From Perspectives

"Ellen Ostrow, founder of Lawyers Life Coach LLC and a psychologist/coach who works frequently with lawyers, coached a woman to improve her business development. The woman was very successful at cultivating clients but had not taken on management roles in her firm.

Her Aha! moment came as she sat in a firm meeting. She realized she could approach her colleagues the way she approached her clients, Ostrow explains, by emphasizing the ways she could help and influence people. 'She has now taken on leadership roles both in her firm and in professional associations.' "

The Passage to Leadership:
Aha! Moments Lead to Confidence
Perspectives, Vol. 12, No.2 Fall 2003
by Holly English
Published by the American Bar Association
Commission on Women in the Profession

From The New York Times

"When a colleague told Julie Day, a lawyer in Fairfax, VA, that she was consulting an executive coach - a new breed of personal trainer who helps clients develop business acumen and people skills - Ms. Day was not impressed.

'Boy, that sounds self-absorbed,' she recalled saying to herself. 'I was very skeptical.'

Yet Ms. Day is now a believer. None months ago, she hired an executive coach, Ellen Ostrow, a psychologist in Washington who helped Ms. Day redefine her marketing style and to 'think out of the box.' Dr. Ostrow provided tips on controlling paperwork and other administrative tasks. Perhaps most important, the results have been quantifiable, Ms. Day said: she has become a partner in her firm."

New York Times
Tuesday October 29, 2002
Page E5
Byline: Diane Cole

From Creating a Life

"Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D. is a new breed of psychologist. Founder of LawyersLifeCoach.com, a website that provides resources to help lawyers combat the long-hours trend, she provides personal and career coaching for lawyers determined to achieve balance: to work shorter hours and get themselves a life. Specifically she seeks to help young attorneys - most often women, but sometimes men - buck brutal requirements for billable hours and 70-hour to 80-hour work weeks, and actually take advantage of the work/life policies newly on the books."

Creating a Life: Professional Women and
the Quest for Children p.279
by Sylvia Ann Hewlett
New York: Talk Miramax Books 2002

From The Psychotherapy Networker

" 'If you're looking for your [coaching] niche, the question I'd ask is, 'Whose issues matter to you?' Ostrow says. 'Because you have to live these people's issues."

Ostrow [originally] found her [legal] niche within her therapy practice. '[Early on] I was seeing a lot of women attorneys,' she says. 'And a lot of them were coming in with work-related issues. In the big prestigious law firms, the ideal worker is completely analytical, unemotional, competitive, and heroically individualistic, and a lot of women have trouble with that. I realized I wasn't treating psychopathology as much as a very stressful work environment.' Gradually, she says, her focus shifted away from her clients' difficulties and toward [coaching them to find] potential solutions…"

From ABA Journal

"…Many firms declared outright that if they were going to pay top dollar, it would now take, say 1,950 billable hours to get it. On its face, this fed into the already vicious circle of ever-worked lawyers who measure success and each other by just how overworked they can be. But the new focus that big money has put on long hours might also be a tipping point for long-running quality-of-life programs. At the very least, the issue will surely quicken as the watershed pay spike of year 2000 runs head on into new energy and strategies calling for a more human face on the legal profession.

'I had young associates coming in and telling me they'd rather have the time than the money,' says Ellen Ostrow, a psychologist who has expanded her Washington, D.C.-area practice to include career coaching for professionals. 'But they were telling the wrong person. The managing partners need to hear this.' "

ABA Journal
February, 2001
Law Beat
"Your Time Or Your Money"
Byline: Terry Carter

From New York Lawyer

"Q: There seems to be nothing one can say to one of my partners - particularly in partners' meetings - which he doesn't automatically disagree with. I actually believe that one could say, 'The sky is blue,' and he would object, 'Oh, no, it's actually a silvery-grey, and in any event will be dark grey soon.'

"This habit is maddening. It gets in the way of effective communication in our meetings. Equally maddening is that often, having disagreed with an idea put forth by myself or someone else, he will later articulate the same idea in different words, this time framing it positively and adopting it as his own. He's very glib and smooth so it's hard to take him on without looking petty. What can I do?"

"A: …Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., founder of LawyersLifeCoach.com and a psychologist who coaches lawyers, asks whether other people in the partnership group feel the same way about this person. If so, she advises, 'The person with the best relationship with the partner, the person with most power, or the person with the best communication skills can meet with the partner. This person might point out that although the partner probably doesn't even realize it, he tends to be argumentative in the meeting and that this makes accomplishing the goals of the meeting more difficult. This person might thank the partner for helping the group consider alternatives and perhaps note that his adversarial abilities serve him well in court, but in the meeting it would be helpful if he were more aware of this and gave more careful thought to suggestions before he responded to them. I f the partner accepts the feedback, the group is then in a position to gently remind him of the goals of the meeting - that cooperation and dialogue will help more than argument in this setting - if and when the behavior occurs again.' "

New York Lawyer
September 27, 2001
Work/Life Wisdom
Holly English

From the AFTL Women's Caucus Journal

"In an interview with ..Dr. Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., founder of LawyersLifeCoach.com..,I explored the gist of virtual ..coaching.

