The Addiction to Speed and the Power of Slowing Down with Lora McInturf

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. This episode is proudly sponsored by The Inner Advocate with Laura Mcinturff supporting lawyers and other business leaders around the world to transform important aspects of their work to realize more impact in their careers and feel more fulfilling life. You worked so hard to get this far in the legal profession, but now you're facing a challenge that you cannot ignore. Is this what it all came down to? I don't like some aspects of this career. How do I manage this difficult person or complex set of circumstances? Should I stay where I am? Go somewhere else or leave the legal professionals together. And the biggest question, what do I actually want from my career, from my life? Enter Laura Mcinturf, a former international lawyer turned executive coach who has faced these questions herself, as well as worked with hundreds of lawyers and other business leaders from over 55 countries on the same questions. She helps lawyers like you and me to capture the confusion and complexity and work through the real challenge. Is it time for a career transition? Is it a leadership challenge? Is it about work, life, integration? Is it just dreading Mondays? If you're feeling stuck in something, then connect with Laura Mcinturff on LinkedIn or visit the Inner Advocate Colon and book an exploratory call. It's time to stop ruminating and start navigating your way forward. Today, I have the pleasure to host Laura McIntyre. She's an international lawyer turned executive coach, coach and supervisor and ICF mentor coach. She has an incredible career and she has been through all the continents. So it's just great. Great pleasure. Great match to have her here in the podcast. Thank you so much for making the time to be here, Laura. Thanks for having me, Claudia. Absolutely. And to start podcast, I'd love for you to introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your journey from international law to coaching. Already mentioned, my name is Laura Mcinturf and I'm the founder of The Inner Advocate. I'm an American lawyer currently living in Germany. I started my life and career in the US as an accountant. Then I trained as a lawyer and worked in big law there. I then moved abroad for an LLM in Germany and worked in big law in Germany there as well. I am a qualified as an attorney in Ohio in the US and a solicitor of England and Wales, although I'm no longer practicing. So after the LLM in Germany, I married someone who then took several rather important expat assignments around the world and that took us back to the US and to China and then to Canada, where you are Claudio. And now we're back in Germany again. And for a lawyer moving across four different legal jurisdictions where I'm not licensed in the span of who was about 5 or 6 years, it really felt devastating my legal career, or so I thought at the time. And I realized that I was not going to be able to practice the law in a conventional sense. And my chosen life setup. And keep in mind, this was pre pandemic. And when I was exploring my options, a friend suggested that I would make a great executive coach. I looked into it, didn't really even know what it was, and decided to go for it on the premise that, well, the worst thing that could happen was that I would develop myself as a person. And I fell in love with the work of coaching. And I combined it with my legal background, which is where my business name comes from, the inner advocate. And since then, I've coached hundreds of lawyers and other leaders from over 55 countries. And as you mentioned at the beginning, I'm also a coaching supervisor and an ICF mentor coach for other lawyer coaches. And I work 100% virtually, which means they can work anywhere in the world. And I'm not limited limited to where I am licensed as a lawyer. So that was important. Amazing quite quite the path. I love that. Thank you for conspiracy to to drill in a little bit and learn more about those, you know, experiences that you had throughout your life. I'm curious, you know, when you first graduate, when you first start working, there's certain expectations and ideas and and all things that come into mind during your time at big firms. What did success mean to you and how has that changed for you over? Time. This is a great question because in law school I completely bought into the big law narrative. Success to me at the time meant big firms, biggest and most complex deals, those money involved and and success in my mind was very external and easy to articulate. Prestige, challenge, titles, connections, money, all that kind of stuff. And what I ignored in that definition was the internal and let's say more difficult stuff to quantify or show. So how I felt physically, emotionally and spiritually. And now after all these years and, and of course, with some credit to the coaching profession and in my shift and, and mindset, I consider my view to be more balanced among those things. So intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual, of course, some of them are more difficult to see or measure. And so now what I would say, quote UN quote, success means to me is I have very challenging work alongside consistent sleep. I eat well, I see my family