Doron Gold

2I'm great, it's so nice to be here, Pulat, thank you.

4Yes.

6Actually, the origin of both names is Hebrew. Doron is a gift.

8And my mother bought me a gift, and so she named me a gift. Jonathan in Hebrew is Yonatan, which is God-given. So she put the whole name together, and I'm a God-given gift. And if you really want to add my last name to it, you can add a God-given gift of gold, but that's going a little far, I think.

10Fascinating question, because yes, for a very small snippet of grade 4, I believe, I went by Jonathan because I thought Doron was weird and I didn't want to have a weird name. So I insisted that the teachers call me Jonathan for about half a year. In elementary school, and I got over it, and I've been Doron ever since.

12I stopped thinking it when I stopped caring what people think. To me Doron is Weird is strange because weird can be you know, good or bad. Well, it's something that people don't recognize is one thing, okay?

14But something people have trouble pronouncing is a separate category of difficult, right? Because with me, it's— I tell them my name and more often than not it's, "You mean like Duran Duran?" Like, people like to spell my name with different vowels. They for some reason don't like the two O's. So that is the part of the name that sometimes is challenging, and lots of people experience that. Lots of people recognize that, you know, the extra labor of having a name that requires explanation. But honestly, I like my name.

16Yeah.

18It's also cultural, right? Some cultures, a lot of, you know, I've met a lot of Chinese people who take on an Americanized name or a North Americanized name. I know Russian people who have, you know, taken on a name like, you know, I won't even say, I don't want to identify anyone, but there are people who just, they don't want the name that's different. Even my uncle, my uncle, and I'll say it in the proper Hebrew, Chaim, with the guttural Chaim. He came in the '50s. He worked at IBM for about 40 years. He was Sam.

20Sam. He was Sam for 40 years because Sam is, you know, you can hurt yourself if you say it wrong.

22Technically speaking, I was— I completed my Master's of Social Work in 2012.

24I got called to the bar in 1996. I practiced up until 2006, early 2006. So I was a lawyer for about 10 years. And it's interesting you say I'm a, I'm a psychotherapist and a lawyer as though I'm still a lawyer. If you ask my wife, she would say you are still a lawyer because she wants to be married to a lawyer in spite of the fact that she met me after I stopped practicing. But I think of myself as a former lawyer, a recovering lawyer, because it's been now how long? 15 years since I practiced law. That's enough time to say I was. I know a lot about it because I've worked in the field with lawyers since then.

25I've worked in lawyer assistance for that entire time. So I'm immersed in lawyers. We're on Law Twitter. I'm immersed in lawyers on Twitter. I know the area. It's an area perhaps of expertise, you could say. But to say I'm a lawyer always makes me think, when's my next, you know, court appearance?

27Oh, a really, really loaded question. Causes Well, causation is an interesting problem, right? Sometimes being in that environment exacerbates potentially mental illness, but then sometimes being a cab driver exacerbates mental illness. It's not inherent to law that one suffers with emotional or mental challenges, and I'm always a little bit hesitant around words like illness. It's a very medical model, and while it's a nuanced point, Sometimes people really benefit from having a diagnosis, a name from the DSM-5. I have clinical depression. Oh, that's why I feel this way, and now I have a plan for getting better. People want that diagnosis. Sometimes it's a relief to know that there— it's a thing that can be identifiable and treated.

28On the other hand it's— it is pathologizing inherently. It's labeling, which therefore leads to it being potentially stigmatizing. And so I like to talk about, you know, challenges, 'cause honestly, if a person is, let's say, doing a law job that they really don't like, but they feel trapped because they have lots of debt and it's the middle of COVID and they're isolated and they're a first-year associate and they don't have much mentorship 'cause there's too much distance with the people they work with, that causes for a lot of people, including some of my current clients, considerable amount of distress. Sometimes there are days when they don't want to get out of bed. Sometimes the, the distress mimics medical conditions like depression.

29Sometimes they are medical conditions like depression, but they're intertwined with the life conditions. So illness— you get cancer, you've got a tumor, you can identify the tumor, you can put it through pathology and, and identify what kind of tumor it is and identify what kind of treatment. With something like depression, since I'm talking about that, it really kind of sits in a middle place sometimes where the person is exhibiting what you would call symptoms, but really they're just experiencing the impact of their life circumstances, which if they could alter those life circumstances or if they could alter the way they approach their life circumstances, they could get alleviation of those quote-unquote symptoms. So I'm always hesitant about going to the illness place because to me it's life.