Let's face it, 'work-family balance is a fact of life, not an accommodation for people with peculiar needs.' Finding a balance between work and life without sacrificing professional success can be a daunting task..

If you are a lawyer faced with the challenges of bringing in new business, the need to implement a plan to market yourself, create visibility, manage your schedule, advance in your firm, or manage the spillover from your work to your family, a life coach may be ideal for you."

AFTL Women's Caucus Journal
May 2002
"You Have Sacrificed To Get Where You
Are, Why Not Control Where You Are
Going? - What Is and Why You May Need
a Life of Career Coach"
by Jene P. Willliams, Esq.
Liggio, Benrubi & Williams, P.A.
West Palm Beach, FL

From Of Counsel

"The profession's problems are not just evident to those on the inside. Others, including ..Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., see the super-charged stress and subsequent dissention the law-firm environment breeds…

Although Ostrow generally works with individual attorneys, recently she's been talking more with management, as law- firm leaders grapple with dwindling retention rates…

She also implores associates, before they become completely dissatisfied, to take more initiative in getting mentoring by being clearer about what kind of work they want to do and by targeting the specific skills they should seek to enhance, all while asking them to examine what they really want in their lives.

Ostrow is asked to speak at state bar association conferences, where she often hears horror stories about the unwillingness of firms to treat attorneys as anything but billable-hour machines. 'I shake my head in disgust the most when an attorney has made a reasonable case for working part-time to help balance her life,' she says.

[Entire text available at http://lawyerslifecoach.com/ofcounselarticle.html]

Of Counsel
Vol. 20, No. 6
"In a Profession Beset with
Problems, 'Coaches' May Offer
Part of the Solution"
Byline: Steven T. Taylor

From The Florida Bar News

Little gasps burst from the audience at the Florida Association for Women Lawyers luncheon when keynote speaker Ellen Ostrow said: “I’m going to ask you to throw away your to-do lists.”

Armed with her Ph.D. in psychology, Ostrow is a personal and career coach for women lawyers, from Washington, D.C., the founder of LawyersLifeCoach.com, on a mission to help lawyers achieve success without sacrificing a meaningful personal life.

Shock rippled again through the crowd at the Bar Midyear Meeting in Miami January 17 when Ostrow said, “I’m going to suggest that you not worry about your billable hours.”

A survey by FAWL revealed that balancing professional and personal lives is the number one concern for women lawyers.

“There are countless people who will be happy to tell you that work-life balance was a fad that went out with the bull market, and that right now if you want to be successful as a lawyer, you’d just better put in those hours or abandon your professional goals,” Ostrow said.

“But I am absolutely certain that the quest to have a life is not a fad. My hope is that you’ll leave here being as certain as I am that you don’t have to downscale your professional expectations in order to have a balanced life. And I want you to be able to walk out of here knowing how to successfully fight for your career and your life.”

So what does a balanced life mean exactly?

“There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for feeling like your life is balanced,” Ostrow said. “Most fundamentally, work-life balance means having control over when, where, how, and with whom works gets done.”

When it comes to the legal profession’s assumptions about a successful career, she said, “A truly committed lawyer is one for whom work is primary, time to spend at work is unlimited, and the demands of family, community, and personal life are secondary. The ‘ideal’ lawyer works 25 or more uninterrupted years, taking no time off for pregnancy, childbirth, or child-rearing.

“A truly competent lawyer is supposed to be tough, unemotional, competitive, self-sufficient, and individualistic. This lawyer will demonstrate heroic action – like the woman who completed a transaction while on the gurney being wheeled into the delivery room or the associate who billed 3,000 hours last year.”

Another assumption, she said, is that a successful attorney is available to clients any time of day, or else they will leave you for another lawyer who is.

Put aside those assumptions and be open to new possibilities, Ostrow challenged.

“What if you decided not to think about hours and instead to simply focus on your work?” she asked. “You’d be less distracted, far more likely to get into the state of ‘flow,’ where you’re working at your peak, and so engaged you’re not aware of time passing. Would you be feeling stressed and out of control while you were doing this? Probably not.”

She’s heard all the protests before, that every month the law firm sends out a record of everyone’s billable hours, and if numbers are down, heads will roll.

“Please don’t think I don’t understand this. I’m merely suggesting that focusing on your billables reduces the likelihood that you’ll be effective at work. Give it a try, for a day, for a week. Then you can look at your billables if you want to. But remember, your goal is balance.”