often. I connect with what I feel is is greater than me and more and I have a lot of autonomy and flexibility around how I spend my life. And the shift has really been from external metrics to more of an internal focus to what I value around family, health, freedom, love. And that's how I define what is important for me right now. And while others around my age, I won't disclose my age, I'm kind of in the middle of a lot of people at this stage can go through what people have described as a midlife crisis. And I kind of really describe what I meant as in the middle of a midlife clarity. So it's it's been a pretty big shift. It's a great question. Amazing. That's incredible. And I can only imagine, you know, having those expectations and, and that, you know, part of life happening. And as you had just mentioned, when you move across countries, that can be, you know, quite frustrating if you're, you know, learning how to become licensed again. And then maybe it takes a, you know, a whole another year in the process, then maybe you have another assignment and have to move somewhere else. So it's, it's quite interesting to, to think about all those things along with those personal expectations and, and all of that that you just mentioned. I think that's so interesting to hear more about alignment, more about, you know, what the, the real needs and what the definition of success can be for each of us. I love that you shared that for today's interview. I wanted you to hear a little bit more from you about, you know, this very specific point, I think, which is a speed, pressure pace. And I'm curious, you know, now that you've talked with lawyer Zara across the globe and you have an incredible community of then as well. Why didn't you hear? What kind of patterns do you see across cultures in the legal profession regarding that regarding. Yeah, I think this is is a is a more complicated question than it sounds at 1st and I'll just use a personal example as a point. So I assumed that because, well, at least my perception of the German culture is that it generally values free time and a slower pace of life, that working in a German legal office would be very different from working in a US legal office. And it was actually the opposite for me. The hours here in Germany were longer and the weekends were less protected. And what that taught me is that areas of the legal profession carry their own sort of internal culture around speed and pressure, one that can even override, let's say, the national culture around it. So speed and the law, from my perspective and working with a lot of people and in my own experience as well, is it the speed really sits at the intersection of a lot of different factors. Societal culture within which you work and live could play a role. Maybe it doesn't. The legal professions own internal culture around speed, which maybe we'll get to a little bit later. More specifically, the practice area you work in and the legal systems that govern it. Of course, the leader partner, a manager you work with and their internalized ideas about speed. It could be your team, department or partnership and its group pace. And the list is going on here, right? The features of your client, which you can can reflect any of these influences as well, right? Their culture, industry, manager, team and so on. And just as important is our own personal internal sense for speed. So we're going to have our own conditioning, neurology and history with it. And the last factor I think is the one that maybe many people underestimate. And it's really important because some lawyers don't arrive to the profession and then get turned into speed as identity people. They arrive already wired that way. So if you're in a high drive only system, you've had achievement as love, perfectionism or let's say neurodivergent hyper focus or the immigrant hustle. The the identity that speed is good, the output is worth is already running for these people long before, let's say law school, it shows up. And I was one of those people. I grew up in a household where the rule was being on time is late and at school and in sports, being the fastest was rewarded. So speed was not something I learned by being a lawyer. It was something I already brought to the career. So the profession didn't install it. It just kind of confirmed it for me. That's so interesting. It seems like quite often there's a lot of incentives to be, you know, fast-paced and to be quite quick with all kinds of things being, you know, answering those emails that come in, be it, you know, fulfilling mandates. And I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on, you know, why speed be so rewarded in law And even, you know, our lawyers trained to equate fast with good. I think for for some of us who train or have trained in law school under the Socratic method like I did, so I can only use my experience as an example. I think this is where it can start being called on in law school and in my experience meant being expected to have an immediate confident answer. I mean, in some classes you were allowed to pass once or something like that. But I got the implicit message from the first day. Well, speed is competence. And for some lawyers, this is the moment when speed shifts from being a tool to to an identity, right? So