In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws sits down with one of Arizona’s Top 5 commercial litigators and the author of Rewiring the White Collar Mind to talk about what we don’t learn in our professional education and how we can fill in the gaps to find contentment in the present. Charles Price shares some stories and tips about how to rewire your relationship with yourself and your career for authentic balance and contentment.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Charles Price has over forty years of legal expertise and has earned acclaim from AZ Business Leaders magazine, ranking him among Arizona’s top five influential commercial litigators. He is the author of the recently published book,
Rewiring the White Collar Mind: Transcending Professional Training to Achieve True Life Balance and Contentment.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
BEHIND THE BOOK
The idea for Charles Prices’ new book, Rewiring the White Collar Mind, came when preparing to talk to law students about what they don’t learn in school. Charles explained, “Everybody goes through a professional school [and] becomes keenly aware very quickly that there are things you don’t learn in law school, […] and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that not only were there gaps in our professional training but there were all sorts of ways in which our professional training actually steers us away from the things that we’re gonna need to live contented and balanced lives.”
Early on, he taught law students to think about the curriculum they were learning — how they were being taught to study precedent, or “looking backward,” and to strategize, or “looking forward.” But they weren’t being taught “to live right now.” If the students went to law school to pursue success and find happiness, then they weren’t going to find it without rewiring their minds to find contentment in the present. And the same goes for all of us.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Biggest Blind Spot
“I’ve always been a good student and a good learner, and so I kind of responded to the inputs that I believed my environment was giving me. So my law firm is paying people a lot of money to work a bunch of hours. Okay, I’ve gotta go do that. If you’re being taught that winning is everything, and you gotta win every conversation and win every exchange, [you] gotta do that cause that’s what’s being rewarded […]. So my biggest blind spot was the failure to understand that there is both an outer world and an inner world and that the most important one, the one where we truly live our lives, is the inner world. And the outer world is important as sort of a workplace, a playground where we express our inner selves, but it’s the inner selves that matter in the end.”
Finding True Balance
“My view is that you can learn to be content, engaged, present, focused in any circumstance, however stressful, and that’s what you should strive for. I write in the area of what some people call work-life balance, but I actually struggle against that term a little bit because there are some problems with that term — it kind of implies that work life is terrible, your home life is great, and you ought to balance out your terrible work life with your great home life. And I say it’s more important to sort of macrobalance to make sure that you’re depositing as much as you’re withdrawing, but at every moment throughout the day that you’re enjoying little moments of joy and connection and engagement as they come. […] We tend to minimize all of our wins and successes while, at the same time, we obsess about our defeats and mistakes. So our bank balance inevitably over time gets radically overdrawn.”
Growing Up
“I just was gobsmacked by how much I fell in love with my first child, and then, of course, my second and third, and I just couldn’t believe this wellspring of emotion that was within me. It’s like, I need to do whatever it takes to be the best parent that I can for this person, and I would certainly lay down my life for them. But am I willing to do an even more difficult thing, which is to lay down my preconceptions? And I realized over time that I had to do that, and I could do it. Really, I would say that my emotional development has been sort of a process of me growing up alongside my three girls.”
Something Outside Yourself
“As you think back on why you got into your profession, what’s most important to you, find something that’s bigger than yourself. Find something that’s outside yourself, because so many people say, my motivation is to get this amount of money, this promotion, this job, this position, this recognition, and in my life and my own experience, and looking around at others, I’ve just never seen that work.”
Stealing Your Focus
“The ‘attention economy,’ I think, is what we were discussing a couple of moments ago, and that is carefully curated to get our attention, get eyeballs on the screen, and to outrage us, but we have a choice. Are we gonna watch? How are we gonna respond? Are we gonna say, ‘Well, there’s probably more to the story’? It’s a process of consciously reclaiming control over your life because the messages aren’t getting any less explicit and any less powerful. […] Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, said, ‘They could take away everything in the concentration camp except my ability to think my own thoughts.’ And certainly if he, in that utmost of hellish circumstances, could realize that, then the rest of us can, too.”
Learning to Listen
“I believe that it’s not taught unless you’re lucky, and it’s one of the most important life hacks that really is pretty simple. I’m not saying it’s easy for everybody, but once you start practicing it, especially if you pay real close attention, it’s so easy just to be quiet.
Just sit there and do nothing. That ought to be something most people can do. When I say do nothing — on the outside, you’re not talking, you’re not interrupting, you’re not thinking about what you’re going to say, you’re not formulating your response, but you’re really trying to absorb what does this human being have to say to me that I’m engaged with right now?”
“[…] Then, see if you can find some way to respond that moves the conversation along rather than just gives your take on it. ‘Why do you think that? Tell me more about that. How did you come to that conclusion? What are you reading about that?’ […] And the reason it’s so powerful is we’re all wired for connection. The primary way we connect with people is verbal.”
A Different Take on Stress
“I’ve tried to cultivate an attitude of gentleness towards stress because anything that you resist and fight, it tends to just increase its power over you. So I accept the fact that my job is stressful. If it weren’t stressful, I probably wouldn’t get paid a lot of money to do it because almost anybody could do it. So in some ways, I can be grateful for the fact that I have this stress. And I also realize that so much stress comes from that inner voice.
And we have power over what the inner voice says, but we often don’t exercise that power. We go to the worst, most critical place.”
LEARN MORE
Pick up your copy of Rewiring the White Collar Mind on Amazon or wherever books are sold.