Another suggestion is to refuse to buy into the idea that you must be available to your clients at all times. Of course, you need to be available in a crisis, but not whenever the clients want to reach you.

“Are you there 24/7 for anyone in your life? If you’re not for the people you care about most, why would you agree to that for a client?”

She urged women lawyers to stop worrying about competition and the possibility of losing clients.

“ The fact is, you are more likely to succeed in your work and in your life if you adopt the attitude that there are always more clients,” she said. “If you participate fully in work that truly interests you, instead of thinking your life depends on reaching some pinnacle, you’re far more likely to have a successful career and a balanced life.”

Another tip in striving for the balanced life is defining what success looks like for you, she said, rather than clinging to the assumption that success is measured by money.

“What’s the use of working hard to make enough money to send your children to the best private schools if you never really get to know them before they leave home?” she asked.

She challenged the audience to take a moment to jot down five things that define their lives as successful, and to keep it in a place where they can look at it any time.

“Because if you don’t define success for yourself, your firm and your clients will be happy to do it for you,” Ostrow advised. “And if you allow them to define success for you, they will define it to meet their needs, not yours. They’ll have you working endless hours, so that you will make a lot of money, and they’ll think you’re a hero, and you probably won’t ever have to worry about losing your job. But you will be chronically stressed, your life will feel out of control, and you will feel anything but balanced.”

Dissatisfaction stems from working in an organization where the values of other attorneys don’t fit with your own, she said.

“I’ve worked with countless lawyers who’ve left behind large firms with large paychecks and are now happily employed in government positions or non-profits or doing public policy work or whatever allowed them to do what they went to law school for in the first place with people who share their most important values,” Ostrow said. “Sure, they make less money — but they make ‘enough,’ as they’ve defined it.”

If you want balance, stop being a perfectionist, she said. And throw away those to-do lists.

“This is what to-do lists do to you. You want to be organized, so you write down something you need to get done like, ‘bone up on Sarbanes-Oxley’ or ‘do taxes’ or ‘prepare for deposition.’ And the list keeps getting longer. And worse, at the end of the day, you can’t cross them off your list because you haven’t finished them yet. So, you move them to tomorrow’s list, along with several new things you hope to do tomorrow. If you make typical to-do lists, you wind up feeling overwhelmed, because you’re asking yourself to do things that can’t get done in a day. You feel out of control and like you failed when you can’t cross those things off your list. Even worse, you’re constantly preoccupied with all the things you have to do – and this is very stressful.”

The short version of her advice for the alternative to the overwhelming to-do list is to “get control of all the stuff that’s in your mind and on your to-do list, develop practices to help you stay that way, and then step back to examine the big picture.” And that “stuff” includes projects and goals in your personal life, too.

“After you’ve gotten everything you’re juggling now under control, you can step back and set some long-term goals and your personal vision for your life,” Ostrow said. “The absence of the pressure of having all these things you should do or need to do or forget to do floating around in your mind is indescribably delicious.”

Once you’ve managed your own life, Ostrow had more suggestions for managing your managers.

“I want to share with you something the CEO of a law firm confided to me a few months ago. This is not an exact quote, but essentially he said, ‘If you want to help women lawyers, tell them to stand up for themselves. The guys think they can push them around, and they’ll continue until the women start setting limits.’”

Successful women lawyers who also have a life confirm what he said, Ostrow said.

“They did not get where they are by just doing what they were told, trying to blend in, or tolerating verbal abuse.”

She advised that women on the receiving end of a jerk boss should calm down first, then stand up for themselves.

“Don’t be confrontational. But don’t be passive. If you want balance, you’ve got to take complete responsibility for your own career as well as your life. It’s up to you to be your own CEO. Decide where you’re headed, whose help you need to get there, what skills you need to hone. Lay out your action steps and do it. You’re an advocate. Advocate for yourself.”

Another tip: Get out of the win-lose game of lawyers.

“The focus on good counsel about justice and fairness has shifted to billable hours, the bottom line, and eat what you kill.”

Instead, she advised, “make your enthusiasm, your sense of fairness, your perseverance the point of what you’re doing — not the winning.”

Remember that all work and no play makes for a dull lawyer.

“Having a life outside of work nourishes and energizes you,” Ostrow said. “You bring more to work — not less.”

Lastly, she said that while women lawyers can work to change their habits, it won’t change their work-life balance if the workplace culture is stuck in the past.

“The corporate world is way ahead of the legal profession in supporting work-life balance,” she said. “That’s primarily because they’ve discovered that it’s profitable.” She asked whether the legal profession truly values diversity or just gives lip service.

Work-life balance, she added, is not just a women’s issue in these dual-job family times. A 2000 study by Harris Interactive and the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute revealed that four out of five men ages 20-39 rated having a work schedule that allows them to spend time with their families more important than money or the challenge of their work.

And what about staying involved in your community?

