St. Pete Bar aims for ‘Happy, Healthy, Holistic Attorneys’
St. Pete Bar aims for ‘Happy, Healthy, Holistic Attorneys’
Senior Editor
Want to be a cutting-edge lawyer? Try living life with a little less edge.
So says St. Petersburg Bar Association Executive Director Melissa Byers.
In herprevious life, Byers owned a California wellness salon, taught wellness at the exclusive Golden Door Luxury Resort and Spa in San Diego, and personally coached the likes of Barbara Walters and Joan London.
These days, Byers and St. Petersburg Bar Association President William B. McQueen are mounting a campaign to blend modern health and wellness practices with the modern practice of law. Their motto is, “The St. Pete Bar: Happy, Healthy, Holistic Attorneys.”
Descriptive, but less bumper-sticker friendly than the “Shift Happens” original, that was dropped for the sake of professional propriety.
Byers acknowledges that a wellness definition is hard to pin down. But she says it has a lot to do with stress reduction and juggling the 24-hour demands of a digital workplace with primal imperatives for healthy nutrition, exercise, and meaningful human connection.
“To me, wellness is the balancing of an overall holistic approach to your life,” Byers said. “There’s many layers to wellness and we often try to simplify it. But I think it’s a balancing of the areas of your life that are needed to support you and support others.”
Byers had serious reservations before launching the wellness campaign. She knows the Type-A personalities typically drawn to the law are the ones most likely to dismiss wellness as left-coast, crystal-gazing mumbo jumbo. But studies show the legal profession is long overdue for a wellness campaign.
The ABA National Task Force on Lawyer Well Being surveyed 13,000 practicing attorneys last year and concluded 36 percent are likely problem drinkers and 28 percent struggle with depression, anxiety or debilitating stress. Substance abuse and suicide have become occupational hazards.
McQueen considers the findings a wakeup call. Dissatisfaction within the profession is too widespread to ignore, McQueen said.
“I am the proud parent of two 1L Stetson law students this year,” McQueen said. “However, as I shared this great news with fellow attorneys, often their response was, ‘that’s too bad that you weren’t able to talk them out of it.’ My hope is that we can all work together to support one another in changing this reality.”
Earlier this year, the St. Pete Bar sponsored “wellness membership luncheons” featuring national experts like Nora Bergman, author of “Improve Your Practice, Improve Your Life,” and a guest lecture by Debbie Lundberg, titled, “Permission to Create Wellness.”
The association sponsors “Wellness Wednesday” walks at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. at Crescent Lake hosted by the St. Petersburg Bar’s Young Lawyers Section. There’s even a wellness book club.
One of the biggest hits, Byers said, was a tea tasting and wellness event at Tebella Tea Company. Many members were astonished at how much fun they could have at an alcohol-free event, Byers said.
Seminars in March and April will focus on financial security, a vital but too often overlooked component of a wellness-centered life, Byers said.
“I think we all inherently believe, yes, we do need to have financial success before we can look to overall wellness and security,” Byers said. “And that becomes a perpetual cycle of when is enough enough?”
Wellness can be as simple as remembering to take a client’s call on a cell phone so the conversation can coincide with a leisurely walk, Byers said, or the basket she keeps at home to collect family members’ cell phones so they can focus more intently on each other.
Wellness could also be bigger, Byers said, like a perspective change that allows managing partners to see free and family time as vital for mental healing and recharging creative energy — not wasted hours that could be billed.
“We’re not saying that you have to shut your law practice down and ignore your clients and become homeless and have no income to speak of,” Byers said. “We’re just saying that if you want to have overall health, and be better for yourself, your clients, your family, your community, it starts with you and it starts with a cultural shift.”