before law school, maybe being fast was a preference or strength, but by training as a lawyer, it can become something else. It's a signal of do you belong? Do you belong in the profession or are you good enough to be here? Are you a real lawyer? And for other people who've already arrived with speed as identity like I did, it doesn't create the shift, it just confirms it. And for for those of us where it was confirmed, we have a harder road and managing our speed because there's no earlier self or pre fast self to reference or remember. And either way, whether it's created or confirmed in a lot of cases is just not ever examined again. After that, we just kind of go fast and go faster. And so by the time lawyers reach the practice of law right, the conditioning is deep and speed gets rewarded structurally through billable hours, client responsiveness, deadline expectations and so on. So identity and structure just reinforce each other. When lawyers are always moving fast, what do they lose? Are there things that you can notice that you hear people mentioning or that you know through your experience you've been made more and more aware? I think it takes a lot of maybe taking in observational mode and not being in the middle of this, you know, speedy environment to be able to notice that. I'm, I'm curious, did they lose creativity? Is it about that? Is it about, you know, judgment? What are some of the the points that you notice when that happens? If this is a good question and I think the you mentioned stepping back and and observing some of coaching, not all of the time we talk about the the beliefs that we maybe aren't aware that we hold. And if we just step back for a second, I'm going to answer the part about what we lose when we move too fast. But if we go back and just look at the belief a little bit more and I mentioned the one that I have held, which is speed is competence. And I'll add one that some of my clients also sometimes there that hesitation is weakness and to just challenge those ideas or ideas that are similar to those, you know, is hesitation weakness. Citation can be an intelligent first response. It's it's a signal that something deserves more attention. And figuring out what deserves your attention is worth understanding, not avoiding the question is not why am I hesitating as sort of a self criticism? It's well, what is this feeling of hesitation telling me? And about speed is competence. The lawyer who always has an immediate answer may not be the most competent person in the room. Moving fast can be a sign of things like avoiding deeper fears, complexity, not knowing or difficult emotions in the room. And to go back to their point, you asked about what what lawyers could lose by moving too fast. Wind speed is seen as a tool. You can choose to deploy it when the situation calls for it and then set it down when it doesn't. So when speed is your identity, that choice is gone. And then that's when the cost starts to accumulate across different career stages. So for example, junior lawyers, one of the major costs is your development speeds means, yeah, you get through the task quickly. You send out the emails, you you, you record your time or whatever else needs to be done. But maybe you missed becoming a well-rounded lawyer in the process. So you miss some nuances of the law, maybe opportunities for mentoring, building client connections overtime, these kinds of things. And for senior lawyers, a cost can be in your leadership, the identity to serve you on the way up. Right, let's move classless deliver. Let's be the expert. It can become an obstacle when you shift into leadership because leadership is more about people and less about the task. And this requires slowing down to spend more time thinking strategically, delegating, empowering others, and more. And beneath all of this or both of those points, when we run our intellect so fast, all other important categories of ourself become invisible to us. The body signals are felt, sense, intuition, emotions. These are critical sources of intelligence that tend to operate on a slower timetable. The result is lawyers who are extraordinary thinkers but increasingly cut off from the parts of themselves needed for building trusting relationships, creative thinking, stronger physical health and. More that is so interesting. As you were saying, my mind kind of wandered as well in the sense of, is there also a risk of, you know, getting to the end of your career 30 years in and, and kind of realizing that it all just happened so quickly and, and that maybe, you know, a lot of the attributes that you wanted to develop as a professional and, and as a person kind of got lost in the way. Um, I'm, I'm curious here, kinda at speed become a form of avoidance, you know, keeping us from maybe facing those bigger questions about, you know, our career, our purpose. When I think about this, I think that maybe people who were in the job market, you know, 20 years ago or so didn't maybe have had the opportunity to think that much about it or, or maybe we as a society didn't bring those topics as much, especially in the profession. But I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that sense. Well, first of all, I just want to say I love working and and the coaching field now at this time of