“Wasn’t serving the common good an essential part of what it meant to be a lawyer? Under current billable hour demands, lawyers are cut off from their communities. Communities are suffering, and lawyers who’ve lost their connection to their communities become increasingly removed from the human side of law.”

Balancing work and life is not a fad, Ostrow stressed, but “is essential for your well-being, for the well-being of society, and for the long-term viability of your profession and your workplaces.”

She challenged the lawyers in the room to use their advocacy skills for something new and healthy: embracing the balanced life.

Florida Bar News
March 1, 2003
"Finding the right balance
between life and work"
Byline: Jan Pudlow, Associate Editor

From ABA Journal

"Psychologist Ellen Ostrow, who is also a professional coach and founder of LawyersLifeCoach.com, agrees with Seligman that lawyers tend to blame themselves when things go wrong. 'It tends to be about what's wrong with me and it's not changeable," she says. This, she adds, is particularly true of women lawyers, who are apt to view themselves as failures rather than as someone who merely failed to accomplish something.

'I recently had a conference call with a group of women lawyers who were talking about why male mentors gave them work,' she recalls. 'And not one of them attributed it to competence. It was always something outside themselves.'

For clients who struggle to bounce back after an experience that seriously taxes their emotional resources, Ostrow helps them to build what she calls a cognitive bridge between the difficulty of the present and the possibilities of the future. 'In this way,' she says, 'resilience is something you can teach.'

She often does so by using imagery. She might, for example, ask a client to imagine that she's getting into her fantasy car, 'and as she drives, she discovers that it flies through time. She then lands and imagines every detail of what it looks like,' says Ostrow. 'Depending on the issue, different details might be emphasized. But the idea is to enable the person to visualize what she is striving for. It's not very different from some of the visualizing that athletes do when they see themselves successfully accomplishing their goals.' "

ABA Journal
April 2003
"The Bounce-Back Factor:
Even Pessimistic Lawyers Can
Learn To Be More Resilient"
Byline: Steven Keeva

From The Washington Post

The distinction between therapy and coaching became apparent five years ago to Ellen Ostrow, a clinical psychologist in the District and Silver Spring. After 17 years of practice, she began to notice that many of her patients, primarily lawyers, had no diagnosable mental disorder. Instead, they were under stress because of workplace and lifestyle issues. What they wanted -- and needed -- was a safe place and an expert ear to help work them out, she says. Ostrow found herself acting more like a coach and less like a psychotherapist with those patients. After training with MentorCoach, she now divides her practice 50-50 between coaching clients and psychotherapy patients.

"After years of empathizing with my patients' pain and anguish, coaching lets me empathize with their excitement and exuberance," she says. "It's selfish, but it brings excitement into my own life."

The Washington Post
June 10, 2003
"A Coach for 'Team You'"
Byline: Cecilia Capuzzi Simon

From MORE Magazine

"Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., 51, a licensed psychologist in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., who got into coaching five years ago, brings me back to reality. She says change is change, and it's difficult. As much as we say we want to pursue our ideal life, we get scared, or we just don't know how to proceed. "In coaching, I can help high-functioning women take stock of what they've accomplished and construct the kind of personal life and career they want," says Ostrow.

...Ellen Ostrow believes all coaches – whatever their previous training – have to be alert for psychological problems that can develop. She adheres to the ethics and standards of her first profession – licensed clinical psychologist – when she does coaching, and has her clients sign a detailed contract, which includes the following statement: "If either of us recognizes that you have a problem that would benefit from psychotherapy, I will refer or direct you to appropriate resources.

Susan Hubele, who lives outside of Calgary, Alberta, found that therapy and coaching serve different purposes when she needed to make a life change. Four years ago, depressed and stressed out about her job at a start-up tech firm, a year of therapy helped her identify her sources of anger – the long hours, the lack of time to pursue her art and be with her family, and the old-boy network that governed her work life. When she concluded that she needed to leave her job, she started regular phone appointments with Ellen Ostrow. Today, Hubele sells her ceramic sculptures through galleries, and does architectural sculptural commissions for homeowners. The therapy helped her face facts about an untenable situation, she says, but the coaching helped her move forward boldly."

MORE Magazine
July/August 2003
"Coaches for the Game of Life"
by Priscilla Grant

From ABA Journal

"Most any lawyer would welcome the chance to work with a good coach to help improve a golf swing or workout routine. What may not have occurred to many lawyers - at least not yet - is to look for a coach to help improve their professional lives.

But career coaching may be the next big movement for lawyers who want to improve their careers and find a better balance between work and home life..

Career coaching is kin to the more-established practice of career counseling. But while career counseling may focus largely on helping someone change jobs, coaching considers the broader issues of career development while tackling specific issues in a very direct way, say practitioners in the field.

