In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Adam Ouellette discuss:
- The long-term impact of unmanaged stress in the legal profession
- Shifting from reactive to responsive behavior in work and life
- The necessity of integrating systems, organization, and delegation in law practices
- Exploring effective breathing and mindfulness practices for emotional regulation
Key Takeaways:
- Most lawyers suffer from nervous system dysregulation due to chronic stress, which leads to physical symptoms like migraines, arrhythmia, and burnout.
- Heart-focused breathing, specifically the “Quick Coherence” method, can physiologically shift the body from fight-or-flight into healing mode in just minutes.
- Using modern legal tech tools like CRMs, automation software, and client management systems can drastically reduce workload and prevent burnout, but most lawyers resist adopting them.
- Implementing micro-pauses every 50 minutes for breathwork and short breaks can significantly reduce mental fatigue and boost long-term performance.
“It’s so critical that lawyers start to quiet their mind and regulate their nervous systems, because if you don’t, you’re gonna hit a wall at some point in your practice, and you’re not gonna like it. Most people won’t change until they have to.” — Adam Ouellette
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Episode References:
Getting Things Done by David Allen: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280
About Adam Ouellette: Adam Ouellette, Esq. is a former law firm owner turned transformational consultant for lawyers. With over 28 years of experience in the legal field, Adam now helps law firm owners eliminate stress, increase productivity, and build balanced, fulfilling practices. He is the creator of Esquire Academy, the Stress Less Plus course for lawyers, and author of Raising the Bar – Turning a Law Career You Hate Into a Life You Love, In or Out of the Law. His new book, Transform Your Law Firm, Transform Your Life, will be published later this year. Adam specializes in law firm growth, time management for lawyers, lawyer wellness, and stress reduction for attorneys.
Connect with Adam Ouellette:
Website: http://adam.law/
Raising The Bar by Adam Ouellette: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Bar-Turning-Career-Hate-ebook/dp/B00I9K1J58
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamJOuellette
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjouellette/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esquireacademy
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin [00:04]
Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin I am almost done promoting my book for a little while, but I wanted to share that it is crushing it on Amazon, five star reviews across the board, and if you want to grab a copy now is the time. Adrian Mendoza is one of our contributors. He said Steve consistently has his finger on the pulse of effective business growth strategies. This book focuses on the behaviors and approaches that successful attorneys use to build their network and client base. Check it out, everybody. It’s be that lawyer. You can’t go wrong. Thanks and enjoy the show.
Narrator [00:42]
You’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin [01:04]
Hey everybody, it’s Steve Fretzin. And welcome back to the be that lawyer podcast. You guys know this is the place to come when you’re interested in learning how to be that lawyer, confident, organized in a skilled Rainmaker. And you know my job is, you guys know, is to continually bring on amazing guests, no different today. Adam, what’s happening? Man, how you doing.
Adam Ouellette [01:22]
Good to be here, Steve, appreciate it.
Steve Fretzin [01:24]
Yeah, good to have you. And for those of you who are checking this show out or learning about Fretz, and be that lawyer for the first time, you know, my whole career has been directed to help lawyers to sort of demystify business development and the business side of law and to give you sound plans and methodologies and systems and things to focus on to be your best self and live your best lawyer’s life. So whether you are checking out this podcast, I’ve got five books on Amazon. I’ve got I write for above the law. I got a bunch of other stuff cooking just leverage what you can to be a student of the game. And whether it’s de stressing, which is what you know a lot of what we’re going to talk about today, time management, you name it. There’s so many different things to learn, and this is just one point of contact. So with that all being said, let’s jump in and get to it. We’ve got a great quote of the show. It’s not the stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it. Welcome to the show, Adam, and tell us a little bit about that quote.
