Many lawyers attain conventional success (in terms of earnings and financial wealth building) but feel unhappy and unfulfilled. Although they take justified pride in the excellence of the professional skills that make them financially comfortable, their material success does not bring them joy. Yes, they are successful breadwinners, but deep down they don’t feel as if their lives produced anything of lasting significance.
Are you currently engaging in soul searching within your own mind or in relationship with a psychologist, therapist or clergyman? Have you wondered, “Is that all there is?” or “Have I come close to reaching my full potential as a person by being a lawyer and living the life I’ve led?” These are very important questions. They arise when you develop a nagging sense that you’ve only tapped a fraction of the unique talents that your Source (be it God, the Universe or whatever you call it) gave you; that you haven’t taken actions of lasting transpersonal significance which will benefit future generations; or that the ways in which you earned and spent your money do not express your true essence as a person and do not make you proud.
Wouldn’t it be great to have success and significance – to positively impact many other people (not just the small circle of clients you represent) and to leave something meaningful for future generations? Wouldn’t it be great to experience joy from using your skills in ways that go beyond just making money for yourself or your family? The answer lies in learning to incorporate activism, kindness, generosity and charity into your daily life. Engaging in activism, kindness, generosity and charity in a habitual manner will make you a happier person with more friends and more meaning in your life. After looking at each one of these ways of being in the world, we’ll look at what a Generosity Plan is and how it can help you joyfully be all that you were meant to be.
Activism Let’s start with activism which is generally defined as “intentional action to bring about political or social change.” Does activism make you happier than being affluent and having creature comforts? Two university psychologists (Malte Klar and Tim Kasser) researched this issue and published their findings in the on-line journal Political Psychology Vol. 30 Issue 5 (7/24/09). In their first study they questioned 341 college students about their level of activism and their level of happiness and optimism. In their second study they did this with 718 adults consisting of a national sample of activists and a control group. Both times they found that the people who were advocating for a cause they cared about were happier, more cheerful and had a higher level of “social wellbeing” than the ones who lived only for themselves.
In their third study they divided up a group of students. They asked one group to write a letter to the management of the college cafeteria asking for tastier food. They asked another group to send a letter asking the management to buy only local or Fair trade products. When tested, the students in the second group (the ones who got involved in a political debate) scored much higher on the Vitality Scale, meaning they felt more alive and enriched than the students who merely complained about the bland menu.
Why does activism produce higher levels of human flourishing than just doing one’s job and earning money in a state of disengagement from causes like reducing poverty, hunger, gaps in educational equality, job discrimination, diseases, pollution or animal abuse? Taking action by itself feels better than complacency and can get you out of an emotional, social or physical rut. Taking action with others creates friendships. Taking action that has a positive impact on the world gives people a sense that their lives have meaning, that they are more than just consumers.
Kindness is different from activism. It is something we show to individuals rather than groups. It can be as simple as a warm smile or encouraging pat on the back. Kindness is given quietly without fanfare and without writing letters, distributing leaflets, fund raising, joining boycotts or marching in the street. A person is considered kind to others when he is warm hearted, sympathetic, considerate, compassionate, helpful or benevolent toward them. While some activists are kind to all (Mother Teresa), some activists can be harsh, strident and without compassion toward those who oppose their cause, while being kind to their family, friends and fellow activists.
How do you act as a lawyer? Are you kind to everyone or are you kind to your family, friends and clients while being harsh, strident and without compassion to opposing counsel, his secretary and his client? How do you treat judges, law clerks, bailiffs and court reporters? Are you respectful and courteous to all of them at all times or do you let your impatience and irritation show by raising your voice or speaking in a condescending manner?
When you’re not in court what are you like when dealing with people who are not friends but who aren’t strangers either – people like your neighbors, your children’s’ teachers and the people who coach and ref games for your children’s’ sports teams?
What about strangers? How do you treat other drivers, grocery store checkers, retail store clerks, waiters and waitresses, home deliverymen, bill collectors, telemarketers, pan handlers or out-of-towners asking you for directions?
Are you kind, rude or indifferent to these sorts of people or does your manner fluctuate constantly depending on variables like your mood, what time pressure you’re under and what your day has been like so far? Does your manner with others (kind or sarcastic) depend to some extent on how things are going at the office – whether your cases are going well and money is coming in versus cases going poorly and debts piling up?