'A lot of the career coaching I do is not career change but helping attorneys figure out how to be successful in their legal careers, while at the same time accomplishing goals that are not career-related, like having a life,' says Ellen Ostrow, a psychologist in the Washington, D.C. area who offers career coaching services to lawyers.

Typically, career coaches consult with clients by telephone as well as in person, say some coaches.

'As busy as attorneys are, most of them are very happy not to leave their office,' says Ostrow.

ABA Journal
October 2003
"Someone to Watch Over You:
Lawyers Turn to Career Coaches
For Help in Their Professional Lives"
by Martha Neil

From New York Law Journal

One reason [that many lawyers are unhappy] is that attorneys, whether by temperament or training, tend to approach situations from the viewpoint of "what can go wrong" - which might make for good lawyering, but a glum worldview, explains Ellen Ostrow, a personal coach who specializes in lawyers. What's more, people who always see the negative don't bounce back as quickly as optimists.

One starting point [for bouncing back from losing a trial] is for attorneys to ask themselves what did go wrong in the case…With lawyers, says Ms. Ostrow, these reasons take the form of: "I'm a terrible lawyer," or "I'm just incompetent." But these rationales can only lead to despair: "If you're incompetent, there's nothing you can do about it," she says.

In her role as coach, Ms. Ostrow suggests attorneys evaluate all possible reasons for defeat. Once they do so, she says, they tend to see that the evidence usually supports a more temporary reason, such as the facts of the case were particularly bad or that the lawyer had the flu, than a pervasive explanation. "Fundamentally, there is no one reason for everything, so you're not trying to get people to con themselves."

Another thing that makes it harder for lawyers to recover after losing a case is engaging in "catastrophic thinking," which involves imagining worst-case scenarios, such as: "word will get out and all my clients will fire me;" or "I can't ever show my face in the courtroom again," says Ms. Ostrow. When lawyers start this type of fantasizing, Ms. Ostrow talks them down by telling them to imagine the best-case scenario. Attorneys then usually see that their best- and worst-case scenarios are "equally ludicrous" and prepare for the most likely scenario.

Finally, says Ms. Ostrow, lawyers should learn to live with imperfection. "This doesn't mean lowering your standards," she says. But it means banishing punitive thoughts - which goes against the grain for many attorneys. Even if they weren't perfectionists before becoming lawyers, the profession encourages an almost overwhelming obsessiveness. Associates in law firms, she says, "are encouraged to believe if there's a typo in a memo that's going to be the end of the world." This type of thinking, says Ms. Ostrow, makes it harder to recover from setbacks. "You have to cut yourself some slack," she says. "There aren't any perfect people."

New York Law Journal Magazine
February 2004
"Facing Defeat" by Wendy Davis

From Legal Times

"Ellen Ostrow, of Lawyers Life Coach, is one local career coach who helps D.C.-area women attorneys figure out where they should be in the legal world. Ostrow says that usually by the time her clients call, they have reached some sort of turning point and need help sorting out how to succeed in certain work environments. It's no surprise, then, that her practice is thriving."

Legal Times
September 6, 2004
"Where's the Class of '88?"
by Joanne Cronrath Bamberger

From Women Lawyers Journal

"National Conference of Women's Bar Associations (NCWBA) Summit Shares Secrets of Success"

Unique Programs and Projects

"Women from the D.C., Texas, and Alabama bar associations shared some of their more successful programs in a lively panel discussion…

Recognizing that women communicate differently than men, communications seminars are …very popular. Dr. Ellen Ostrow, a[n executive and career coach for lawyers], lead a seminar in Birmingham entitled Success in the Business of Law: Marketing and Management for the New Millennium. The focus of the seminar was to maximize marketing efforts with minimal time. Topics included 1)a dozen marketing tips for the time-starved lawyer; (2) take control of your career: how to develop a marketing strategy and hot to market effectively; and (3)how firms can help their attorneys and how you can help yourself."

From "Women Lawyers Journal,"
a publication of the National
Association of Women Lawyers,
Vol. 98, No. 1, Fall 2004.
"National Conference of Women's
Bar Associations (NCWBA) Summit
Shares Secrets of Success"

From New York Lawyer

A 2003 law school graduate writes to Ms. English, asking for advice since losing his job after failing the bar. He describes himself as depressed, concerned about the job market and his limited experience. "Please advise on how to handle my career and how to deal with the depression that seems to be getting worse."

from Ms. English's answer:

"Initially, you need to deal directly with your depression. Dr. Ellen Ostrow is president of Lawyers Life Coach and serves as an executive coach to lawyers from coast to coast (and around the world, actually.) She advises that you see a doctor or a mental health professional to determine whether you are clinically depressed or not. If you are, she says, 'It's going to make you extremely pessimistic, and you won't have the energy to do what's necessary for an effective job search. And it will most likely affect how you behave during interviews. Depression can also make decision making difficult, by slowing down your responsiveness. You can seem sad and down and irritable.'

