Ep 98: Breaking the Silence: Legal Leaders Talk Mental Health

My name is Tyler Finn and welcome to a special bonus episode of the abstract podcast. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. So we sat down and pulled together some stories from the legal and business experts that you hear every week about managing stress, achieving a healthy work life balance, navigating tragedies at home, leaving toxic working environments and more. I hope you keep listening and feel inspired to make a positive change in your life and career or at least feel a little less alone. Let's get started. Here's Ryan Near, General Counsel at Nova Credit on navigating imposter syndrome and feeling like an outsider in the legal community. So when I moved to San Francisco, I didn't have a job. I was chasing a girl and I didn't have this job and I interviewed at Paul Hastings thinking that I was interviewing for an employment law job. And it was midway through the interview with Ned where he was, it just became obvious that at this time, this was like 2005. So yeah, it was just finally like a newspaper ad or something. So he came out in the interview, this is not an employment thing. I acted cool, or maybe at the time. And I was like, oh, of course, of course. And my head was like, oh shit, this is not an employment law. I didn't even know what employment law really was. And so it was litigation. This is a litigation job. And I was like, okay. And they mentioned they had this big case that could be its own podcast. He didn't mention it by name because it was secret at the time. But he told me about this case. They wanted me on because I was a software developer in the past. And this case was going to hinge on software development. And so they really wanted some of the expertise. And so by the time I came in, that case, it settled. But I came in and they're like, just kidding. And my first project was a hundred bankers boxes of documents, mostly in Chinese that were dumped after an appeal where the client had fired their law firm and hired us. And I mean, not me, but hired somebody. And I was the one who was given it. And so I was one associate. And I was given a hundred bankers boxes full of documents that were about the development of an acidic acid manufacturing plant that were somewhat in Mandarin Chinese. And I just was like, okay. So I was excited. In many ways, I was so focused on the work and the problem solving that I was like, all right, let me get a translator. Let me figure all this out. And I was like a beautiful mind in their man with red string trying to connect the dots of this trade secret case and who saw what and when and whatever else. And anyway, I did when I would stop to think I was so scared because I didn't even want to be a lawyer. The reason, I mean, I applied to be in the FBI after law school. I wanted to be a screenwriter. I would move to LA for a while. Really? Yeah. I was trying to do anything in some ways. It wasn't that I was scared of a law necessarily, but I thought, I don't know if this is my passion. So I applied at the FBI and I it was only I'd been working in politics for a couple of months and the FBI got in contact with me and they're like, hey, are you interested? And I was like, you never got like I was like, wait, what? And they had sent my materials to San Diego instead of San Francisco. And I guess San Diego, FBI regional office was trying to get a hold of me and I didn't live there. So anyway, I that point was like, all right, I'm staying at I'm staying in politics because this is I I got a bonus to come here. I don't want to claw back like I guess I got to do this and I have this memory of going to a partner sales for a poker tournament. I grew up on a farm. Like I grew up when I was for the early growth of my life upstate New York for half my life, half my childhood and the other half was in rural Florida. And so I didn't know I'd never tasted wine. I didn't, you know, I didn't know anything. And so I was at this party and someone handed me what I've come to learn now is a tamale. And I just put that bad boy right in my mouth. And with the husk with the husk, I didn't have no idea. And the person two people looked at me in retrospect. It's so funny. It's so funny. And two people looked at me and they they assumed I think that I was being funny. And then I just kept chewing. It was like I was eating a shoe. And then because they were mini tamales. And anyway, I eventually like grabbed a napkin and like spit out this tamale. But I felt like man, I remember going through interviews and the reason I was so excited about Ned, who's like an incredible human and one of my biggest mentor was I looked at him and I thought, is the only person I've seen? He and it's just a brief background on that. He grew up in an intern, he was born in an internment camp. He's like, wow. Born in an internment camp, grew up on a farm. And he was the first person I looked at and was like, you're, I mean, I didn't grow up in an internment camp. But like, you're kind of like me. Like you, I could, I could maybe see myself in you somewhat. And that was the first time that I had seen in a law in any of my legal interviews or what I had done where I was like this person, I can see a little bit of myself in them. And so in this moment, I think with the tamale and everything else, I definitely had this imposter syndrome. I mean, I had it all throughout my career. But I just focused, I think I just did a lot of heads down focus