30Life is stressful sometimes. Life is stressful for many people, enormously so, and I don't want to turn that into pathology because it's coping with and managing life.

32There can be, sure. Start with the fact that, you know, I hate to say it, but often in the medical field psychiatrists are viewed as the as the, the, the bottom of the barrel, even though they're dealing with perhaps the most complex topic. And so there's this— if you go to your, to your family doctor and you have an ache in your elbow, they'll go ahead and do a few things to figure out what's going on. If you go to your family doctor and you are having trouble breathing, they will do certain things. You go to your family doctor and you say, I'm having trouble getting up in the morning, it's like you're speaking a different language.

33A lot of them are not taught in law, in, in medical school how to take in that kind of information, assess that kind of information. And the truth is, unlike something like a broken leg, which is very much technical, something like emotional distress, like grief, which isn't pathological at all, it's quite healthy but still quite painful, requires a level of tools that are not about, you know, physical tools or diagnostic tools. They're Talk about empathy. You know, one of the best ways that a psychotherapist engages a client and helps a client is by simply being there with them, witnessing them in their, in their place, empathizing with them, having compassion, validating their experience. Those things to medical doctors often feel very mushy nondescript, you know, undefinable.

34And so it's, it's an area they often don't want to go to. They want to go to the definable. They want to go to the codifiable. Show me a study. Show me best practices. Show me evidence-based. And sometimes it's simply the, the ability to sit with someone and have them feel like you validate their experience. You don't judge them, and they can be themselves, even if it's at a painful point.

37Not so much that we shouldn't, because some of them are actual diseases,

39Clinical depression is a disease. Bipolar disorder is a disease. It's just I don't default to using the term mental illness. Mental health Absolutely! We want health. It's a health condition. Being healthy is good. I just avoid the word illness because there's a connotation to it that's just being broken somehow or faulty and frankly, it's just the management of everyday life and sometimes it just happens to be difficult everyday life.

41You know, the way you framed the question was fascinating because you— I feel like you almost mix some things together. So you said not to blame someone. Yes, don't blame them. You said what was it? There were a couple things where you said that, that it's not that, that they're not the cause, right? They're not the cause. But should they seek help? Absolutely. Should you go up to them and say, you need help? Probably not. But can you walk alongside them and offer them compassion and listen to them And perhaps in the context of having met them where they are without any judgment, ask them about are they doing anything to, you know, to alleviate their suffering?

42Would they be interested in a suggestion? Not telling them what to do as much as, you know, the lawyer way, here's what you should do. The idea being it is on the person ultimately most of the time. Sometimes the person absolutely can't. But it is on the person to advocate for themselves, to seek help for themselves. So for instance, if you talk about someone who has an alcohol addiction it's not their fault that the disease of addiction has invaded them, has taken them over, has really taken a toll on their lives. But it is ultimately going to be for them to come to the realization that in their life the alcohol is toxic for them and they need to do something about it.

43And the thing they need to do about it more than anything else is reach out for help, because they don't actually usually know what to do about it, and why would they? Asking for help is something the individual in many cases has to do. It has to be a voluntary process. If you have people who were court-ordered to go to addiction treatment, they're not necessarily cooperative patients in an inpatient setting because they were mandated to go. When you are engaging someone for mental health purposes, for the purposes of healing, they actually have to be on side with you. They have to identify there's something that they don't like about their situation, identify that, that they'd like it to change, maybe identify they're not sure they— that they can change, the helplessness and the hopelessness, but identify that if it could change, they'd like it to, so they will engage.

44They will go in it with a whole heart. And in many ways, that's the only way for it to make a difference because they have to believe in what they're doing. So that's the thing, they, they do need to reach out for help because it's hard to do these things alone. And in fact, I'll even add the fact that the isolation and the loneliness increases the pain, increases the judgment, because as you said, we don't blame them. Well, they'll often blame themselves. They will often hold themselves as doing wrong. You know, in the legal profession context, a lawyer suffering with anxiety will often not tell anyone and will not want anyone to know because they will look around them and see all of their colleagues looking all, you know, buttoned up like you look right now and thinking, this guy's got it together, it must just be me because we're in a profession full of super people.