She sums up the obvious: 'none of those things is going to help you get a job.'

…You can also do temp work (which can turn into permanent work), do some pro bono work, or volunteer on a bar committee - these also will help build contacts and enlarge your personal network. According to Ostrow, 'Only 20% of jobs are gotten without this personal networking among contacts.'

…There are many, many folks out there who failed bar exams and went on to have great careers, so please don't be discouraged. Ostrow has worked with many individuals who have had tough job searches, and she is emphatic: 'Everybody who is persistent gets a job, and gets a job they're pleased with.' "

New York Lawyer
December 23, 2004
Work/Life Wisdom
By Holly English

From Health

"Though it may seem to overlap with therapy, coaching is a very different endeavor, says Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., who is both a psychologist and a coach in Washington, D.C. Therapy is for healing wounds that impair a person's ability to function, she says. But coaches don't treat emotional problems. Instead, they focus on helping you establish and achieve goals… 'Coaching is for accomplishing goals, 'Ostrow says. 'It's the pace you go and say, 'Here's my dream. Help me get there.' '

… 'Nobody's doing anything in coaching that they can't do themselves,' Ostrow admits. 'But everybody has so much on their plates. Sot it's the coach's job to hold up your goal, shine a light on your path and say, 'Yes, but what about this?' "

Health
February 2005
"Coached to Perfection:
Can a Coach Help You Create
the Life You've always Wanted?"
by Ellen Michaud

From Lawyers Weekly USA

"Ellen Ostrow, a clinical psychologist and founder of Lawyers Life Coach, agrees that a worldview that makes lawyers effective in their profession can pollute their personal lives. 'Almost every lawyer I've worked with is looking for the dark cloud behind the silver lining,' she says. 'That's what they've been trained to do. If they are looking at job options, they are focusing on what can possibly go wrong in that position. Their spouses complain that when they go to a restaurant, rather than focus on the great food and atmosphere, they fixate on the bad service.' "

"The second form of happiness is 'The Good Life,' which Seligman defines as a state of absorption. Ostrow describes it as a state of "flow," in which a person loses all sense of time and self because they are so completely immersed in the activity at hand. This is often achieved through creative pursuits, inspiring conversation, sports, immersion in a beloved hobby - or in practicing law. According to Ostrow, when work is meaningful and utilizes a person's core strengths, it provides a form of engagement that produces a deep sense of satisfaction and pride. 'Burnout is the opposite of engagement,' she said. 'It occurs when your work is no longer meaningful. I think that much of the dissatisfaction among lawyers is due to burnout.' Ostrow says she works with lawyers on engagement issues and finding their core strengths. Her goal is to help them discover what elements of the legal profession are most meaningful to them. 'They often come in extremely dissatisfied and say, "I just hate law." But it's not that they hate the law, it's that their practice has no intrinsic meaning to them,' she says."

" 'There are a lot of happy lawyers,' said Ostrow. 'But the ones I know who are truly happy don't just litigate. They also mentor younger lawyers, they have rich family lives. And, for many, they find it enormously meaningful to fight hard for their clients. 'The important thing in work is finding balance. It's not about how much time your work consumes, it's about the engagement. When I say this to lawyers, it really resonates.' "

Lawyers Weekly USA
July 18, 2005
"Positive Psychology
and the Law: Why Lawyers
Are So Dissatisfied"
by Bill Ebelle

From Psychology Today

" 'You need to break it down into small pieces, so it doesn't feel like you have to jump across a deep canyon,' says Washington, D.C. coach and psychologist Ellen Ostrow.

'Talk to people who have made these kinds of transitions and create a strategy. Unless you are in jail, you are not trapped. You do have options.' "

Psychology Today
July/August 2005
"In Pursuit of Happiness
- New Careers"
by Carlin Flora

From Washington Lawyer

At an April event held by the Women’s Bar Association as part of its mentoring program, close to 30 attorneys filled a conference room at Howrey LLP to listen to Ellen Ostrow, founder of Lawyers Life Coach LLC, offer advice and answer questions about making career decisions. Ostrow dispensed such tips as “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll be following someone else’s agenda” and “You have to find what interests you. . . . You need to know your values and what’s important to you. . . . You need to know your strengths.”

The attorneys scribbled notes and asked questions. “How do you deal with taking a significant pay cut when changing jobs?” “How do you know when to stop thinking about change and actually take action?” “How do you deal with lack of experience when changing practice areas?” This scene may not appear to have much to do with the act of mentoring itself, but it illustrates the desire that attorneys, particularly young attorneys, have for career-related feedback and advice and the pervasiveness of job dissatisfaction, both of which have very much to do with mentoring.