Adam Ouellette [02:20]
Well, for me, stress, kicked my ass and took my name, right? I mean, the biggest challenge for lawyers is the anxiety and the stress. And I want to start the show Steve by saying the stuff we’re going to talk about today is not the normal shit you usually hear about, stress reduction. Okay, I’m pretty bold. I might drop some F bombs. Try not, but my boldness kind of takes over, because stress management isn’t the way to go, and I learned that after many, many years. So Han Selle wrote that book, and he was an endocrinologist, and he was one of the first to introduce the concept of stress. And so 99% of the stuff out there for anyone in terms of having too much stress is stress management. But what if we are doing stress to ourselves? That’s what we’re going to talk about today in some depth, as much as we can get to. And I do want to apologize at first, because sometimes I do ramble because I’m trying to get as much information into this episode as we can, because I’ve learned so much over the 30 plus years. I’ve been law school, practicing law, and then now a consultant for lawyers and law firms that I try to just give as much information as I can, because this is a prevalent problem in our profession. The bar associations from state to local have tried and tried people ignore this stuff now, but I hope they don’t ignore this information, because this is so different than anything you’ll probably have ever heard.
Steve Fretzin [03:58]
Well, my job is to keep you focused, and what I love about what you’re saying already is this show, you know, quite frankly, isn’t about ideas at 20,000 feet. It’s really about what actionable takeaways can people walk away from 30 minutes and say, Hey, I’ve got something to go do that’s going to help me. X, you know, accomplish something, solve something, finish something. So we’re definitely going to take a deep dive. I just want to add to add to your quote a little bit, and then we want to get into your background a little bit. The it’s so true that stuff comes at us all the time, whether it’s email jail, whether it’s client emergencies, whether it’s, you know, whatever it is that you know, a pet’s health, it doesn’t matter. There’s stuff happening all the time, and how we respond to it is really what it’s all about. Because, you know, you’ve got a moment of time to react to something that can either take you over the edge of the cliff or, you know, keep you safe. So we’ll dive into that, as you said, Adam, pretty well, but give us a little background. So how did you, you know, take us back to, you know, the lawyers days, and then leading. Into how you became this coach for lawyers.
Adam Ouellette [05:02]
Well, I started practicing law in 98 and I was working with a guy that had been practicing about 25 years, and one of the reasons I went to work for him was because he had a lot of knowledge, and I wanted the knowledge, and he really sucked at business, and so when you and I talked first, I was so appreciative of what you’re doing in the world. Because lawyers are so bad at business. They’re very good tacticians, but they really stink at business. And so this guy really stunk at business, but I love the business aspects of it. So I was bringing in so much business early on, Steve, that this guy made me a law partner six months in. So here I am. You know, 27 years old, 28 years old, and I’m a law partner in this business. We’re growing quickly. And I was stressed beyond belief, because here’s these women in their 50s that are working with us, right? We had this staff, and we moved to different offices, and I had to make sure that the rain making I was doing was going to support the multiple offices we had the staff and, you know, turnkey, it’s 25 grand back then, you know. So there was a lot of stress on me as a youngster, as a young lawyer, and it crushed me. It absolutely crushed me. And so I woke up one morning and I had what was they diagnosed as arrhythmia, and I’m sitting here going, what the hell is this? I was freaking out, you know, I thought I was having a heart attack or something. So hospital visits, you know, they put me on the drugs for arrhythmia, but it wasn’t the arrhythmia. I had a dysregulated nervous system. Now, that’s some of the things we’re going to talk about today. And so you hit the nail on the head. It was, you know, the fact is, what we do is we push so hard and we don’t understand what we’re doing to ourselves. And when we screw over our nervous system, the nervous system runs the body, and since the nervous system runs the body, it can cause us all kinds of problems. So I went undiagnosed for the real problem for, like, 20 years. So I practiced real estate business law, and I did some litigation. You know, we had three offices at one time, and so when I woke up that morning, I knew at certain point later that something had to change. Something had to change in my life, because I was heading for a nervous breakdown or heart attack. Young kid, heart attack, right? Kid, lawyer. So when I figured something had to change, I started looking at different modalities, and I’ve learned so much over the past 30 years, right? I mean, I’ve learned a lot over the past 10 years, and that’s why I have this stress less course that I’m redoing now, because I’ve learned so much since I created that first course, and hundreds of attorneys have been through it. I’ve gotten feedback. I’ve had dialogs with people. I understand how the lawyer mind works. And so one of the questions that I want to pose to your audience is, what happens if you wake up like I did, and you can’t work because you’re sick? What happens if you can’t work for a year or two? Look, I’ve coached lawyers that have had five different lawyers over the past 10 years that had cancers, leukemias, lung cancer. Want to what if you wake up and you have to go through cancer treatment? What I’ve learned is 70, 80% of disease, maybe more is caused by stress, anxiety, and we have too much of it in this profession, way too much of it.