45And from that comes shame. What they don't know is it's a profession full of humans and lots of people suffering with lots of different kinds of challenges. They just don't talk to each other about it, so they all think they're the only one, which increases the stigma, increases the pain, increases the isolation, and keeps someone therefore from asking for help.

47I

49You brought up really interesting analogies to firefighters and soldiers. Truth is, they're very good analogies to lawyers because for the longest time they didn't really have the mental hazards alluded to either in their training. They're just tough guys, and they were usually guys because the guys were the only ones let in. And the idea that someone might have a post-traumatic reaction to an incident. The idea that someone might in the field see a child harmed or a gunshot wound or whatever the case may be was just part of the job. Just like the idea that a criminal lawyer would see some evidence that was upsetting, just part of the job. So the analogy is really good because they weren't really trained in mental health either, and they were also judged and judged themselves if they weren't coping well.

50That is changing in those fields. It is changing in, you know, amongst Crowns, for instance. It is changing amongst legal profession, hence people like me who do in fact go into— I'm gonna be speaking at 3 or 4 law schools in the next couple of weeks during orientations. I've been doing it for years now, giving them a heads up on day one there are other things you should be thinking about. There are other considerations while you're going through this legal process, this legal education process. You also need to be considering how is my health? Am I still sleeping? Am I still connecting with people? Is my level of expectation of myself reasonable?

51So here's one of the warning signs: perfectionism. You know, endemic to the legal profession. Also problematic to the nth degree because perfection doesn't actually exist in the human condition other than perhaps in mathematics, and yet lawyers continue to strive for it, continue to try to be, as you said, the best, to beat the other side. Now, in the adversarial process, beating the other side is what you're supposed to do. Nothing inherently wrong with that. You're trying to get an outcome and you're trying to do your best as an advocate. To obtain that outcome. If, however, it then goes into your identity, your value as a human being— I am the best, I am a Bay Street lawyer and everyone knows it, and I've made it to the top of the mountain, look at me— that doesn't necessarily improve mental health.

52In fact, there was a study out of the University of Toronto, a sociologist did a study around 2015-16 I think that the term that came out of it was the status health paradox. In other words, they studied Bay Street lawyers and discovered they had a higher incidence of depression as compared to other lawyers. And the question was, why would lawyers who've made it, according to the, you know, the definition, even though it's not correct, why would they be more depressed? Well, they're also working much longer hours. They also have much less autonomy over their time. They also have higher pressure around the matters they're dealing with, the type of clients they're dealing with, the type of other lawyers they're dealing with.

53The stresses are quite enormous for many people. The demands for billing hours and, and excellence is high. It affects their mood, and they've made it to the top of the mountain. Shouldn't they be happy? All the money they're making and everything else. The idea of status I've always found in the work I do with lawyers is a trap. In fact, another study Larry Krieger is a professor in Florida. He studied legal professionals for years. He's written handbooks on law student mental health. He's amazing. And he did a study also of lawyers who pursued status versus lawyers who pursued service. I think those are the terms he used. And he found that the lawyers who pursued service, as in, you know, legal aid lawyers clinic lawyers, family lawyers in small firms versus lawyers who pursued, you know, investment banking or mergers and acquisitions or whatever, that these— the lawyers who pursued service were often happier and healthier.

54Not that that's a universal concept, because there's lots of people in M&A who are really loving it, and it's the— it's, it's the life they were meant to have. It's that a lot of people pursue status jobs because of the status, not because of the merits of the work, not because of the challenge, but because of what people will think, how it will look, how much money they'll make. That has diminishing returns because you are who you are. Your identity is not what you do. You are who you are and how you treat people and who you love and who loves you. And in the meantime, you're also doing work which really fulfills you and is really satisfying, and that is part of who you are, but it doesn't define you.

55People who are looking at, am I where I should be as compared to the other people I went to law school with, that comparative thing that lawyers like to do that gets them in trouble because we can't compare our stories. Our— each story is an individual story. Each journey is one's own, incomparable to anyone else's. There's no right way to do anything, really, because we're learning about ourselves as we do these things. We're learning what's right as we go. Including the fact that we change. 20 years ago, when I was— when I got out of law school in 1994, 20— oh my God, 27 years ago, I'm so old. I immediately thought, I'm— I don't want to be a lawyer, it's not for me.