on the problem and just solving whatever problem was ahead of me. And I and paying off my crazy bills and like just just moving one foot right in front of the other that I never when I came up to breathe and looked around though, I was like, man, I don't know half of what these people are talking about. I didn't, you know, I remember getting, they gave me a, whatever Kate Spade's brother Jack Spade, they could be a Jack Spade bag. I mean, I immediately sold it because I was like, I don't need this. Like why I got like a hundred and sixty dollars for it. And I was so excited because I was just like, I don't need a fancy bag. I need money. I just think I was I was very different. I cut my own hair like I just, I don't know. I didn't know anything but what I was doing. I owned one suit at that point in my life and it was green. No one told me like, if you're going to get one suit, don't make it green. So I was going to every meeting and and let it add in like every interview, every wedding in this like olive green suit. I didn't know anything. So yeah, I'm post-torture drum. I still, I still like, you know, moments in my career now, still all the time where I'm like, should I, you know, like I'm, I'm, uh, what I, I think there's a lot of tasks I have to do in every basis where I go, last night I read a butter and I go, God, everyone seems to know what they're talking about about this and I don't. And I think what has gotten me through it is just like put my head down and focus on the problem and don't pop my head up for long enough to be like, I don't know what I'm doing. Next up we have Joe Sullivan, former chief security officer at Uber, Facebook and Cloud Player on managing the stress of a federal indictment. I never believed it was going to come because I, I'm still fighting the case is still, it's pending on appeal and I still believe I'm going to win and it's taken some turns that I think are going to help it get there from a legal perspective. But, uh, yeah, I was talking about it with my attorney, you know, because, you know, I was terminate, like I said, I was let go in the fall of 2017, a Thanksgiving week and in a very sudden kind of rude way. And then I went to work at Cloud Player 6, you know, I, I, I probably felt worse after I lost. I was terminator from Uber than I felt when I got indicted just because I just, what, it just got, it blindsided me so much. And that, that the company was taking the, the view that it was on it. And so I knew for at least a year before the indictment, well, first it was a criminal complaint I was charged with and then they did an indictment later. So I, I learned about the criminal complaint the same way I learned that I was getting fired from Uber in the news. Press release. Uh, yeah, the US Attorney's Office and the FBI did press conferences. They didn't tell me they were going to charge me on that day. I was sitting at my desk working for Cloud Player, working from home because it was August of 2020. Yeah, so it was six months into the pandemic. I was sitting at my desk working and my daughter who was moving into college that week. She was with her mom and they called me because like I was, I was texting with my ex-wife about how we were going to tell her like literally on the day she's moving into college. I, I learned about it and my daughter's calls because her friend heard on NPR that I'd been arrested. And so she, so she started getting people reaching out to her like, are you okay? Because the FBI put out a press release that was alive. They said that they had arrested me when they actually had never been arrested. I don't know why they did that. After I asked them to retract, retract it a few weeks later and they did. But they put out that fake press release that everybody, so everybody thought I was in jail. Yeah. And I had to call everybody and say, no, I'm not on my table. Party typo. So it was yeah. So that was a pretty stressful thing. But at that point, I didn't believe it was going to happen because I, I knew what it was like when I was a federal prosecutor. Like we had a million cases we could do. And I only did cases where it just felt like, I'm what, honestly, it felt like it was a slam dunk each case because you could pick from so many different levels of guilt, so to speak. And so, and I knew what really happened in this case. And so I didn't believe, I just didn't believe it. So I was shocked. And then, you know, I didn't go to trial for another two years, so I went back to work and worked for the next two years and put my trust in my lawyers. I will say that like the other hard part was the first time I went into the federal courthouse in San Francisco. A couple of months before the trial, and it just hit me on a whole leather physical level. Like here's an office in a courtroom that I've been into as a federal prosecutor and now sitting at the other table was pretty intense. And I always think of myself as a person who stays calm under pressure because in security you have what could be the worst situation ever come up like once every two months. And unfortunately it usually isn't, but you know you have to treat it like it could be the worst thing ever. And so I'm used to that, but when it's about you, it's a much harder amount. It felt like my brain couldn't think the way I normally can. Usually I can look at a situation and be like, "We need to do this, this, and this." Yeah. And I was just like, "Well, Iris, please just do what?" Like my brain just