understand that other people don’t just for life advice, health advice, I’m thinking of doing this, are we on track with this? And that is a healthy use of time. So, and the thing about a mentor in the law culture is they’re going to bring you the law perspective. Okay? So it’s actually good to have somebody outside of that. Somebody with whom you can be real.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That’s a really good idea. I think that our perfectionism tends to make us think we don’t need that kind of help, but, you know, we work really hard. And so they say, you know, we work hard and play hard. And so there’s all those happy hours. Those, again, encouragements to drink. And that’s where I think a lot of the addictions come from is we’re all so burnt out. Let’s all go out and relieve our stress with alcohol. And again, that can be healthy enough if you’re doing it on occasion, not every weekend, not all the time, but having someone who actually is from outside your culture, that you don’t ever have to worry about that judgment of, well, why can’t you just bill more? Or, you know, I bill more than that or whatever that, that competition, right.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
That’s right. And the thing is that with all the initiatives there are a lot of firms now providing psychologists. Okay. and counselors for their workers, but there’s a level of distrust because they’re answerable to the firm. Okay. So if somebody is in trouble, the firm’s not going to take that risk. We live in an risk and tolerance society. So Jolene, I seriously have people that say to me, okay I will pay you just don’t record it anywhere. Okay. I’m not going to receive benefits from the government for this. Don’t use my name. Okay. But I’ve got to talk to you about what’s really going on in my life. And I say, sure, we can do that because that is really helpful.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
I can feel it just talking to you now. I feel better. So yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah. Yeah. If you have one person in your life with whom you can actually be real, right. Like really real, authentic. Okay. These are my fears. Okay. These are some of the horrible things that I’ve done. These are some of my regrets. Okay. And for somebody to sort of say, yeah, it’s okay. All right. You’re a human being just like the rest of us, right. To a perfectionist, those words of gold, you know.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
A lot of lawyers I know have we within each other, we can talk a certain way. But when we talk to other people, family members, our significant other, it doesn’t always come off the same way. We become almost like dictators. Again, we have to win all the time and it can really harm our outside relationships. So I think having someone like you to rehash a conversation and see where we might be at fault or improve the next time or understand the other person’s feelings from an outside perspective might also be very helpful. Is that something you tend to see as well?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Oh yeah. Well, this is something that I have to do in myself as well, Jolene, because in my working life, I’m the guy that’s got the answers. I’ve got the knowledge. Okay, well, I’m sorry that doesn’t work. When you come home to somebody else who’s living their life. And a couple of children, you know, who’ve got different ideas to me. So what I do is I stop off in a park and I will walk around the park and I will shake tension out of me. And I will go through things that happen during the day so that I don’t take it home. And I separate the two worlds. One is I’ve got this certain role. Okay. And often something like a jacket helps. So when I take off the jacket, I take off that whole role. Okay. And on top of it, I can’t say it’s as easy as I’m making it sound.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
This is actually a really big problem, but that’s my aim. My aim is then to be just a normal, vulnerable human being that makes mistakes, just like everybody else in my family. You know, because we are all in a sense like that, you know, and lawyers have a particular problem because you are learning, you’re taught to argue and argue well and how to be logical and how to win arguments. All right. And in your personal life, you realize, you know what, winning an argument, doesn’t actually make this relationship better. In fact, sometimes your aim is to lose the argument because that will make the other person feel better and you’ll end up with a better relationship and to do that sincerely, you know, it’s very hard, very, very hard.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Okay. So I want to go back through the timeline a little bit here, because we’re going to have to wrap up soon, but I want to touch a little bit on each point. So we talked about the pre-law students and then how they change throughout law school, and then how the career changes them again. Are there key points that you see along that journey where maybe they can shift their outcome, their potential outcome?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yes. Because I gotta say, this is one thing that I say that my son likes, okay, you don’t actually need to change what you do. Right. You but you do need to change your attitude. All right. And that sounds so easy. Thank goodness. I don’t have to give up what I’m doing, but it’s actually really difficult. And so this is why I use the idea of withdrawing for an hour a week to be just by yourself to ask yourself, how are you doing? And that’s sort of checking in to make sure you’ve got the attitude of you at five or 10 years old. Am I being me? Right? And then you’ll find out that at law school or in the law firm, that you’re not being, you, you are fulfilling a role, which means that other people are in control of you.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
All right. And that’s all right. You can play that game. Just like you play monopoly or tennis, you can play to win. Right. But when you stop playing, right, you go back to being you the real you it, so I tell people that you are a human being, not a human doing, because we often get our identity from what we do, rather than who we are and a family, a love, anybody like that, that accepts you just for being a person and doesn’t care if you win or you lose a case, you’re still that person, that’s the kind of separation we’ve got to make.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Okay. It sounds so big. And it is, but it’s also the way you’ve broken it down. It sounds like baby steps an hour, a week is a good start. A mentor is another good start.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah. And the, the overriding attitude is to remember who you are, remember who you were when you were five, 10, remember why you said I’m going to be a lawyer, right. Have your inspirational lawyer be it Ruth Ginsburg, Cicero, or, you know, Gandi. Alright. Have your inspirational lawyer and say, yep. You can talk to other lawyers about this because other people think this is a bit sort of airy fairy, but there’s a reason why you as a person wanted to do law. Okay. And it’s a noble reason. We actually all have that in us, but the culture starts to weigh you down because the culture has its own agenda. And it’s not necessarily your life agenda.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I love it. Okay. All right. I feel like I need to write this down and put it on my wall. Thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to reach out to you how can they?
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Jolene, I have a website Dr. Christian Heim and that’s actually the best place where we’re on several platforms, but we have a page on our website. That’s for specialists like lawyers, all right. So that they can find stuff that will speak to them. And we put on podcasts and things like that because that’s my inspiration to improve people’s mental health by encouraging them to be who they actually are, vulnerable, fragile, sometimes perfectionistic human beings, just trying to get through this thing called life, just like the rest of us Jolene, you know. Well, thanks again for joining us. Thank you so much. And thank you for putting on this podcast and for having me be a small part of it.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Before we get into my top takeaways, a quick word from our sponsor. If you you need to take out student loans, check in with Juno first, Juno can often offer law students one to 2% lower interest rates than the federal government and with no origination fees and oftentimes cash back as well, visit advisor.legallearningcenter.com/Juno For more information, my top takeaways from our chat with Dr. Christian Heim first, remember who you are and who you were as a child take an hour or so each week to just reconnect with yourself, check in, maybe find a mentor, someone you can trust to talk to and bounce ideas off of. I know that I do this, and it’s really helpful. Remember that being a perfectionist is okay. It can be a good thing. Just be careful how it’s being used.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Number two, who is in control of your life? Mental health is an issue for a lot of attorneys, and we need to learn how to separate our work and our personal lives. We need to change our attitude and that’s it for this episode, all the tips links and so forth will be in the show notes. A full transcript will be available at legallearningcenter.com/drChristianHeim. And if you enjoyed this episode, please like, share, leave a review so that the show is more visible and can help those who may need it. Thanks.