56I didn't really like law school, and I looked into an MSW back then, but my mind at the time was centered on— I was very interested in politics. I was much more interested in in, in social social justice. I was interested in, in policy, macro things. When I did my MSW and starting in 2009, it was all wanting to do one-on-one, one-on-two group counseling therapy. I wasn't interested in the macro issues anymore in terms of being involved in them. I'm very interested in those issues, but my focus changed because I changed. So what's the right way to do that other than to adapt as we grow, observe ourselves, observe the world, adapt our expectations, our goals, our values, be ourselves without apology.

58Well, the easiest one is the people who knew since they were 3 that they wanted to be a lawyer. Those are easier because they've thought about it their whole lives and they've been really attracted to it. That, by the way, does not preclude them becoming lawyers and realizing they don't want to, because they never really— we— none of us knew. You knew that, you know this too, right, Pulat? You didn't know what being a lawyer was going to be like until you became a lawyer. My advice on apropos of what you said earlier, my advice on Twitter this morning for law students Don't listen to other law students. They have no idea what they're talking about.

59I've been saying that for years now because it's true. Law students make each other nuts with their opinions about what it takes to be a great lawyer. Law students have no idea what it takes to be a great lawyer. So they go into it for all kinds of reasons. They've always wanted to, or they were told they're very good at logic and argument, maybe they should be a lawyer. Or they got to a point finishing up undergrad and didn't know what to do. And thought professional school, well, medical school requires certain things, and I don't really want to be an accountant. Law school, it's a, it's kind of an open-ended thing. You can do lots of things with a law degree.

60Maybe I'll go to law school. And people like me who— I went to law school, I'm told, because I don't remember, so long ago, because I thought it would be an entry into politics. I was working in, in, in, you know, party politics at the time as a young man. I you know, started up political clubs at university and such. That was my passion back then in the late '80s. So law school was a way— all the people I knew in politics were lawyers. I guess you have to be a lawyer to get into politics, prerequisite. I'll become a lawyer. I've checked that box and now I can go into politics. Problem was, by the time I got done with law school, I had lost my taste for party politics.

61I was too idealistic for it. 'Now what do I do with a law degree?' So lots of people find that to be the case too.

63First of all, lots and lots of people stay lawyers even though they don't want to be lawyers and for various reasons. You know, there— it's kind of a known commodity that when people, you know, talk about, you know, when you ask a lawyer if they're happy, they're going to say, oh no, I'm miserable. That doesn't mean they're all miserable. It does mean though that there are a lot of lawyers who are misplaced in the profession. And that doesn't mean they shouldn't be in law. Maybe it just means that they shouldn't be in, in real estate law, because they're interested in the environment, but they couldn't get an articling job in it. And now they're pigeonholed in real estate.

64Maybe it's because they're working, they got a Bay Street job, but they're really not the Bay Street type. But everyone told them Bay Street is the place to aspire to. Who walks away from that? So they stay. Again, reputation what will people think? Who, who walks away from a Bay Street job, right? Well, lots of people walk away, whether to in-house or whether to go into smaller firms or whether to go out of law altogether. But you have to come to that. There is a— there's a way that the legal profession has— I, I coined it an unconscious treadmill. I'll say it quickly. I got into law school, so I have to go.

65I'm in law school, I have to finish. I finished law school, I have to article. I articled, I have to get called. I got called, I have to practice. I'm practicing, I have to make partner. No, no, no, no. Each step necessitating the next step without any stopping to, you know, do a— do just a quick check on, is this what I want? Am I where I want to be, or am I where I just I ended up because the treadmill picked me up and carried me there. And then when I think, I don't want to do this, but then your family says, but you worked so hard and you're a lawyer, why wouldn't you want to be a lawyer?

66It's so prestigious. I mean, there's so many reasons why people are hesitant. The biggest one perhaps is that mentality of perfectionism, the self-judgment leading to a sense of, I don't want to be thought of as a quitter. I'm not a quitter. I slay dragons. I don't succumb to them. I'm going to stay and figure out how to make this work. And that keeps them in it a long time. It kept me in it a long time. I often will quote Albert Einstein on this point, that everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will think it's stupid. And I will often say that there are a lot of fish trying to climb trees in the legal profession.

67Not necessarily that they shouldn't be lawyers, but maybe they shouldn't be government lawyers, or maybe they shouldn't be working in sole practice because it's too isolating. Whatever the, the point, it's very challenging for many to find their place, to find that groove where they're doing the kind of law they want to do and the kind of environment they want to do it in, with the kind of people they want to work with, and have the clients, the kind of clients they want to work with. Making the kind of money that they want to make. A lot of variables they're trying to align. For many, it takes a while to get that— get into that groove.