history relative to the legal profession, because there's so many young people like you who asked these kinds of questions that I know 20 years ago when I was starting out that wouldn't have you thought about it? I mean, the Internet was kind of still a baby. We were, I think I was just handed my first BlackBerry, if that ages me for anybody out there who's listening. But I love that you're asking these things because there's, it shows like the curiosity that maybe a lot of us just maybe you didn't even have the courage to bring. So anyway, back to your question, can speed become a form of avoidance? And yes, I think it can. The genuine business, the real client demands. There's a lot going on and there's a lot of it that is fast. But it can become an excuse not to face questions that feel threatening to our working identities as lawyers because at different points in our career, even people who are still before law school and thinking about it, is this the right expression for me? And maybe it's a yes now, but in 10 years it's not or is this still the right role for me? Because it's a lot easier to get into the, to the, the, the daily grind and, and not face the fact that maybe you just are deeply unhappy or, or this doesn't feel right anymore. It felt right at one point, but not anymore or another question what I actually went out of my life. It's not necessarily only about what you do in your the career part of it. There's many other aspects to us as people working as is is one part of us, but not necessarily all of us. And you know, humans are wired to avoid discomfort and speed is a particularly effective avoidance mechanism because, well, we know it's rewarded. You're not hiding, you're working. No one questions the lawyer who's busy, right. So you know what? And, and maybe it's it's useful to make a distinction here between speed and movement. You can produce at high velocity emails, decisions, deliverables and arrive at the end of a year or a decade in the exact same place you started. And if you're cool with that, great. But a lot of people actually aren't. And so the bigger identity questions about meaning, direction, purpose, they really do require slowing down to access. And those they do not arise to the surface when everything is moving really fast. They appear in the pauses. That's incredible. Building on what you just said, I'm curious to hear what does chronic urgency do to a lawyer over time, both professionally and personally? I'm glad you're asking this now when you're in the early stages of your career because you can take advantage of this for the many years to come. And anybody else is listening, of course, can too. So I mentioned earlier about some different dimensions about how I, I look at my life now. And I also do this with a lot of my clients and we use an acronym, it's called PIES P i.e. S and one really fantastic lawyer I worked with, it also added an R so became PISER. So it doesn't really sound so great as an acronym. PISART, Pfizer. But anyway, to go through them quickly here. So the P represents physical. So of course, health issues show up and the body keeps the score. As many who are listening will know from Bessel Vanderkolk's book of the same time, the same title, these issues tend to arrive as symptoms that feel unrelated to the speed at which you work until somebody doctor, coach, a loved one draws the connection for you. Hi, so chronic speed can produce cognitive overload, which can lead to reduced working memory, shortened attention span, more errors. And what happens is you can tend to move quickly across the surface of things and then start to miss opportunities where depth could make a real difference in the worker for your client outcomes. The E is a motional. So going really fast or having a high pace or fast speed can mean bypassing our emotions entirely. If you're really moving fast, you don't have to feel what's underneath. Oh, you could be very productive and be avoiding feeling fear or anger, sadness or even joy. S spiritual there's like the biggest questions who am I what matters? What is all this for? They never get asked because they require a quality of attention and and slowing down and stillness that just going fast makes impossible and the the R so the pies are the R people around fast moving lawyers. So like our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our neighbors and so on. They can start to experience the relationship with you is increasingly transactional or distracted or absent, and the damage accumulates quietly and tends to become visible only when it's really significant and perhaps irreparable. Some interesting, you know, points to to think about, and in a way quite scary to. Sorry for. That right, that's amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm curious to hear, you know, as someone helping people in this area, what, what, what have you seen changing when a lawyer intentionally shows up and how can reflection become a competitive advantage? We just talked about, you know, maybe the incentives you'd have to be quick and to, you know, go faster. But after we hear about Pfizer, that that sounds quite concerning to go, you know, a whole lifetime unchecked. So what are some of the things that you've seen? So the reframe that works for a lot of professionals, not