If you are a kind person who habitually treats other people kindly regardless of circumstances, then you’re likely to be a whole lot happier and a whole lot physically and psychologically healthier than people who are unkind.
Allan Luks, author of The Healing Power of Doing Good: The Health and Spiritual Benefits of Helping Others, says that acts of kindness toward others decreases stress hormones like cortisol, increases feel good endorphins, maintains good health and diminishes the effects of many physical and psychological diseases and disorders. According to Luks, kindness reverses feelings of helplessness, depression, hostility and isolation that cause or aggravate stress-related problems including over-eating, binge drinking, ulcers, skin rashes and asthma. Acting from the heart to help others enhances our feelings of joyfulness, emotional resilience and vigor.
Being kind to others increases self-worth, optimism and happiness. It establishes “affiliative connections” with others and by strengthening our social bonds it also strengthens our immune system. In Love & Survival, famed cardiologist Dean Ornish, M.D. showed that heart health and immune system functioning are more strongly correlated with friendship than with diet, exercise, not smoking or any other variable.
The events that occur in our law practices can be used to justify being cranky, grumpy, surly and snappy toward others. Sometimes our hard work goes for naught. Sometimes we’re unfairly criticized rather than appreciated for the good that we do. Sometimes we’re subjected to rude, demeaning and insulting remarks by a hyper-aggressive opposing counsel. Sometimes we are run ragged by an over demanding judge or by a supervisor at our own firm. Sometimes we are forced to miss a badly needed vacation because of a trial continuance. And sometimes we get passed over for promotion in favor of someone else we regard as less talented, less hardworking or less loyal to the firm.
When these sorts of events happen we have a choice. We can get angry, rail against the universe, sulk and take it out on the people who surround us. I did my share of that for many years despite all the evidence that it was counter-productive and caused needless pain to others, while compounding my own suffering.
The other option is to do something kind for someone else. Mark Twain got it right when he said “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.” Hal Urban, author of Life’s Greatest Lessons, said “It feels good to make someone else feel good.” He also said building people up is a far more effective life strategy than tearing people down. In The Noticer Andy Andrews points out that people flourish when they get maximal encouragement and opportunities from other people. How do they get this? From giving other people encouragement.
What goes around comes around. When you’re kind to others, they’re kind to you and you live in a kind world. When you treat others unkindly in the sort of confrontational, abrasive and dismissive way that too many lawyers have become known for, then that’s what you get back, and you live in a highly stressful and lonely, dog-eat-dog world.
In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. demonstrated through lab studies that people with the strongest tendency to act as “caretakers” of others had the highest levels of agreeableness, social energy, social contact and friendship. Kindness pays long term social and emotional dividends that far exceed the short term sense of relief one gets from dumping toxic anger all over someone else when things aren’t going well.
A great way to sum up the value of being kind comes from no less a thinker than Aldous Huxley who said, “It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.”
Generosity and Charity Most of us think about generosity solely in monetary terms, as in paying your associates big salaries or being a big tipper at restaurants. Most of us think about charity solely in monetary terms as in writing checks for organizations that do good in the world in one form or another such as feeding homeless people. These conceptualizations of generosity and charity miss the mark.
In The Generosity Plan Kathy LeMay defines generosity as “the habit of giving of yourself in support of that which you most care about.” By the phrase “giving of yourself” she means giving your time, energy, talent and treasure selflessly to benefit others. By talent and treasure, Ms. LeMay is referring to the inborn gifts, education, training, and life experiences you have to contribute toward fixing something that is wrong with the world (something that keeps you at night) and bringing the world more into your alignment with your deepest values.
By charity Ms. LeMay means “to be generous to those who are going without or who are suffering.” To illustrate the concept she uses a metaphor from a Muslim woman named Ayesha who likened charity to a tree heavily laden with ripe fruit that bows deeply in gratitude to God and shares its fruit freely with others. LeMay adds that charity asks us to be a better person today than we were yesterday.