68And for some, they keep trying to find the groove, not realizing maybe the groove doesn't exist for them, like me, and it's time to go do something else, which can be scary, especially if you're of this generation and you've got $100,000 in debt.

70Start with the basic question I'll ask you: are you happy in law practice?

72Yeah, just like briefly, but just give an idea to those listening. When you ask a question of someone who actually is happy in law practice, what is it about it that— whether happy or fulfilled or satisfied or content— what is it about it that is making you think, yeah, I like this?

75So very focused on autonomy, focused on the ability to control your circumstances and keep, keep fires from flaring. So I could say to you, I can be a lawyer who's a litigator who is great at avoiding emergencies but is bored to tears by commercial litigation or construction liens, which I did for a while, or insurance defense— bores me to tears. I can't be happy doing accident benefits all day because that wouldn't be interesting to me, but I could be happy potentially doing family law because at least there's an element that fits in with my values, my interest in human beings. But maybe someone's really, really interested in transactions, they love making deals, they love corporate law.

76So you see, there's elements of who is the person, what are their values, what makes them passionate, and does their work give them a place to express those things? I'm getting a sense that your work gives you space to express who you are, to be you, so you're in alignment.

78Please.

82So I, I, I take your comment as rooted in a kind of perfectionism. Which is to say either I love my job— you're saying why do people need to love their job completely? I don't know anybody who loves their job completely. I loved doing my— this job, the counseling job that I'm now doing in front of a screen, but a year and a half ago I was driving to downtown Toronto every day, a long commute. I didn't like the commute. I couldn't learn to like the commute. I could maybe feel like it was a— like a private meditation, but frankly it was just the Don Valley Parkway. So I didn't learn to love that.

83I didn't love the hustle and bustle of downtown. Of course, there are going to be elements of your job that are not optimal that you tolerate, but you almost— you used in the same word fun or tolerate. Those are two different things. There's lots of stuff you can learn to tolerate in your job. I don't know a job that doesn't require you to tolerate a colleague that's awkward or hard to deal with or— or certain parts of your job. When I was a family lawyer, I tolerated the calculation of, you know, spousal support. I enjoyed working with clients to, you know, create safety or to work on the best interests of the child. The numbers were a part I tolerated.

84That didn't lead me to hate the work. What I'm saying is, in a non-perfectionistic way, if you look at it, softer focus, is your work something that you would be overall fulfilled by? Does it help you express who you are? In part because when I was a lawyer, I didn't get to do the kind of work I'm doing now, and the kind of work I'm doing now is actually making a difference, I think. And if I had kept doing that where I was doing good work, you know, I won at trials, I got a Court of Appeal win under my belt, I mean, I've done work I never felt really great about it. I mean, great, you know, winning at the Court of Appeal was fun.

85It was an accomplishment. I like accomplishment. But was the subject matter important? Discoverability in a civil litigation case? I can go the rest of my life never discussing discoverability again. I'll be fine. But if you want to talk to me about human motivation and pain and depression, I'll talk to you about it for hours because it fuels me. That's not so much about fun as it is about fulfillment, about being who I am as much as I can be who I am. And the inverse of that is doing work that is absolutely out of alignment with who you are. So beyond just tolerating the work, working with superiors who are abusive— there's no learning to like that— working in an area of law that if you're a survivor of domestic assault and you're Crown or you're a defense lawyer and you're representing alleged abusers, Some of them, some lawyers really like that.

86Others are quite triggered by it. There's no learning to like that. You could learn to like Windows because Windows is awesome. I've been using Windows my whole life. I didn't do coding, but in the '80s they taught us DOS and COBOL and stuff like that. But

88I mean, I didn't know much of it. We just did little quickie little programs. But this is about learning Windows is about, it's part of your job. And if you want to do the job that you otherwise like, there are elements of it you're going to have to learn to at least tolerate, and maybe you'll learn that it's actually not as bad as you thought. I liked court. I also hated court. I liked the challenge of being on my feet. I liked the challenge of advocacy and, and, and convincing a judge of, of the outcome I think is right, and the, the, the intellectual challenge of the to and fro, the adversarial process was really interesting.