Steve Fretzin [08:28]
Yeah. I mean, our bodies are in. Our brains are like a car, right? They need to be maintained. And you can’t just push a car at 100 miles an hour all the time and expect that you’re going to have an okay car in a year or six months, if you’re doing that, or in Chicago, cold, you know, the car needs to warm up and so, no, you’re just going to speed off on the highway at 100 miles an hour. You can’t do it. Hey, everybody, just so, you know, Adam allette Is is with us today. He’s the owner of Esquire Academy. We are going to be taking some really deep dives today into helping you guys, you know, figure out the whole aspect of how to be at your best self and live your best lawyer life and not fall into that burnout category, if you can help it. And again, if you get a couple takeaways from today’s show that help you towards a cleaner, better path, then you know, you’ll be sure to tell friends about the podcast anyway. Long and the short is, Adam. My question for you, I want to start off with is, you know, there’s, obviously, you know, there’s a couple of specific industries that are specifically stressful. And I mean, I would take, you know, someone that’s like a brain surgeon, or someone that’s, you know, a lawyer, you know, maybe they’re different categories, but ultimately, you know, there’s stress in a lot of different businesses, but in law, with the billable hour and client demands and partner demands and all the things going on, what are you seeing lawyers stressing out about more than anything?
Adam Ouellette [09:53]
I think it’s the amount of work we have to do in order to make a living. Yeah, and when you pie. All this work on somebody that isn’t leveraging their staff enough, isn’t leveraging technology, because there’s so much to do that they don’t want to spend time on the stuff that you’re telling them to do, you’re recommending them to do. I’m recommending those, these lawyers, to do. Look, I have a friend who my one business partner. I helped her leave the law. She works for smokeball, right client management software. And I said, What’s the biggest challenge that you have? These lawyers won’t work with the software. So in the end, what happens is you’re so overwhelmed because you have so much work to do, but then you won’t do the things that could really cause you to have less work. And Steve, let me first give you some kudos, my friend, okay, because you have automated the shit out of your podcast. And I’ve been on quite a few podcasts over the last 10 years, but you have it so dialed in, and if lawyers would follow that lead, because I’ve done the same with my work, right? I did it when I was a lawyer, automating system sizing, but let me give you kudos for how dialed in you have it. You have structured this so you don’t have to do much, right? I answer the questions. It sends out the emails before it reminds me of the questions that I said, please ask me Steve and lawyers gotta, they have to do this for their own firms. Because if they do this, and they spend a couple hours a week, and they start to implement the things that are there, I wish I had these softwares that are out now, like Clio and smokeball and the CRMs. I mean, you could put your marketing on autopilot. Look, I use Constant Contact back when, and that created so many leads for me because I was doing videos and teaching and sharing, but now it’s mind numbing how great this stuff is, but the lawyers won’t spend time implementing that so that they can save time at the end of the week. And so to me, being a lawyer is one of the hardest professions in the world it is, I can’t tell you that it’s worse than er, doctors, EMTs, nurses in the ER, police officers, military. No, no, we’re not getting shot at, right? We’re not in the military, and we don’t have guns pointed to our head. But that’s the way we.
Steve Fretzin [12:19]
But I don’t know that it matters. Meaning, I mean, I don’t know that your mind and your body know the difference if they don’t. When you’re feeling stressed and your back goes out, or you’re feeling stressed and you can’t get out of bed and you’re depressed or whatever it is that’s going on, you might it doesn’t matter if you’re being shot at or you’re getting screamed at by a client, or you’ve got, you know, 1000 emails unopened in your inbox. It’s the same response that, and I think what you’re saying too is that a lot of this stress is caused by unintentionally, maybe by the lawyer who isn’t delegating, who isn’t automating, who is really trying to manage and run everything on their own, and it this day and age. What a terrible mistake and misstep that is.