As lawyers we are narrowly focused on helping the small number of clients who seek our legal help during our careers, on advancing within our law firm to positions of greater responsibility and greater income and little else. We can easily lose sight of the fact that we live on a planet with nearly seven billion people that has a tremendous number of problems including war, torture, social injustice, poverty, hunger, epidemic disease, illiteracy, discrimination, the physical abuse of women and children, environmental pollution, habitat destruction with species extinction and so forth. When we lose touch with this fact and do absolutely nothing to engage ourselves with the world in a small way in an effort to improve some aspect of it and leave it better than it was before, we can fall into depression or at least into dissatisfaction and discontent.
It is crucial to understand why engaging in generous and charitable actions increase our life satisfaction. They take the focus of our consciousness off our egotistical wants to be rich, to have fine possessions, to be superior to others, to stand out from the crowd and to be admired, lauded or envied. At the same time they shift the focus of our consciousness to envisioning the kind of world we want to live in, what’s wrong with the world we have now and what we can do with our time, energy and talent to bring the world as it exists now more into alignment with our vision. It is this shift from self-absorption to expressing care for our world and its people through generous and charitable action that enables us to become happy and fulfilled at last.
How you express your caring for others is up to you. You could work to cure a specific disease, to protect marine mammals from being hunted for meat, to halt global climate change caused by pollution or something wholly local like feeding hungry children or tutoring children with math disabilities who live in your town.
Do you need to shut down your law practice and fly to Africa to help those who are going without or those who are suffering? No. Everywhere, including your local community, there are people who are going without and who are suffering. Have you helped them in the past and gained inner satisfaction? If you haven’t is it because your work as a lawyer takes so much of your time and energy that you have nothing left beyond what you can muster for your family? Given your lack of free time and your fatigue level from working 60 -70 hours per week, does it even make sense to think about generosity and charity? How are they possibly relevant to the life satisfaction of a lawyer? Haven’t you told people, or at least heard other lawyers say, “I’m not running a charity here. This is a business!”?
Some lawyers grew up in homes where their parents modeled generosity and charity. In some cases their parents were wealthy and regularly donated large sums to favorite causes. More often their parents could not afford large financial donations, but found other ways to help by adopting an orphan, caring for a foster child, taking meals to the sick, volunteering in a soup kitchen, visiting lonely people in a nursing home, shoveling snow off the driveways of disabled or elderly persons, helping to clean up litter from a creek or beach, reading to children through a literacy program or raising money to fund medical research for the cure of a disease by walking, running or cycling.
Lawyers raised by generous parents are likely to donate money or take action to benefit a cause of their choice and feel good about doing so. This is especially true if their parents emphasized the joy of giving instead of the egotistical pleasure of having your name splashed across the newspaper or plastered all over a building because you donated funds. My parents modeled generosity mainly by generous check writing. They were upper middle class, not wealthy, but did contribute about 10% of their annual net income to charity. They communicated the importance of helping the needy to me. Once they hosted a girl from Harlem at our house for a week through the Fresh Air program. My brother, sister and I really liked Terry and had a great time playing with her. While I do write checks to charity, I personally don’t get much of an emotional lift from doing so. I prefer the hands-on, face-to-face interaction I get through direct service.
Not all lawyers grew up with generous parents. Some were raised by parents who (regardless of their income level) were not disposed to share what they had with others. Unless they had grandparents, uncles or aunts who were highly charitable, such lawyers grew up with no model for generosity and charity. If you grew up in a home like that don’t berate yourself if you haven’t given much to charity over the years. Stingy, selfish parents don’t stress charity as a value to their kids. There is time now for change.
Ms. LeMay says the average amount of charitable donation in the U.S. is about 3% of one’s annual net income, which is well below the 10% that some religious groups mandate, or at least aspire to. Why is this? It’s not because most of us grew up with stingy, selfish parents. It has more to do with us being so incredibly busy that we don’t take time to figure out what we most want to see changed in the world and how we can most effectively spur that change – either by donating money, performing service or both.
