Jo:
Annmarie, we recently discovered that we are both ‘sober’ lawyers. I’ve been sober for more than 11 years and you for more than 13 years*.
We have also set up our own businesses. Do you think that’s a coincidence?
Read More »Sober Lawyers discuss…’the drinking default’
It’s the right time of year to be talking about ghosts. The ones I’m talking about here aren’t those that come out on Halloween though. But they can still be pretty spooky.
I’m talking about people from the past re-surfacing in our lives, either by design or by chance. How that affects us and what it means.
Read More »GhostsHaving procrastinated over the title of this article for a fair amount of time I can tell you that life in the brain of a lawyer ain’t an easy one. It’s teeming with all sorts of stuff: a ton of perfectionism, a heap of compulsive overthinking and a pretty hefty dash of pedantry for good measure.
Read More »Law and wellbeing: are they incompatible?“HAIR IS EVERYTHING”
We all secretly knew this to be true but it took Fleabag for us to know we knew it.
Clearly it’s not the only lesson to take from that programme (the main one being that, if that’s what priests look like these days, we need to start going to church a bit more…) but it really stuck with me, not least cos of my own experiences.
Read More »“What the hell have you done to my hair?” and other awkward conversationsSo I’ve made it to the first anniversary of starting my own business and I’m chuffed as hell about it.
Read More »Happy Birthday To Me!“How can I learn to become more resilient?”
Clients often ask this in their first therapy session. They tell me that they find it hard to cope with setbacks and they set ‘achieving’ resilience as their ‘goal’ for therapy. It’s one of those buzz words like mindfulness that has been floating around for the past few years and many organisations and businesses have also cottoned on to this trend, offering training on how their staff can become more resilient.
Read More »Developing resilience and why it’s not about becoming a ‘hard-a**’Every so often you get those times when a certain phrase plays over and over in your head. For me at the moment it’s about comparing my ‘insides’ to other’s ‘outsides’.
Read More »Comparing your ‘insides’ with everyone else’s ‘outsides’…when your days aren’t so merry and brightLast week I had the pleasure of seeing Jeanette Winterson speak on the subject of feminism and the #metoo movement. This became a broader discussion about the fact that we seem to be living in a more split and divided world than ever before with, as Winterson put it, opposing forces of light and darkness struggling against each other.
Read More »Are you split? #MetooI had an extraordinary experience at a conference last week, witnessing a presentation that was moving, desperately sad and hopeful in equal measure.
The speakers were Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. Jo’s father, Sir Anthony Berry was a Conservative MP who was killed in the Brighton bombing in 1984. Jo’s fellow presenter was Patrick Magee, the IRA member who planted the bomb. They spoke to us on the 34th anniversary of the bombing.
Read More »Are we building bridges or are we building walls?Mindfulness is the buzz-word of recent years with everyone desperately trying to remain ‘in the present moment’. But how does that fit with the ticking clocks on the computer screen that dominate many lawyers’ lives? They’re an ever-present reminder of how long you’ve been working on each job and of the passage of time. Usually sat alongside a graph of progress against the dreaded ‘billing target’; the two together are a constant reminder to strive to record ‘enough’ hours and bill the clients ‘enough’ money.
Read More »Lawyers! Are your clocks making you ill?