Adam Ouellette [13:03]
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s a difference between being stressed and not looking at things stressfully. Okay, there’s always going to be stress in our lives, but we can reduce it because we’re doing it to ourselves, absolutely doing it to ourselves. Yeah, we can choose. And you said this word early on, and it’s exactly what we do. We react to it. We react to life. What we can do is start responding, because our reactions are habitual. They’re habitual patterns. We are actually addicted to the stress chemicals. Our brain has become addicted to those chemicals, and they are caustic. They’re acidic. Cortisol and adrenaline are some of the worst things, but they’re created for fight, flight or freeze. We’re not supposed to live there. And when I said nervous system dysregulation at the beginning of this the half hour, what we do is we become addicted to those chemicals, and so we move our systems into the fight or flight almost all the time, all day, every day. That’s why we can’t sleep, that’s why we’re frazzled, that’s why we’re exhausted, that’s why we can’t focus. You know, if you move your system into the sympathetic nervous area, and you’re moving your baseline is what it’s called, because I’m a Heart Math trainer and coach and certified and all that, and I’ve learned from some of these doctors about what we’re doing to ourselves. And so what you’re doing is you’re living from the fight or flight freeze. And what you got to do is start to regulate the nervous system and bring it back down into the parasympathetic, which is the heal mode, right, which is the I’m safe mode. But when we live from that fight or flight, we act as if we have a gun pointed to our head or a lion’s chasing us all the time, and it’s a fucking email. It’s a client bitching. So what? It’s not going to kill you. It’s nothing that you should stress out about. But when you layer all of that shit on us all day, every day, where does it go?
Steve Fretzin [14:59]
Yeah. Where? Right, right? All bottled up in you, and you know you don’t want to burden your spouse with it, or you don’t want to get a therapist because that shows weakness or some bull crap.
Adam Ouellette [15:09]
Well, every lawyer should have a therapist. Every lawyer should have one.
Steve Fretzin [15:12]
I mean, right, right from your mouth to their ears.
Adam Ouellette [15:16]
I hate to laugh about it, but it’s true.
Steve Fretzin [15:19]
With proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm. Rankings.io. Prides itself on proof, not promises. Mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io. When they want rankings, traffic and cases, other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get More rankings, get cases and schedule a free [email protected] today, hey everybody. It’s Steve Fretzin as the you know, I’m the host of the be that lawyer podcast, and if you’re serious about growing your law practice, let’s talk. I’ve coached hundreds of attorneys to build bigger books of business without selling chasing or wasting time. This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a real 30 minute strategy session to explore what’s possible for you in your practice. Just head over to fretzin.com and grab a time that works for you, and let’s make this your breakout year. But I think what we need to do is we need to transition into what are a couple of things, habits, things that lawyers can do to I don’t want to say maybe it’s distress, or maybe it’s to reduce overwhelm, increase clarity. I want to just share something that I think is really important most lawyers never. Most lawyers never do this, and it goes right along what you were just saying, Adam, is take a day and just write down everything you did in the day. I mean, I know that’s a burden, and I know that’s difficult, but I think they just don’t understand that they’re making copies and they’re dealing with admin people and admin and they’re, they’ve got five boss partners, and they’ve got 10 boss clients, and they’re got all these emails, and they’ve got, or, you know, they realize they have poor administrative help, or no administrative help, whatever it might be. I think just doing that exercise demonstrates one of the reasons why you may be so stressed out. You’re, everything is on you 100%.
Adam Ouellette [17:03]
Yeah. And I read a great book around the time I was having these issues when I was a younger lawyer, called Getting Things Done. Well, that’s my baby. It’s the classic, right?
