Have you noticed when you look around that everyone is on their cell phone? Do people seem to be enjoying the “here and now”? Do you see people out with each other and on their phones? We are supposedly so much more connected, but are we really connected? And what effect can this lack of present attention have on our lives and our profession?
I spent two of the last several weeks on ABA trips. One was to the GPSolo Division’s Joint Spring Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, with GLSA, and the other was at the Section of Litigation Annual Conference in San Diego, California. On both of these trips I observed attendees, specifically thinking about how we pay attention. One big thing I noticed is that when people were at the CLEs, they were often on their phones and computers working on other things. What would it take to get them really engaged in what was being said? I overheard people talking to one another about how much “work” they had to do while there and how long they were in their rooms working, rather than being at the conference. It was almost like a status symbol of who was important—the more work you had to do, the more important you were.
I realized that, when we are not paying attention to what is before us, we are missing out on the “NOW.” The NOW is all we have. So, if we are not here NOW, where are we then? It all relates to our power of focus and our wandering minds. I began to wonder how that affects our ability to practice law and to actually serve our clients and our communities in an effective way. There are several professions where attention is crucial. If a judge misses a few minutes of a final argument because of his wandering mind, if a police officer doesn’t hear the last part of a witness report, if a doctor doesn’t hear a patient’s symptoms, critical mistakes can be made.
Amishi Jha created a powerful TED Talk called How to Tame Your Wandering Mind, presented to a local audience at TEDxCoconutGrove, an independent event. Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist who studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what’s important out of the constant stream of information it receives. She researches mindfulness techniques to optimize focus, even under high stress.
“Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention’s power, but some simple techniques can boost it. Pay attention to your attention,” Jha says.
Jha did mindfulness training on military forces and came up with profound research on the subject, concluding that mindfulness does help the brain focus and reduce the wandering mind epidemic. It actually helped the troops in many surprising ways.
For us lawyers, really keeping our attention where it needs to be in the moment helps us do our best and then frees us up to enjoy our lives later. If we are at work when work is going on, then we can be at play when it’s time to play. This is preferable to being in multiple places at once and not really getting the best benefit of our lives in the moment.
Check out the TED Talk and let me know your thoughts. I found it to be a very powerful message. And begin to notice where you are when you are doing things. Are you 100 percent focused on the task at hand, or is your mind wandering? The daily practice of mindfulness will tame that wandering mind and produce benefits that others might not see, but you will be able to notice them and feel them inside.
One very important thing that Jha points out in her research is that mindfulness is like exercise—if you do it, you get the benefits. If you don’t do it, you don’t get the benefits. Simple as that. Mindfulness practice, to be effective, must be done on a regular basis. It’s not something you do once or twice and then you are there. It only works if you are working it. And five minutes a day can easily turn into ten and then fifteen. When you begin to see how much more energy and time you have as a result of that small effort, you will want to invest more into it because the results are so great. Check out more on this at the UMindfulness Resources page on the Miami College of Arts & Sciences website.
This month marks the one-year anniversary of my first mindfulness presentation in Scottsdale, Arizona, at GPSolo’s 2017 Joint Spring Meeting. I was pleasantly surprised when everyone stayed an extra 45 minutes without complaint. Since then, I have continued to do presentations to a variety of groups and to go deeper into the practice of mindfulness daily. The process has changed my life dramatically. In fact, the results astound me. The simple practice of a daily meditation and other techniques has enabled me to respond in new ways to stresses that, in the past, I did not handle so well. And I have been able to do more with less effort.
When people ask how I am doing, I report that I am having a “renaissance” in my law practice. My renewed sense of well-being can only be attributed to this mindfulness work. The results keep coming every day, in both little and big ways, and it is such an honor to be able to share what I learn with you. In today’s world and with our increasingly stressful profession, anything we can do to reduce that stress and to handle it better is a worthwhile endeavor.
Until next time…namaste. Please let me know if you have any tips, sources, or experiences with mindfulness you want to share at melanie@legalinsightinc.com.
“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”—Zen proverb