May 18, 2016 – I was in a WisLAP Committee meeting a few months back and was talking to the committee about doing mindfulness classes for lawyers. After years of attending trainings on mindfulness and having my own practice, I had recently completed a training program on teaching mindfulness.

After the meeting, a member came up to me and stated, “I didn’t want to sound uninformed but what is mindfulness and how can this help lawyers?”

That question prompted me to write this column on mindfulness, what it is, and how it is helpful for lawyers – or anybody for that matter.

Defining Mindfulness

The best definition I can offer is this:

It is a practice of teaching your mind to slow down enough so you can attend to the present with acceptance or without judgment.

This means you can be in a contentious meeting with others who are disagreeing with you and you can notice the tension, stay grounded, and respond in a way you feel good about.

Sound like a good lawyering skill? Cultivating mindfulness takes practice, but there is no failing because of the “no judgement clause” in the contract. If you find yourself not attending to the present and your mind is wandering off in many directions, coming up with verbal warfare it would like to spit back at meeting participants, you simply notice that the mind has wandered away from the present and bring it back.

I noticed as I was writing this my mind was saying, “what do you really know about mindfulness, this will be boring for others.” I then redirected my mind to the present, laughed at the irony of it, and continued writing.

Your ‘Puppy Brain’

It takes practice because of what mindfulness instructors refer to as “the puppy brain.” Our minds can act like puppies where our thoughts wander away from the present and need to be called back. How many times do you need to call the puppy to get its attention before it learns to heed your call?

And to train the puppy you need to be gentle, kind, and consistent with your training, or the puppy will run from you and not want to return. Our minds benefit from training exercises to cultivate awareness and maintain our focus on the present. Our minds are more responsive if we are gentle, kind, and consistent with our training. It is only in the present that we can impact our lives, so it makes sense that we train our minds to focus there.

The skills you can develop by practicing mindfulness are skills that are helpful in everyday life as well as in your practice as a lawyer. Different sets of mindfulness exercises promote different skills.

The skills you can develop by practicing mindfulness are skills that are helpful in everyday life as well as in your practice as a lawyer. Different sets of mindfulness exercises promote different skills.

So, what do you gain by practicing mindfulness?

1. Increased ability to focus and attend. Through focusing on our breath, listening to sounds, and guiding our attention to observe without judgment, we increase our capacity to attend to the workday in a way that will increase efficiency and decrease distraction.

2. Increased self-awareness and self-regulation. By practicing to focus on our five senses, we gain the ability to pay attention to detail, and increase the accuracy of our work – as we are no longer rushing through the day on autopilot, making mistakes and missing details. These exercises also help us regulate our reactions to ourselves and to others keeping us better balanced and our perspective grounded.

3. Gaining better understanding of our thoughts and emotions. Through this set of exercises, mindful thinking and feeling teaches us to observe our thoughts and emotions, redirect our thoughts, and understand that thoughts are not necessarily facts. For example, you can think someone is intentionally trying to sabotage your work when in reality their behavior has nothing to do with you. You learn to sit with your emotions without having to respond to them, decreasing the conflict in your life. In the adversarial nature of the practice of law, these skills seem paramount for staying the course.

4. Cultivating healthy social skills and relationships. Mindfulness exercises teach us to increase our compassion, generosity, and gratitude for ourselves and for others. Quality interpersonal relationships are central to well-being. What would the practice of law be like if the work was less confrontational, more collaborative, and compassionate?

Mindfulness practice: there is no perfection and no failure. Wouldn’t that have been a great environment in law school?