There are 1.5 million non-profits in the U.S. (averaging 30,000 per state) which send out billions of pieces of mail. Most of us react to the year long bombardment of charitable solicitations by putting them in a box and reviewing them at the end of the year just before the tax deadline. By the end of the year we’re tired and have little, if any, excess cash to spend. The problems highlighted in the brochures seem so huge we can’t imagine that our small monetary donation could possibly help. We are confused by the plethora of organizations clamoring for our attention and dollars. Which of the target groups they want to help is the most needy and most deserving? Which charity is the most honest, well run and effective? Which ones are incompetent and wasteful or even fraudulent?
On top of this is anther problem. Ms. LeMay says most people are under the illusion that they cannot effectively help anyone else unless they give the kind of vast sums that only the Warren Buffets and Bill Gates of this world possess. This makes people feel that modest gifts are useless so they get intimidated from giving at all. LeMay points out that the word philanthropy does not mean a wealthy person who donates millions or billions to charity. Rather a philanthropist is any person who loves humankind. LeMay reminds us that not everyone has lots of cash to give away, but all of us have time and talent we can use to make the world a better place. Furthermore, giving your time can be more valuable than money to the recipient and can bring you more joy.
Ms. LeMay says far from being restricted to check writing, philanthropy is a way of honoring the gifts your Source has bestowed upon you and a way of caring for your fellow human beings. What are your gifts? They can include physical strength and endurance; creativity in the realms of concept-formation or the arts; number crunching ability; organizational ability; strength as a fundraiser from your charisma and way with people; effectiveness in communicating ideas through public speaking or writing; heart-based love, care and healing; and others.
If you don’t have excess cash to give because your law office expenses, family expenses and taxes are so high, don’t worry. You can express your care for other people in an infinite number of ways including volunteering your time to help with fund raising, research, education, awareness campaigns, legislation and direct service to target groups. Charity isn’t restricted to immense cash donations. Indeed, just 19% of the world’s charity comes from the monster cash gifts from the foundations set up by the very wealthy. The rest comes from individuals who are not rich and whose donations can be very small, as small as $5.00 per month. And don’t forget that the huge cash gifts from the foundations could not benefit anyone without the time, effort, problem solving capacity, experience and creativity of the people who use the donated funds to help others. Money by itself just sits there. It can’t spend itself intelligently, justly, humanely or in any other way.
In The Generosity Plan Ms. LeMay repeatedly uses a quote from Teddy Roosevelt to show that philanthropy can be practiced by anyone at any socio-economic level, even those living in poverty. The quote is: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
The Elements of Your Generosity Plan
No one knows automatically who to help or how, what cause to fund, how much to give or who to entrust your money with. Ms. LeMay says it’s crucial to develop a Generosity Plan to guide you. She also says that even the most wealthy, well meaning people are flying blind when it comes to charity if they don’t have a Generosity Plan. While they can afford to hire an experienced staff of people to advise them, we can’t. On the other hand it’s free to ask yourself and answer the questions needed to develop a Generosity Plan so we don’t need the staff anyway. What are the key elements to developing your own Generosity Plan? According to Ms. LeMay they are:
1) Determine through a process of self-reflection what you most care about, what you stand for and what cause moves, motivates and inspires you the most.
2) Develop a personal vision statement that contains a vivid, idealized description of the outcome you most desire along with the concrete reasons which motivate you to work for that outcome, so you’ll be in touch with what you’re trying to create and why you’re going to take action to create it. Ask who I want to help and why. Ms. LeMay says that when you define the reasons and motivations behind giving, your sense of personal reward is enriched.
3) Make sure the vision is positive, hopeful, forward thinking and emphasizes the possibilities. Stand for something not against something.
4) Choose a vision that makes you feel your life will be meaningful if you exert effort to make it happen. Assuming you do accomplish what you set out to do, ask yourself if that’s something your descendants would be proud of and that you would be proud to pass onto them.
5) Make your vision specific so you’re able to exclude other worthwhile causes. Focus on what need out there in the world touches you most deeply so you can smartly contribute your time and talents to meet that need rather than spread your efforts too thin and dilute their effectiveness.
6) Identify what you have that you can utilize to support your cause. When you start this exercise you might assume you have lots of talent but very little time and money, no talent or money but lots of time, etc. You can cut through the falsity of such assumptions and get to the truth by careful analysis. With regard to time, Ms. LeMay says draw up a time budget that shows accurately how you actually spend your time at work and home. This will enable you to cut back on the time you spend on inessential activities and free up more time to give to your chosen cause. The same is true of money. Draw up a budget that shows what you spend your money on and how much you spend. This will guide you and help you to cut inessential spending and free up more dollars to give to charity.