89It was fun in many ways. It was also often so toxic because opposing counsel was often toxic and uncivil, maybe even mean. So, I was— my blood pressure always went up when I got a— at the time, a fax from them or an email from them, or the fact that I had to be in court. I liked the arguing. I didn't like the pettiness, So there were, there were elements I could learn to tolerate. I could learn to tolerate, you know, you know, angry opposing counsel, as long as I actually like parts of it, as long as I'm getting something out of parts of it. And what I came to understand in terms of my journey was it wasn't worth it.

90It was causing me too much distress. I was anxious a lot of the time, in part because it really wasn't what I was built to do. I'm not built to go and argue with people. I'm good at it. I can do it, but it didn't fit me. I was a fish trying to climb a tree because sometimes I could do it and I could do it well. So, I felt good about myself. But your initial question was about why are we always thinking that things need to be fun? I think it's what we— and you also asked about, you know, are we too focused on emotion? I think you said, or too interested in emotion?

91I think we're not interested enough in emotion. We escape emotion, we avoid emotion, we push down emotion, we tranquilize emotion. We are not generally good with just being with emotion without letting it overwhelm us and debilitate us. When we grow up, we're often taught, you know, just, just deal with it, or, or I don't want to hear about that, or whatever. So we're taught to put down our emotions, which means we are invalidating our experience. We're stuffing it away and it's sitting inside of us and it's festering, but it's in our unconscious, so we don't really attend to it, but it shows up when we're triggered by things in the world or whatever. I think emotion is powerful and important.

92It's often, you know, it's often classified in a gendered way, right? Women are emotional and men are logical. Oh, bullshit! Men are emotional as hell. And it's good. It's just that we're taught not to be. We're taught that it's weakness. You can't— it's Jell-O in your hands. You can't hold on to emotion. I can hold on to an equation. I can hold on to a process. I can't hold on to anxiety. And so if I can't define it and name it, I don't know how to deal with that. And the way you deal with it is you don't think about it. You don't abstractly process it. You sit with it. You feel it in your body.

93You let it go through you. When you process emotion, you can come out the other side of the emotion. You can start to learn from it. You can feel like an engaged, plugged-in person. I benefit so much from being an emotional person, from sometimes feeling other people's emotions without having them overtake me. It's healthy to be emotional, as it is healthy to be intellectual and think and organize. We very much don't overemphasize emotion. I think we're not emphasizing it enough, or at least we're not emphasizing treating it in a healthy way.

95I love the "we need therapists" because self-servingly, yes, you need therapists. You don't need therapists, but it can be very, very helpful in gaining perspective on your internal world. You're too close to it sometimes. You're too— I mean, people who, let's say, have been traumatized are blinded by their traumatic experiences. Those traumatic experiences often teach them distorted narratives about themselves, about the world, A child who's been, who's been harmed won't come away thinking, "Boy, that was a bad grown-up!" They'll likely come away thinking, "There must be something wrong with me!" Because to a child, they are the center of the universe. And what we see in trauma is that child who has come to a conclusion there's something faulty with them, that if bad things happen to them, it's their fault.

96That child will often become perfectionistic because maybe if I'm perfect, bad things won't happen. 'Because I have control over it, I can do something about it. I can just be awesome. I can be the best, and therefore I won't attract negative attention.' That child grows up to be an adult who looks at the world the same way the child looked at the world. That adult doesn't stop self-blaming and self-judging. That adult continues the narrative the child created. They, they then enter therapy, and the therapist hears the narrative And in a, in a, in a compassionate and delicate way, the therapist can hold a mirror up to them and show them, have you ever met a 5-year-old child?

97They're not culpable for anything. They're innocent. They're pure. They have little brains with no life experience, and they're just being. You can't hold a 5-year-old responsible for anything. If my daughter burn down this house, it wouldn't be her fault. She's 5. There's a reason why we don't let people vote till they're 18 or join the army or drink by a certain age. Children are forming people. They're not complete. They're not even close to complete yet. Teenagers still have, you know, frontal lobes of their brain forming. They don't have great executive functions. But the person who's been through that then goes to a therapist and says, "I'm in all this pain. I can't have good relationships.

98I'm all— I can't communicate with my partner." I'm always afraid I'm going to be rejected. I don't have any friends. And the therapist can listen to the whole story and say I can see, I can see potentially where this comes from, even though you haven't been able to because you've been in the middle of the storm. So the emotions, the traumas, the scars are often hidden from us because we're almost too close to them to see them or to, or to judge them objectively. The therapist brings objectivity and non-judgment. The individual is judging like crazy, completely subjective. The therapy allows a more neutral, compassionate perspective that they may not have even considered.