Steve Fretzin [17:12]
I mean, my clients get all of my books, like I send a box to all my clients, right? They get all of my books and one other book, and that book is getting things done. Yeah, I’ve never found anything better. Now I talk about on the show all the time and money, I am not built at the way that I I’m built now the way I was built before was hair on fire, all from the gut, stacks of business cards, stacks of paperwork, hundreds of unopened emails, scrambling around to do whatever that book I am, no paper, no unopening, every you know, no inbox. This is what I did to my firm. You can’t go back once you do it. It’s beautiful.
Adam Ouellette [17:51]
Yeah, no. And when you recognize spending a little bit of time getting yourself organized with the David Allen principles is going to save you so much time and doing the weekly plan and doing the daily plan that, in itself, helped me. When you get organized, you know what’s next, and there’s never a thought of, look at all this friggin paper and oh my God, and that feeling of overwhelm when before you’re organized, that is stress in itself.
Steve Fretzin [18:20]
Yeah. I mean, I remember, I remember very distinctly, one of the first things that the book says is you have to do your purge. So you have to put everything in your office and just put it in one pile, and it was four feet high and three feet wide. And I was, I had an assistant helping me, but we took the top piece of paper off. We said, What is this? Yes, is this garbage? Is this file? Is this? What is this? Something I have to do? So we took, I don’t know, six hours, eight hours, the two of us, we went through it, and I physically felt the weight off my shoulders when I realized everything was cleared out. It wasn’t hanging over me like a dirty, disgusting and boy, I was able to breathe again. It made it such a huge difference. So I think getting things done and getting organized. But let me ask you this, someone is in the stress mode, in the in feeling overwhelmed right now, what should they be doing when that feeling is hitting them and dragging them down?
Adam Ouellette [19:14]
So there’s a quick breathing technique I’m going to give everybody. It comes out of Heart Math. And I can do this because it’s online, it’s a lot of places. But one of the things I do say to the people I coach and I’m going to start doing a lot more videos on my stress less. Course, I do an hour long training on Heart Math. There’s something called coherent communication, which I do right before an episode, or I do right before I get on the phone with people. Ultimately, Heart Math is connecting your brain and your heart. There’s a lot of power there. But one of the things I would want as a takeaway for somebody watching this is micro pauses during the day. Micro pause, so the breathing technique we’re going to go through in 10 seconds here is what you can do during a micro pause. For me, I still. Work 55 oh minutes, and I set an alarm on my phone or my Apple watch, I said, set a timer for 50 minutes. When that shit goes off, I stand up. I walk around a little bit because I’m six nine, and sitting at a desk is not good. So I have a stand up desk here in my office that I record this from, but I don’t like a stand up desk all day, but so get up, stretch, sit back down and take some deep breaths. And what this process is, it’s called heart focused breathing. It links up your heart and your brain, and it ultimately brings you down from the sympathetic, which is the fight or flight, back down into the parasympathetic. And if you did that for five minutes every hour, it could totally change how you feel. And so instead of reacting to everything, you start to respond, because you bring your nervous system down so hard focus breathing is this. You close your eyes, if you can. You’re not doing this in the car, riding mower, but you close your eyes, and you just put all your attention in the middle of your chest, and you breathe deeply and slowly, if you can five seconds in, five seconds out, and you slow everything down. What this does is it tells your nervous system, I’m not being chased by a lion. I’m safe. And it will slow the mind down. The mind is what’s racing. It’s like a friggin hamster in a hamster wheel. Always going, going, going. But if you did this once an hour for a minute something, it would slow everything down, and it could help you gather yourself. So when you put GTD together with stop doing so much admin work, start delegating the shit that you’re not good at and focus on what you’re really good at. And you slow down a little bit, because when you’re organized and you’ve done these micro pauses, and you spend, I still, hour a day, I do my Heart Math, folk, the focus breathing. It’s called Quick coherence method, but an hour a day I’m doing that, and the lawyers I’ve taught it to over the years, oh, my God, I’ve tried to meditate in the past, and I can’t. Well, yeah, your mind’s going a mile a minute. You’re thinking about all the shit that you don’t have on your to do list or your project plan, like getting things done tells you to do. And when they focus on something the heart space, it allows them to connect with that quietness, right? Yeah, it’s difficult at first. Most lawyers will push back against this because they don’t want to quiet that mind, because they’re not used to it, and they are literally habituated and addicted to being going a mile a minute, but.