As a career coach, Ostrow often advises her clients to put together a “personal advisory board” made up of various mentors, because not every individual on the board will be able to attend to the mentee’s needs at any given moment, and the diversity of mentors will broaden the mentee’s learning experience. “You might look to one person for help with your legal writing skills, another person for help with your business development skills, somebody for your trial advocacy skills, and someone else to help you figure out the politics of your organization,” says Ostrow.

Washington Lawyer
July/August 2006
Mentoring Opportunities for Today's Lawyers
By Kathryn Alfisi

From The Legal Intelligencer

Can In-House Attorneys Get a Life?

More corporate law departments are embracing initiatives to help in-house counsel attain a work-life balance.

“General counsel are increasingly paying attention to work-life balance and implementing flexible work arrangements and other programs for their in-house counsel. Long work-weeks may still be the norm, but many legal departments are now offering flexible work arrangements. Other work-life initiatives such as in-house amenities, stress-management programs and help with child and elder care are also taking root.

‘Creating flexibility is an imperative,’ said Ellen Ostrow, psychologist and principal of Lawyers' Life Coach, a personal and career coaching service for women lawyers in Silver Spring, Md. Ostrow said the reasons behind the change are two-fold: Attorneys increasingly strive to achieve better balance between work and family life, while legal employers generally face lower rates of retention among their attorneys. In an effort to keep their best employees and attract new talent, many corporate legal departments hope promises of flextime and other work-life balance tools will lead to more loyalty and better retention rates. “

“HOW CAN FLEXIBILITY WORK?

First, ‘be receptive to alternative work schedules,’ said PAR's Calvert. Job sharing, where two employees split a full work-week, is new to the legal field. But Calvert said it can work particularly well at legal departments. "When the attorney is not in the office, there is someone covering her job," Calvert explained. ‘The clients are happy and the attorney is happy, so it's a win-win for everyone.’ Telecommuting at least part-time is another good option, said Ostrow of Lawyer's Life Coach, since ‘most internal clients can be perfectly well served by someone who's working at another location.’

Even if job sharing or part-time arrangements mean increased costs in employee benefits, Calvert said keeping a loyal workforce quickly offsets those costs. ‘It takes six to 18 months to get a new attorney up to speed,’ Calvert said. ‘A huge drain on the department, and the department will not function as efficiently.’ Cutting down on attrition costs will greatly benefit the department in the long run, Ostrow said.

Of course, not every position or employee is well suited for an alternative arrangement. ‘You have to think, for any given position, what are the requirements that have to be fulfilled?’ Ostrow advised. With job sharing, the department will need two people who work well together and have seamless communication and coordination, said Ostrow. With telecommuting, the department will have to evaluate the extent and amount of face time that's still necessary to do the job right.”

“Attorneys' quest for more balance and happiness isn't likely to go away, predicted Ostrow. The pool of employees will only have increasing external demands to meet. Ostrow advised: ‘Rather than resisting that, a department will be much better able to respond if it has diversity that reflects the business's clients.’

The Legal Intelligencer
August 11, 2006
Can In-House Attorneys Get a Life?
By Ursula Furi-Perry

From Diversity and the Bar

“Dr. Ellen Ostrow, founder of Lawyers Life Coach in Silver Spring, MD., provides personal and career coaching for lawyers determined to achieve professional success and a fulfilling life. Many times, her coaching includes her help in developing an effective proposal for reduced hours or a flexible work schedule.

‘Women don’t necessarily negotiate as aggressively as they could – they tend to assume that the offer on the table is the only one possible,’ says Ostrow. ‘Sometimes coaching helps them remember that it is a negotiation and to get clear on what their terms are.’”

“‘Think of balance as a verb and not a noun,’ says consultant Ostrow, who says that like a punching bag, women are going to get knocked off balance, but they have to re-center themselves. ‘That means you have to be clear about why you’re doing what you’re doing and what your priorities are and not let yourself get distracted.’”

“Ostrow says that the ease in which flexible work arrangements can be made also depends on the firm, and even as reduced-hour work schedules gain popularity, there is still a tremendous stigma attached to it.

‘Implementing flexible schedules across the board is difficult. Even if the firm has a policy for it, the firm’s policy doesn’t dictate the attitudes of everyone else in the firm,’ says Ostrow.

‘You have a range of attitudes to contend with, which means a range of people who will respect your schedule as well as others who will make assumptions about your career commitment that may adversely affect your opportunity for advancement,’ continues Ostrow.”

Diversity and the Bar
July/August 2006 Vol. 8 No. 4
Part-Time Partners: Making It Work
By Carisa Chappell

From Legal Times

“Law firms are not know known for innovative thinking when it comes to hiring practices…

So what happens to attorneys who step off the 70-hour-per-week fast track, as many professional women (and a few men) do at some point…?