only lawyers, but all the different types of people I work with, that slowing down is how you get to your goals more quickly. And this is one of the great paradoxes of professional life. If we're always going fast, we might be going fast in a direction we don't want to go in. So if we slow down, figure out where we want to be going, that's slowing down gets us there faster and the intellect operates fast. A lot of us as lawyers, I mean, This is why we like the profession and why we like the work because, you know, really gets us going and it challenges us. However, the intuition and felt sense just operate more slowly. And a lawyer who never slows down is just permanently cut off from those other aspects of their inner intelligence. And This is why I continue to to love coaching. Is it because it one of its kind of, we don't describe it when you talk about, well, what is coaching? But one of the benefits of coaching is that you access these other forms of intelligence, the whole you, not just, you know, your executive function and and your logical art. It accesses the other parts of of you. And coaching helps to build a habit of slowing down and it creates the conditions to go deeper on what actually matters. So reflecting on what is working and what is not working, asking what a given experience is teaching you, attending to the quality of relationships rather than just the volume of outputs and so on. And this is where I think AI enters the chat. I know you and I didn't discuss this before, Claudio, but I'm going to bring it. I think it's useful here because the capacities that AI can't replicate, right? The quality of human presence and connection, sensing what's not being said, that the Gray area of ethics, A strategic use of silence. Reading the room, the wisdom that comes from lived experience, all of these require something other than speed. There was an article in the New York Times yesterday it was titled I think it was that that meeting you hate may keep AI from stealing your job or something like that. And it said AI cannot do this. Sometimes messier human tasks of like debating, lobbying, arm twisting, selling, reassuring, finding agreement or alignment among many stakeholders and lawyers who are actively cultivating these kinds of capacities have a future that AI can't compete with but but can sit next to it can only sit next to those. And the lawyers who are primarily competing on knowledge and speed are competing on two of the two of the dimensions where machines have a growing advantage. So this is where reflection becomes slowing down becomes a competitive advantage. Fantastic. If someone is suspecting that they're, you know, becoming addicted to speed, what signs should they be looking out for? What's one small shift that they could make starting this week? I like this question because this is all great talk, right? But like, what am I going to do with all this signs to look for? So when speed is a tool, you can put it down. When it's your identity, you can struggle to stop even when you know it's better to do so. So speed isn't the problem. Speed is fine. We need it sometimes it's the inability to change speed that's the sign that there's an issue. So here are some other indicators maybe to consider or to look, look for. So persistent full speed across all projects, all relationships, all the time. So when you don't differentiate your speed between contexts that require urgency in context that require something else like full presence and no doing, that's a sign. Another sign would be that you have a sense that something should be faster. So discomfort or anxiety when not performing at higher and higher speed levels, as if the pace itself is the goal. So here's a clear example. When your work slows down, do you panic as most lawyers I know do, or do you see the opportunity and the slower pace? Another example would be what you think about other people who go slower. So if slowness and others reads to you as laziness, incompetence, lack of seriousness, or some other negative quality, that is really useful information about the internal belief system guiding your career in life. OK, so those are the signs to look for and what would be one small shift or one small thing you could do this week? First and foremost, noticed notice before any behavioral change, you have to start noticing or tracking the speed at which you're operating in different contexts. So what is your speed when you're interacting with a potential client or when you're researching or writing or doing admin or responding to a client communication? Also notice your speed when you are talking to a child, talking to your best friend or life partner, when you are eating or walking or doing your morning routine or your bedtime routine. So it's just noticing how am I showing up? What's my pace or S my speed and and different and different circumstances or context. And then then ask yourself in just one place, where could I go 1 speed slower this week? Not everywhere, just one place. Pick it and try to go slower deliberately. That's incredible. I'm thinking here, you know, in the context of AI and really just speed in general. I feel like there's, there's this point here that that maybe we haven't had the chance to, to discuss more, you know, deeply. But there's also a point