Steve Fretzin [22:39]
But it sounds like a form of meditation. It’s more of a breathing meditation. I’m a fan, by the way, of meditation, and in particular, transnetal meditation. And the thing that I like about it, there is a breathing element to it, of course, but the idea of it is, for those who don’t know, is you have a mantra that you say in your head. It’s a made up word, whatever you want, right? Oh, my, or whatever it might be. And then you sound like George Takei, yeah. Oh, my, probably not a good idea, but let’s say it’s Omar or something like that, and you say the word over and over and over again. And when you’re in the process of thinking and saying the word over and over again, it makes it difficult for you to think about the things that are bugging you now, and those things that are bugging you drift in. You go back to your mantra and everything. So it’s like 20 minutes of calm. And that the best example I’ve ever heard is you’re on, you know, a little boat on the top of the ocean being tossed around in a storm. But if you go 500 feet under the ocean, it’s nice and calm, yeah, just to get yourself there for 20 minutes a day, or twice a day, or to do the breathing. We don’t realize that our bodies in the batteries that they are need, that otherwise, you’re always in that fight or flight, which is, I think, what you’ve been harping on for the last 25 minutes.
Adam Ouellette [23:52]
Well, there’s a graphic in My Heart Math training that comes right out of their PowerPoint, and it shows two batteries, one that’s dead and one that’s full. And so the difference between this and Transcendental Meditation is you’re focusing not on a word which can get a little tedious, because I’ve done TM right. I mean, it’s great, but to me, Heart Math 500 peer review studies over the past 35 years. It’s used in 500 hospitals, doctors, and I’m bringing it to the law, because mostly doctors and nurses use this. It’s in the medical community, but for God’s sakes, we need to use this in the legal community, because we’re every bit as stressed out as them. And interestingly enough, we helped this guy leave the law, and he was an MD in Chicago. I think I told you about him. He was an MD in the emergency room before he became a lawyer. And I said, What the hell were you thinking?
Steve Fretzin [24:42]
He was trying to get less stress.
Adam Ouellette [24:45]
He thought it might be grass is greener. Well, here’s this. And I was like, Oh my god. So I taught him this process. He goes, I wish I had this as a doctor. It wouldn’t have helped me like it anymore, but it would have helped him center and so to me. I love TM, but this when you add in then the quick coherence method, which is basically, you can find it on YouTube, that method, the lady that runs Heart Math has it. Go find it. Quick coherence method. You’re adding in a regenerative feeling. Steve, and when you add a regenerative feeling into that breathing, it changes your chemistry, your body chemistry. And it’s a beautiful process. And I found it about five years in practicing law, and I credit it to helping me keep my sanity. And now, you know, from 2017 on, I’ve been a certified trainer and coach mentor with it, and to me, it’s one of those powerful ways science based, I have this little thing you hook on your ear, and I practice with that every day, and it’ll tell you whether you’re coherent or not. Coherence is linking that part in the brain up, and it knows through your heartbeat. I don’t know if you ever heard of HRV. It’s it’s out there quite a bit. Now, that’s the type of Honda. Yeah, no, those are good cards. That’s too easy, yeah, but it’s called heart rate variability, and it shows you whether you’re in that space that TM teaches you to be 500 feet under the water, where you’re not feeling the waves. It’s so critical that lawyers start to quiet their mind and regulate their nervous systems, because if you don’t, you’re gonna hit a wall at some point in your practice, and you’re not gonna like it. So most people won’t change until they have to. This is something that every lawyer needs to look at and do and implement in their lives, because what if you can’t work? That’s what happened to me, and you don’t want to be in a place like that. It is the worst feeling to be sick in the hospital and having to go to all these doctors. You have no energy and you can’t get out of bed, yeah. What do you do if you have that occur? How do you make a living?