101So I start with examining your premise, the value of achievement, the definition of achievement. What is a super achiever? Well, super achiever is the, the top pole vaulter in the world is a super achiever. The person who stays home and raises lovely children— superachiever, raised lovely children. They put their energy into that. They may have even picked up some vomit because of that job. We ascribe value to things as achievement, non-achievement. That's why when I talk about the concept of success— lawyers striving for success— what's the definition of success? You know how many lawyers are I've worked with over the years who got to Bay Street and were convinced they're supposed to be happy now, but they really weren't because they had artificially either self-defined or had the profession define for them what achievement is.

102And they discovered it ain't all it's cracked up to be because they didn't define success and achievement by their own metric. They defined it by an external metric. We do that all the time. It's kind of part of the human condition. So, when you say screwed up, I need you to define your terms. We're all screwed up. We're all weird. We're all neurotic. We all have our stuff. Everyone's got their stuff, just different stuff. Does it take a certain kind of personality to be excellent at something? So I'm going to change achieve, only be super achiever, because in the way you framed it, it was achieve some thing that other people recognize, right? You know, the person who, who raises great kids isn't always recognized as having achieved something, but they've absolutely achieved something.

103It's kind of in family law, right? If, if the, you know, an old traditional family, a woman stays home and raises the kids while the husband goes off and becomes CEO of a multinational corporation, he's the achiever. Well, one of the, one of the reasons for— if they ever split up, one of the reasons for spousal support is she achieved too. He's there because of her too. This is a collective exercise. He didn't just do it. I have a— I know somebody who's got a license plate He's moved out of the country now, so I won't feel bad about saying it. His license plate basically said "self-made," and I just thought, that car is driving on streets paid for by taxes by all kinds of people, and you did it all yourself, did you?

104That's a need to be— it's a need to be superior, to be better than others. That comes from insecurity, not security. People who are secure don't need to be better than others. They just need to be themselves, and if others like it or don't like it or acknowledge it, hey, you know, we're all We're all people. I think if you're trying to achieve something like an Olympic goal, it could be because you were told this is what you should strive for. It could be because you love the sport and you got swept up in it and being the best was called to you. That's different. So when you say, do you need to be screwed up?

105It really depends. What are your motivations? Why are you doing it? Who has influenced you, good or bad? What is the system you're working within? The Olympic system is a certain kind of system, right? You know, all the stories about Olympic gymnasts and the kind of grinder they go through, or the figure skaters. They've been known— like, it's almost like the abuse by coaches is the only way to be great. Well, then honestly, don't be great unless somehow you've been okay with abuse. And you were probably a kid, so you didn't get a choice. So screwed up, sure, we're all screwed up. To me, it's are you doing it because it really does feed your soul, because you've identified this is who I am, I love doing this, I love how this feels, it is aligned with who I am.

106I I think of like a, like a musician. I've known lawyers who would say, you know, I shouldn't have been a lawyer, I should have been a poet, I should have been a musician, but I couldn't have made a living. But they're much more aligned with their values when they're playing music. They just may not be able to make a living out of it, or maybe they feared they couldn't make a living out of it, so they didn't pursue it. So they stayed in something where they made a nice living, they became the best. Were they happy? Some probably are, and some, some aren't. It's so individualized. The key is— you asked about what to look for, right?

107Earlier on you asked about, you know, how do you, you know, what to look for in terms of being happy or distress. And I really believe it's okay to look at your life and say, do I like what I'm doing? Do I get anxious on Sunday night because I have to go to work on Monday morning? Or do I wake up on Monday morning and look forward to going to work? Or do I feel kind of neutral about it? But once I get into my workday, I feel pretty good about things. Am I dreading my work? Because the easier piece of your question is Can you notice when you're miserable? Not when you're thrilled, that's easy too.

108The middle stuff is hard. Lots of people are doing law profoundly unhappy and still doing it because they are not identifying that they're entitled to create a life that is, at a minimum, not miserable. I should be able to figure this out. I should learn to like this. I should learn to like opposing counsel yelling at me and calling me names. There's some things we can't learn too late and shouldn't because they're not who we are.

111It is my honor. Thank you.