about, you know, developing that intuition, maybe a gut feeling for, for how some people like to talk about it. But since you've, you know, branded yourself, your program, your company as the inner advocate, I want to hear about, you know, the the lawyers inner voice. What happens when those lawyers learn or relearn to listen to their inner voice when they put into practice this, you know, awareness of being too quick and then being finally able to use speed as a tool. What are some of the changes you've noticed in in clients or maybe even in yourself as you've become more aware of it? It's what it gives all of us as lawyers, but also anyone. It's just a a fuller picture about us as as people in the world and and the other people we interact with versus just the technical legal legal stuff. Maybe there's some unease about a deal structure and listening to that a felt since about a particular witness that the moment in negotiation has turned, even though nothing explicits been said or or noticing when your body needs medical support. Lawyers who stay connected to these signals develop better judgment over time in in all of the human ways. They know when to push and when to wait. They can read what's underneath what is being said. They can feel when the room has shifted in real time. They can rest and recover their bodies and minds to continue with the work as opposed to as we know, burnout is a possibility. So while the intellectual mind likes to jump ahead to plan and count and analyze and know and solve speed feels competent intuition in our bodies. As I've said a couple of times already, they just operated on different timetable and you can access these other intelligent parts of ourselves and it's not mystical and practical. Sometimes I get that this is this is woo woo stuff. It's really not. It's already there. These parts of us are there and they're just kind of waiting to be listened to. And if they're not listening to, you can't access them. So in working with me, lawyers often rediscover these other, let's say, intelligences quite quickly, and it's just a matter of of slowing. Down I really appreciate that. I when, when we talked and I thought about you lawyers who take the time or at least that they're able to show you that they're, you know, present that they're thinking you automatically have some additional respect. They just look extra wise and I think that just might be the very case. So I, I just found that amazing to hear and to discuss it with you. Today's report, today's episodes. I wanted to ask you, you know, if you were to redesign the our, our legal culture, how we interact, how we work, especially thinking about, you know, this next generation, what would you preserve about speed and what would you? Change Before answering that question, I just want to acknowledge what you said because it does feel that way when somebody is really deeply listening to us, that they feel wiser. And I have experienced that in you in this call. And I just want to acknowledge you for that because you've been really listening to what I said and integrating that into the conversation and to, to feel heard like that is not something that everybody's capable of doing. So just to acknowledge you for that and the listeners out there, when you listen deeply to somebody else, that is a kind of slowing down, right? Because a lot of us think in our heads through the thing we're going to say next as opposed to the person in front of us and what they're actually sharing. So I just wanted to acknowledge that before going to your very awesome question. I just want to say I love this the next generation and, and what to what to preserve and, and what to change, because I know that we're at at a, a kind of turning point in the profession and in the world and a lot of different ways. And, and I want to underline that what I've said here about speed is the speed does have value. So the whole conversation here about pace and pressure and speed, it's not about deeming, demonizing those things because sometimes they're necessary. It's just about restoring them to their proper place as a tool. There are times when we need to access our capacity for precision under pressure, when a client needs something fast, a well reasoned answer, high stake situation. It's a real skill that needs to be deployed. What I, what I hope will change and why I wanted to have this conversation with you, Claudio, and for other people to hear is, is to change that speed is, is our identity. It's who we who we are. It's our default. It's the proof of confidence and confidence and competence. It's the thing that runs automatically regardless of whatever else is going on. I would just change that. Conflating speed with competence and outcomes and value are what matter. Speed is 1 tool to get there when it's needed, but it's not the only tool. And the question for the next generation of lawyers, I think is not how fast can you go? It is do you know what speed this moment requires? And can you choose it consciously together with what else is? Important, amazing. Thank you so much for making the time to come in the podcast, share these thoughts and I'm looking forward to to welcoming more of these conversations. The end of the show really appreciated Laura. Thank you, Claudio. Just stop recording here.