Laura Mahr is the founder of Conscious Legal Minds LLC, providing mindfulness and neuroscience-based coaching, training, and consulting for attorneys and law offices nationwide. I had the opportunity to sit down and interview her about her work.
Jeena Cho: When you talk about resilience, what does that mean?
Laura Mahr: Resilience is the ability to experience a stressful situation, whether it’s an external stress like a statute of limitations or running out of time or having to face a judge that’s really challenging, or it could be an internal stress like perfectionism or the feeling of not being confident enough, and to go through a situation and make it out the other side not only alive but better than you were when you went in. So it’s the ability to bounce back from any kind of stressor better than you were before it happened.
Jeena Cho: Was there a person or an experience that led you to be curious about resilience and how to incorporate it into your life?
Laura Mahr: I chose to go to law school after being a full-time meditation and yoga instructor. I thought, I’m going to just fly through law school; I have all of these great skills. And very quickly into law school, I realized that I’d gotten in way over my head, that law school was really a bigger challenge than I’d ever experienced before.
I became one of the first lawyers in the country to work with sexual assault and sexual harassment of farmworker women, so migrant farmworkers that are experiencing sexual harassment on the job.
From there, I went on to really become a sexual assault attorney and a trainer for the Office on Violence Against Women on issues related to sexual violence. And through that experience for a decade, working with survivors, I worked with women on the streets as well, women experiencing homelessness, and a lot of other really highly vulnerable populations.
I experienced a lower resilience. I knew that I didn’t have that kind of energy that I wanted to have and that I was used to having at the end of the day. It was going through my own vicarious trauma experience, through my own level of burnout, that I came to be interested in what this thing called resilience is, and ultimately what is neuroscience and how does that help us, lawyers.
Jeena Cho: When you were going through this experience, what were some of the signs that perhaps something isn’t quite right or that it was something that you needed to pay attention to?
Laura Mahr: More than anything, it was fatigue. I loved my job, I loved what I did, I loved the people I worked with, and I was really passionate and still am passionate about sexual assault survivor’s rights and bringing justice into people’s lives that have experienced sexual harassment. It wasn’t a lack of passion, though for a lot of people that experience burnout it can be this slow erosion of their energy or their enthusiasm that over time results in feeling out of balance in one or more areas of their life.
I felt really good at work, I liked what I did. And at home, I had you know a vibrant existence and I did all of those things. But for me, it was really this feeling of being tired all the time, and not having the kind of energy that I was used to having when I practiced.
Listen to Laura’s full interview here…
This article previously appeared on Above the Law.