Steve Fretzin [26:47]
Yeah, so, so let’s not let it get to that everybody. Let’s really focus on what we can do today to support our futures. And you know, it’s not just us. Many of us have families that we’re supporting. We need to protect ourselves, for us and for them. So let me ask you this, and we’ll wrap up on this. Adam, any you know a new segment, Adam’s big mistake. What’s something that happened in your life that you that you made a huge mistake, but you learned from it, and that you would be willing to share with our listeners?
Adam Ouellette [27:14]
Well, let’s keep it in this theme of what we’ve talked about today. Okay, I pushed so hard, and I could feel it. I could feel that stress in me. And I was starting to get like this pressure in my chest, and I was having headaches, migraine headaches. Which one put me in the hospital? I was seeing these auras, and I couldn’t speak Steve. I pushed so hard. And I remember it was the last day of the year in Florida. We were real estate attorneys and everybody, all these Realtors thought we had to close because you couldn’t get homestead exemption. You had to close it on the 31st so we had 15 closings. 11 o’clock, I see this aura go to the hospital. A couple hours later, I couldn’t speak. I’m trying to speak to the nurse, and she’s like, I don’t understand you. Do you know what the president, who the president, is? And I’m like, I’m speaking in tongues.
Steve Fretzin [28:03]
It’s like they got to call in house for you.
Adam Ouellette [28:05]
Seriously. And then they were jabbing me in the back because they thought I had, I can’t remember what it was, but they were trying to do a spinal tap on. Oh my god. And my spine is so thick, because I’m such a big dude, this doctor stuck me 25 times. Oh no, and he couldn’t ever get the fluid out. So it was, it wasn’t meningitis, that’s what they thought I had, okay. But a big mistake was pushing, pushing, pushing until I was on my knees with these various illnesses. And to me, that is not worth it. You give yourself so much suffering if you just implement a couple of the things we talk about here. Yeah, yeah. This is heart focused breathing, if you just implement that and read getting things done. Come on. All right.
Steve Fretzin [28:48]
Yep, so and I’m gonna ask you where to find that in a second. Want to take a moment to just thank our wonderful sponsors, of course, pimcon coming up. If you’re in pi and you want to go to the top notch conference of the year, check out pimcon.org, also my friend Sonia, over at law, her podcast, fantastic, obviously, pick up a copy of be that lawyer on Amazon, a new book, a best seller, and a bunch of categories. Really excited about that. And Adam, if people want to get your information, learn about you and get more information about that, about hard math, what’s the what are the digits there?
Adam Ouellette [29:22]
Esquire academy.com/stressless, I’m rebuilding that course. So if you sign up and you buy the course as it is now, and that course is just for lawyers, when it’s rebuilt, it’s going to be three times the cost because it’s implementing a lot of the things we’re talking about here, like we do stress to ourselves, not the other way around. But there’s free videos there. There’s three videos on some of the things we’ve talked about today. But that stuff is it should be required in law school. Seriously, some of this stuff should not my stress, less, course, well maybe, but understanding that this is one of the most difficult professions on the planet. And understanding that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we’re going to screw ourselves, and it’s something you could do in simple, easy steps every day.
Steve Fretzin [30:07]
So yeah, you’re sinking your own ship. Everybody, right? Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show sharing your wisdom. And you know, just there aren’t many more top many topics more important than taking care of ourselves. I mean, we could talk about business development and marketing and hey, Be your authentic self and all that. But if we don’t address the battery of our bodies and our minds, I think everything else doesn’t matter.
Adam Ouellette [30:29]
Exactly it. Steve, appreciate the opportunity, and thanks so much for what you do.
Steve Fretzin [30:34]
Yeah, hey, my pleasure. Thank you, and thank you everybody for hanging out with Adam and I for the last 30 minutes. You know, again, just really take heed and warning, and really take care of yourself. Understand it’s like put your oxygen mask on yourself first before you got to give it to someone else, that type of, that type of thing. But you know, and keep listening to the show, keep, you know, telling people about it. Give us a kind review. If you love it, it’s going to help us get further along as we get 500 episodes and pass and everything else. So helping you all to be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled Rainmaker, take care. Everybody. Be safe, be well. We will talk again soon.
Narrator [31:09]
Thanks for listening to be that loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fredson.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal, business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.