couldn't, like even sitting in trial. I just felt like I was a zombie version of myself and I wanted to be more active. I think after I lost the trial, I think of it as winning this, we won the sentencing because that just knocked me out of my right. It's super. And I was like, "I need to own this and did much more for the center." Next up we have an excerpt from my conversation with Law Trades co-founders Rod Ahmed and Ashish Walia on how to support your business partner during difficult times. I'll say one thing that I'll pass you over the diahos. We have one rule which is like, we both can't be depressed at the same time. So no matter what, whoever is depressed and you call that out, the other party can't be sucked into that. Even if you have to fake it, you have to just do it. You have to be the optimistic one. So we get that natural downside whenever we need it, but the other side has to, I don't know, fake it sometimes. Yeah, I know. No, I mean, agoptionism. We do a good job at supporting each other when we know maybe there's some level of self doubt that one might be feeling or feeling down about whatever it should you're dealing with at the company. So that's been important. And we've always still no matter all the different pivots and the different cycles that we've been through, we've always kept the same routines as well. We meet up regularly, we work in the office together every single day, we grab coffee at the same time every single morning. We hang out when we're not working as well. So I think when you just have that trust with your business partner, your co-founder, it just helps you survive the droughts much better. It's just showing up. It's like going to the gym, right? If you're trying to get jacked, right? Yeah, if you show up even on the days, you're hungover and you're tired and you're sleepy and you have the worst sleep score, like you're still going in there and you're like lifting that, you know, lifting that weight. And for us, it was, that's why, you know, even though we went remote and all that, we've always made it a point to have an office. And it's just, it makes the biggest difference to just show up physically, show up physically on laptop. Just sit there, even though it's like a terrible day, your revenues down, people are kind of like, you know, like leaving the company whatever, just to be able to show up and sit there and kind of like be near somebody else that's also showing up. Like that just goes so far. And again, it compounds. It like the skill of showing up even when you don't want to show up and things are hard is I feel like a really underrated skill. And I think there's something on on YC that kind of talked about power of habit. I mean, I'm a big believer in that for sure, right? Next up, we have Dan Haley, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Guild on balancing work and life after a cancer diagnosis. So it's interesting. So that is true. And I, this is, this is, it's hard to answer this question without sounding self aggrandizing. The first time I had cancer, I was in my last year of law school and it was literally my treatments. My surgery was right before finals and then my treatments were all through studying for the bar. And I was working behind that good and proctor at the time. So my day was, I'd get up in the morning, I would go to Goodwin Proctor. I would work for half the day. I would go to my bar of U-Class and I would go to bring him a women's hospital, get my radiation, go home, usually throw up and then study for the bar. And that sounds just, you know, it was not an optional. I mean, I suppose, right, that's not totally true. I could have said like, I'm going to put off the bar a year and I'm going to do all these things, but didn't occur to me at the time. And so in the file of silver linings, that experience did give me the ability ever after to say, well, this thing I'm going through is not that six week long period. You know, I'm not throwing up involuntarily while I study for the bar. So, you know, you kind of get through. Right. And I don't know, like, you can't, you can't visit the alternate reality, you know, where I can't visit the alternate reality where I didn't go through that. So I don't know how much of my work ethic or whatever stems from that. I suspect a pretty good chunk of it. And so to circle back to your actual question, yes, people ask me that. It often comes up in the context of I do endurance events sometimes to stay in good cardiovascular health. And so I've done a couple of Ironman triathlons and that requires you to get up at like three in the morning to do the training. And yeah, you know, how do you work that into your work schedule? And, you know, gosh, I'm too busy. You know, you must. And I always say, actually, I'm probably at my best when I'm training for something like that because it's the mind. It creates, you know, the imperative to like actually use your time deliberately and that goes for family time and social time and all that too. And having a goal is just having a goal, having an ostentatious goal. It's being a tremendously motivating thing beyond just the goal itself. Here's a clip from my conversation with Zoe McMahon, head of legal ops at HP, where we talked about mindfulness and bringing parts of your personal self into the workplace. For someone that has been at the company for 30 years, I'm a VP, I'm an executive, I'm successful, but I'm human, right? And I think, you know, we all have, or I'm