Attorneys who take time off are often viewed as not being committed to their careers. ‘If you develop an identity, as Mom or anything else, if you’ve been willing to compromise your identity as a lawyer, then are not [considered] serious. You are a dilettante,’ says Dr. Ellen Ostrow, as Silver Spring, MD-based psychologist who has developed a nationwide career-coaching practice for female lawyers.

Legal Times
09-22-2006
Lawyers Who Take Time Off Face Tough Return
By Alexia Garamfalvi

From New York Law Journal

The Goldilocks Problem

“It's a problem no one wants to talk about, and yet it is one of the greatest barriers to the advancement of women attorneys. Carolyn Buck Luce, co-chair for Ernst & Young's Professional Women's Network in the Northeast and leader of its Global Pharmaceutical Sector calls it ‘the Goldilocks problem.’

‘Women attorneys are criticized for being too little of this or too much of that; not confident enough or too confident; not aggressive enough or too aggressive; not ambitious enough or too ambitious. But women are seldom just right,’ said Ms. Luce, who also chairs the ‘Hidden Brain Drain,’ a task force that helps employers retain women.

The root of the problem is gender bias, and virtually all of us are offenders. Our biases are often unconscious. They operate automatically, distorting information and reinforcing themselves by giving salience to information that is consistent and dismissing that which is not. As a result, our biases skew our first impressions of others, our judgments about their competence, and which facts we recall about their performance.

'As leaders of the legal profession, men also are presumed to be more competent, but lower status groups like women are implicitly assumed to be less competent,' said Ellen Ostrow, a psychologist and the founder of Lawyers Life Coach, an organization providing career coaching to women attorneys. Several psychological studies have found that women leaders are judged more negatively than equally skilled men in male-dominated fields but equally competent in female-dominated fields.

Because we tend to remember information that confirms our presumptions, errors committed by female attorneys may be more salient and therefore more likely to be remembered than those committed by male attorneys, who are presumed more competent.

However, research shows few characteristics on which men and women differ along gender lines. Surveying more than 40 studies, researchers found little difference between women and men's leadership styles, according to the 2005 Catalyst study.

Persistent Stereotypes

Still, stereotypes regarding male and female professional abilities remain.

‘When a moment of low confidence or uncertainty comes from a man, who we presume to be naturally confident, we are more likely to dismiss it than when it comes from a woman, who doesn't benefit from the same presumption,’ said Ms. Ostrow.

Women attorneys ‘walk a fine line,’ noted Ms. Ostrow. Qualities that are seen as desirable or acceptable in a man are often criticized in a woman.

‘If women behave in ways that are inconsistent with their gender stereotypes, there is often a backlash,’ she said. “

New York Law Journal
September 29, 2006
The Gender Gap
The Goldilocks Problem
By Melissa McClenaghan Martin

From Lawlife

Newsletter: Lawlife
October 2006

Please note: You can read the newsletter by clicking on the title "Lawlife".

From Washington Lawyer

Part-Time Partners

“The reason so few partners take advantage of part-time schedules is that there is often a gap between the written policy and how it is practice, especially at midsize and small firms.

‘There are firms that have written policies that look terrific on paper,’ says Ellen Ostrow, a Siler Spring, Maryland, psychologist and life coach who specializes in counseling lawyers. ‘[Yet] I’ve seen women try to use the policies and be told that there’s no such thing as a part-time partner, or be told that the only practice that can realistically fit in reduced hours is a trust and estates practice, or be told that they’ve manipulated the firm into thinking that they were going to be a contributing member and that’s why they had been advanced to partnership.’

Over the years Ostrow has counseled many part-time attorneys who had trouble balancing their schedules against the expectations of their firms, colleagues and clients.

As with any employment arrangement, the less specific the policy, the more that can go wrong. Ostrow says she is currently coaching one D.C. client who is suing her employer for demoting her to nonequity partner after she shifted to a part-time schedule. The lawyer had planned to quit after the birth of her child, says Ostrow, but agreed to return when the firm offered her reduced hours. In her suit the lawyer alleges that her firm didn’t specify that part-time partners could not continue as equity partners.

In the world of law, 45 hours a week is considered banker’s hours. No wonder, then, that most part-time partners don’t go out of their way to advertise their status to their clients or their full time colleagues. Some actually hide it.

Ostrow cites one client who works with a male partner ‘who’s extremely competitive and who undermines her when she’s not there. He doesn’t know she’s working reduced hours, and she doesn’t want him to know.’

Ostrow says reduced schedules are more likely to be accepted at firms where at least 40 percent of the mid- and senior-level attorneys are women. With that mix ‘the reality of life outside the firm has become a normative thing,’ she says. ‘Then everybody starts acknowledging that they have lives and they have families. And once you can talk about those things, then a lot of other things become easier.’ “

Washington Lawyer
December 2006
Part-Time Partners
By Joan Indiana Rigdon