What's Love Got to Do With It? Injecting Health and Happiness into a Clinic or Externship Part 1 & Part 2

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Too many law students and lawyers are anxious or depressed, and often habituated to overwork, poor self-care, and other undermining behaviors. Clinics and externships present the ideal opportunity to train students to live a healthy, satisfying life by connecting them to their internal sources of joy and inspiration, teaching them about the professional need for intelligent self-care, and showing them ways to achieve it comfortably in an active working life. A major “side benefit” of injecting well-being training into clinical teaching is that we teachers enhance these life skills as we model them, thereby becoming more energized and inspired through our work.

The principles and practices in the two sessions are drawn from The Five Critical Steps That Guarantee Success and Happiness in the Law (forthcoming). They incorporate current teachings of neuroscience, biochemistry, and epigenetics along with the leading attorney research, “What Makes Lawyers Happy?”, to show precisely how to create positive health, satisfaction, and success through simple mental and physical practices. One featured principle is a mathematical data analysis pointing to love as experienced across key life dimensions, as the single core experience that provides happiness and satisfaction to lawyers. Professor Krieger will describe the use of this material in a skills course, externship, or clinical setting, and we will provide time for attendees to consider their own approaches to related teaching goals.

Presenters: Larry and Theresa Krieger greatly enjoy working together. He was primary investigator in the recent groundbreaking study “What Makes Lawyers Happy?”; founding Chair of the AALS Section on Balance in Legal Education; and one of two clinicians featured in the Harvard Press book, What the Best Law Teachers Do. Theresa is an experienced fitness, health, and life coach who works regularly with law students and lawyers.