Ten Distinctions
Filed Under Holistic Law |
When a lawyer applies a coach approach to the practice of law, the lawyer works collaboratively with the lawyer’s clients to assist them in transforming their legal problems into opportunities for positive change and spiritual growth. The coach-approach lawyer achieves these goals by engaging the client in profound conversations about choice and the freedom to choose the client’s own interpretations of events and the significance to the client of those events and by inviting the lawyer’s clients to place their legal problems into the context of their lives and of their goals, aspirations and dreams.
As part of the process of providing the client with legal services, the coach-approach lawyer coaches the client to choose among ten key distinctions that will assist the client in moving forward. The coach-approach lawyer invites the client to distinguish:
• Between perception and reality, story and fact, and the consequences of confusing the one for the other
• Between emotions and feelings and the consequences of confusing the one for the other
• Between “the truth” and beliefs, between disempowering beliefs and empowering beliefs, and the consequences that arise from choosing one over the other
• Between affixing blame and accepting responsibility for a legal problem and the impact that choosing one response over the other has on a client’s ability to move forward toward a workable solution to the client’s legal problem
• Between sin and mistake (generating either guilt or reasoned regret) and the consequences of believing that a past act was one or the other
• Between thoughts that generate adrenalin/cortisol and those that generate endorphins and the impact on the client’s health of the presence of one or the other substance in the client’s body
• Between motivation and inspiration and the pressure or the vacuum that results from choosing one over the other
• Between illusionary force and true power of unattached intention and the consequences of choosing thoughts and actions that create one or the other
• Between acting from a domination paradigm and a partnership paradigm and the consequences of operating from one or the other
• Between what cannot be changed and what can be changed and the implications of focusing on one or the other.
Philip J. Daunt, Esq.