going to speculate that many of us have self-doubt at times or nervousness about situations. And I'll give you an example for me that's very real right now. I care a lot about mindfulness practice and I think it's a little bit missing in the workplace, sort of recognizing, yeah, just a little bit of calm. But to actually speak up and say that, to people at work without them going, "Are you crazy?" You know, there's a little bit of like trepidation about it, but you know, I have seen by experimenting a little bit by being brave and sort of dropping it in from time to time. Like, I've seen people respond to me, "Oh yeah, I like that too." And I think sometimes when people at brave and they bring props and ass bag that they care about into workplace, it liberates other people to do the same thing, as you were just saying in this untold stories case. And I think that's a really good thing to bring our humanity. And particularly if we can be more respectful, more gracious to each other, bring ease. There is so much stress in a legal department. You know, as we've heard at this conference, the demand for legal work is growing, the budget is so shrinking. There's not enough bodies you can throw at the problem. So, along with efficiencies and skills and technology to drive those improvements, we have to have some corresponding empathy for each other as well. Sure. So I think like, if we can all just take it down a notch and be nice to each other, I'm a big proponent of that. And maybe some might think it's a bit polyanna, but that's my story to bring. Here's a clip from my conversation with Laura Frederick, CEO at How to Contract on the importance of seeing a therapist and how it helped change her life. Yeah, it's an area that's so important to me. And I didn't, you know, I tell people, I got my first therapist at 42. I didn't realize that I could change some of the ways that I approached some of the ways that I processed and dealt with life. And I didn't realize what a positive impact going through therapy would have on every aspect of my life. And so, before I started with therapy, I very much felt like the victim. I felt like my life had turned into this place and I'd reached this point and it wasn't my fault. I didn't do anything to make it happen. At least when it came to my personal life, my professional life, I felt in control. I have chosen these jobs. I've chosen this path. This is what I want to do. I'm I'm where I deserve to be. Yeah. personal side, it was like, "Oh, it's happening to me. I'm the victim. I don't know how to get out of this." And I didn't see how I had created all the circumstances. I had created a situation where I found myself in a failing marriage and just being unhappy and really unable to cope with the difficulties of life. And it was through therapy that I found how my thinking contributed to that and that I one was I wasn't seeing the role that I had. For example, the idea of owning your outcomes and owning where you are in life and that we're none of us are victim or all making choices about where to be in life. And just even though we feel like we can't make a different choice, we are making a choice even when we're not making that choice. You're choosing to stay in your circumstances. And I think the other big thing which I think lawyers really struggle with and I did as well, which was this idea of I can control the world around me if I just do enough work. And I tell people what to do and I set everything up so it won't fail, then it'll all be good. And anytime things go wrong, it's because I didn't prepare properly. I didn't do these things and I had the sense that I knew what was best for everything that was going on in my world, the people around me, all that kind of stuff. And I had this great therapist who said, she's like, who are you God? How do you know what's best for these people in your life? You have no idea. Maybe you are exactly the thing that's causing all the problems in your life. And if you would let go of you're trying to control everything, then these other people would be better off. And I just was like floored by that because it really challenged the sense of me trying to control everything. And it goes back, there's a great quote on it that you didn't have control. I don't remember the exact wording, but essentially it's you never had control, you only had anxiety. And that false sense of control, especially lawyers and people in the legal world, create for ourselves because we're overachiever types and we're used to making them happen. And we're used to being the smart one in the room and telling everybody what to do. So it's hard to kind of take that version of ourselves that doesn't know what's going on. And isn't in control and is just, you know, all we can control is ourselves. So I think embracing that, and again, my number one career advice for everyone is get therapy early and often it will my career, like the joy in my career, my ability to do a great job, went through the roof once I got my therapy. I learned how to manage my emotions so much better. I learned how to really, you know, embrace the role as opposed to, you know, being scared all the time, being worried and stressed all the time. I just, I found so much more peace once I went through my therapy. So I can't talk about it enough. Thanks so much for listening to this special episode of The Abstract in honor of mental health awareness month. I hope you enjoyed the episode and hope to see you next time.