With regard to talent, once you identify the cause you want to support, you can seek out information as to what help they need. This will enable you to re-examine your education, training, prior jobs and life experiences with fresh eyes that help you pick out relevant skills. By doing these exercises you’re likely to see you have more time, money or talent to give to the cause of your choice than you previously assumed.
7) Take a stand within your cause and add your voice to it. By taking a stand Ms. LeMay means figuring out the best role and best place you can step up for it. She encourages people to be bold and move out of their comfort zone since changing the world requires daring. By adding your voice she means finding a way to use your unique, authentic voice (the one that expresses your deepest values) to advocate your cause. Ms. LeMay says “Lead with your heart” not just your head and “Live a life that reflects your spirit and your truth.” In the law office we suffer because we’re often in morally ambiguous situations and the way to win a case for our client may be morally ambiguous or may even clash with our personal ethical code. When you’re doing charitable work, Ms. LeMay says it’s crucial to be clear about and stay true to your values and character and not betray them. Thus charitable work can be a place for lawyers to advocate for someone or something they deeply believe in without making the kind of moral compromises which can cause depression or discontent in their jobs.
8) Know how to define success when it comes to generous actions and charity. It’s unwise to define success as fixing the problem, because most of the problems we aim to fix are huge, complex, of long standing and involve the cooperation of groups that may persistently disagree. Rather, says Ms. LeMay, define success in terms of the value that will be brought to your life consequent to living generously. You will benefit by viewing success as working toward the goal and reaping satisfaction from living your life in service to the goal. Success is seeing victories in small steps. We succeed when we help people by “doing what we can, with what we have, where we are.” When you live your life guided by your Generosity Plan you will see and feel the value of your actions even if the ultimate goal is not reached.
This is very different from litigation where the jury’s all-or-nothing verdict establishes a clear winner and loser. With charitable work, failing to gain ultimate victory (like the complete elimination of breast or prostate cancer) is not deflating because the work itself is enlivening and worthwhile even when small, incremental steps forward occur.
9) Stay the course. Ask for and accept support from family, friends, co-workers, fellow members of your cause and even strangers to prevent you from faltering, weakening or failing in your mission due to fatigue and discouragement. Ms. LeMay cautions that many people who start contributing their time and talent to a charitable cause give up due to burn out, naysayers, distractions and lack of the support of others. She emphasizes that anyone who is serious about charity needs to be committed and ready to go for the long haul. Charity, she says, is your “heart-and-soul-work” which you will do and support for the rest of your life.
Working for a charity with one specific purpose (e.g. eliminating diabetes) is quite different from legal work which is a disjointed sequence of representations of different clients. Legal work is fragmented. We represent many different kinds of people in many different kinds of matters. There is no one goal or vision that ties our career together or relates it to benefitting others. We liked working for some law firms and not others. We liked some practice areas and not others. We liked some clients and didn’t like others. We won some cases and lost others. Where does that leave us?
This lack of unity makes it hard to grasp the meaning and significance of your legal career and this can cause suffering. Being an activist for a charitable cause on an ongoing basis in addition to working as a lawyer might well provide the missing dimension in your life, the one that gives it lasting significance. In order to lead a generous life and do charitable giving effectively, with maximum impact and maximum satisfaction, you’ll need to develop your own Generosity Plan.
No matter how much charitable work you do – a lot or a little – don’t forget to be kind. Smiles, encouraging words, a pat on the back or visiting a sick person cost nothing, but work wonders. They make the world a warmer, friendlier, more hopeful place. Try doing three kind acts a day for one whole week and see what happens. When you’re done ask yourself if your kind acts has changed the experience of others for the better and if you have changed for the better.
If you are one of the many lawyers out there who have achieved financial success without gaining much – if any – life satisfaction, then please consider embracing activism, kindness, generosity and charity. They could make all the difference.
In her poem When Death Comes the great American poet Mary Oliver makes the certain prospect of our death pose the question of how we will live out our lives: