378: Peace in the Storm

Hi, I am Dina Cataldo, a master coach and ex criminal prosecutor I created. Be a Better Lawyer Podcast for driven lawyers like you who want more from life than sitting behind a desk. You've been playing by other people's rules. Those rules have left you overwhelmed, unfulfilled, and feeling like a hamster on a wheel. I've been there. I was doing everything people told me to do to be successful, working late nights, weekends, and trying to make everyone happy. So why wasn't I happy and I wanted more in life? When was I going to find time to find and pursue that? Well, I did. And I'm sharing with you my secrets to living a happier and more fulfilling life. This podcast gives you a lifetime of wisdom, mindset, principles, and bedrock strategies to give you unshakeable confidence, more time to pursue your goals, a powerful sense of purpose to uplevel your life and law practice and so much more. These are things we were never taught in law school. This podcast bridges the gap between law, school and life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started.

 

Hello, how are you today? Today's episode is titled Peace in the Storm. The storm can be so many things. It can be your office, it can be your email inbox, it could be people coming into your office interrupting your focus. It could be family members who are driving you up the walls. The storm could be anything that takes you out of peace. One of the things that has taken me time and practice to learn is that we can find peace at any time. We can find it at the heart of the storm, in the eye of the tornado, but we are in charge of creating that peace. It doesn't just come the world outside of us isn't going to magically stop. Life isn't going to suddenly be roses and rainbows because there's two aspects to us. And we came into this world knowing it was gonna be this way.

 

So we made the choice before we decided we were gonna come here to say, alright, I'm gonna have this experience. And yes, there are going to be hard parts. I'm going to be heartbroken. I am going to feel doubt, I'm gonna feel fear, and I'm going to have that aspect of me. And then there is also this higher part of me, my spirit that's going to be right alongside with me on this ride. And it is going to feel like I am split into two versions of myself while I'm here. And I know that it's my job to have these experiences and through these experiences, join these two parts of me. So when you think about the storm, I want you to think about this three dimensional world that we live in, the people that inhabit it, the circumstances that you see with your eyes, the experiences you have, whether it's trial, hearings, writing, a brief, whatever.

 

It's, those are our three dimensional experiences. We are engaging with the world, with our hands, with our eyes, with all of the, the parts of our physical being. And then there is this other part of us along for the ride observing us, as you might think, right? If you might think of it this way, that is our higher self, our soul. And we are here together in this dualistic relationship that is meant to be. We are meant to experience the difficult parts of this life and the peace parts of this life. Those parts where you feel the most love, the most joy we're meant to experience it all. But what we get confused is we believe that we are at the world's mercy because we see what we see with our physical eyes. We touch what we touch with our fingers, our hands, and we forget that we have a higher part of us.

 

And that's natural, right? Like this is why I talk so much to lawyers is because we are so immersed in this three dimensional realm. We are so right-brained that we forget that we have this whole other aspect to us. And that's why we feel so much turmoil. I came to find this out about myself much later. But if you're experiencing turmoil, if you're experiencing frustration and all of those things that come with this life, you are not abnormal. This is part of the package deal. But what has happened is you have forgotten that you are able to find peace in the storm, and that it is actually your work in this lifetime to keep reconnecting with that peace. When you feel disconnected from the peace, you're going to feel frustration, anger, you're going to feel that you are out of harmony. And that is part of this three dimensional reality.

 

And then you have this higher aspect to yourself. And my question was always, how do I connect with that higher part of myself? I knew there was something there. I called it inspiration. I thought, okay, as soon as I can connect with my inspiration, I'm gonna be told exactly what to do. What I didn't understand that was in order to connect with that higher part of myself, I had to create peace within myself. And that felt pretty darn impossible when I was, you know, full-time, 50, 60, 70 hours a week running trials, um, running preliminary hearings, you know, doing all of the things you gotta do as a lawyer that are part of your job. And so it felt like it was out of my control until it didn't, because it took practice to keep reconnecting with myself and reconnect with myself to the point where I felt more peace in my life, in my law practice than I did storm than I did turmoil.

 

Before I go any further with this, I want to invite you to my new workshop happening this Thursday. So if you're listening to this in real time, it's happening this morning, but when you sign up, you will gain access to the replay. So even if you aren't listening to this podcast in real time, I'll make sure that you get the replay. And it's essential if you're experiencing the storm, as I'm calling it here, that you attend this workshop because it is going to shine a light on areas where you are out of peace and allow you to take control and allow you to take back your peace. So the workshop is called The Hidden Cost of Frustration in your Law practice. Stop getting Angry and Start reclaiming your Time, energy, and Sanity. You can sign up for it right now by going to dina cataldo.com/frustrated lawyer.

 

That's dina cataldo.com/frustrated lawyer. I really wanted to create this workshop because so many lawyers come to me and one of the things they share with me most often is that they want to feel more peace, but you can't feel peace as long as you are stuck in frustration and anger, resentment, all of those doubts, worries, fears, as long as you are stuck in those, you will not be able to find peace. So let me go through what I wanna talk to you about this 'cause I took some notes. So we've really talked about the frustrations. We've talked about this physical aspect of us, which constitutes the storm that I am talking about here, and the higher part of ourselves, that spirit part of ourselves, that inspiration I was talking to you about earlier that I wanted to connect to so badly was it was my higher self, but that higher self could access problem solving, it could help me access whether or not I'm following the right path.

 

So many times we ask ourselves, am I doing the right thing? Am I following the right path? When you find more peace than storm, you will know if you are following the right path, you will know what to do. And I'm gonna share with you something that happened to me just this morning to illustrate a question that you can ask yourself every time you have confusion about this. So people are always asking me these questions like, how do I know I'm making the right decision? How do I know that I'm doing the right thing? How do, how do I get myself to take action when I quote unquote know the right thing to do, but I'm not doing it?

 

So one of the things that I want to share with you is a question that can help bring clarity in the moment. What would bring me more peace, right? What would bring me more peace? Let me clarify. Peace is not comfort. <laugh> comfort might feel good in the moment. Having that donut, having that extra hour hitting snooze on your alarm, <laugh>, you know, going out for coffee instead of sitting down and doing your billing. That's comfort. But peace is when you feel so good about how you're treating yourself, about how you're treating others. You feel that you are respecting yourself. You feel that you are doing the right thing for yourself long term. So if you think about peace, it's not just a, in this moment, I feel comfort, I feel better. I feel relief because I'm not doing my work. I feel relief because I told that person off.

 

It's what is peace. Peace is, I feel this in a sustained way. I feel good about myself. I feel good about how I made decisions throughout my day. I feel good about the decisions I'm making for myself now that are gonna have an impact in my future. That is peace. So let me take this into the example that happened to me just this morning. So I was on my walk and as I was turning the corner to come to my home, I had this thought and it, and it was, you should go get a coffee and uh, uh, croissant. And oh, it felt like a really great idea. It was like, oh yeah, that would, that would be great. That's comfort, right? You have an urge, you wanna satiate it. That's comfort. And there's nothing wrong with comfort. But in that moment, I asked myself, well, I, I actually looked up, you know, reminded myself of my calendar.

 

And my calendar said I was gonna be sitting at my calendar at my, I was sitting at my desk, I was gonna be recording a podcast. So when I looked at the time, I could have gone to get that coffee and croissant or I could sit down and get my work done before my first call that I had this morning. So it was interesting to watch my brain process what was going on, what my two choices were in that moment that I was giving myself. And then I asked myself, well, what would bring me the most peace? And what would bring me the most peace as following through on what I said I was going to do, completing the task that I put down on my calendar, acting in Impeccability. And if I were to go and get the coffee and the croissant, I'd enjoy myself.

 

Of course I love treating myself. I love giving myself those things, no doubt about it. But in that moment, what I would be chasing is comfort and not peace. So let's return back to what peace and the difference between peace and comfort. When you come into this world, you know that you are gonna have death. You are gonna face heartache, you are going to face all kinds of difficult things. And each of us have a different experience with this. Maybe it is disease, maybe it is, um, a challenging situation with a parent. You know, whatever it is, you have these challenges and we are meant to overcome them. And to overcome them, we must be present with them. We must be present with ourselves. We must be kind to ourselves. We must point ourselves in the direction of peace. So in that moment, my storm was this back and forth between my higher self and my physical body, which is, you know, I can make the choice.

 

I can say my physical body is gonna drive the bus, it is gonna be in charge of my life. Or I can say, no, I want my higher self. That inspired part of me, that part of me that is meant to grow and expand. That, that is the part of me that I want to drive the bus. So the question to help you get there is, will this action that I am deciding on bring me more peace or is it comfort that I'm seeking? And you'll never find a person who reaches the age of 108 who says, oh, my life was just so perfect in every way. I never had any issues. I never had any heartache, I never had any tough decisions to make. I always was just at ease and just felt so comfortable through my whole life. You will never find a person like that.

 

Why? Because we don't come into this physical form to experience comfort. Not all the time. We aren't here to just have a life full of rainbows and daisies. We are meant to experience the tough experiences. The ones where we have difficult relationships, they are our greatest teachers, those who we are looking at and we're engaging with, and they frustrate us the most and they tick us off the most. And we just wanna just strangle 'em sometimes. Well, those people in our lives are our greatest teachers. The relationships that we've had, whether romantic or familial, whatever they are, they serve us in so many ways if we allow them to. And this is something that I work with my clients on because in addition to being a lawyer where you are trying to help your clients and you're dealing with them on a day-to-day basis, you are a human.

 

And as a human, you may want to seek out comfort. I understand that a hundred percent and I think it's even good at times. But we can immerse ourselves in comfort to the, at the detriment of our peace, at the expense of our peace. I'll give you another example. When I was in jury trial, I would notice myself feeling stressed out, overwhelmed. I didn't eat really well, I couldn't concentrate or focus, I'd crash after lunch because I'd have either a big meal or I'd have nothing. Or I'd eat, uh, a Snickers and I'd just have a sugar rush and then I would drop. So there were all these things that I was noticing when I was in trial that felt horrible. And my initial reaction was to blame the job of being a lawyer. Blame the job of being a prosecutor. But that is not the case because I am always in charge of peace. I am always in charge of bringing myself back to that reconnection with who I really am and who I'm meant to be, which is this peace, right? Because when you really sense what's out in the universe, if you've ever looked up in the sky, when you look at the stars, that's peace.

 

Like really stand outside tonight and look at the sky if you can. If you're lucky enough to be able to see more than a handful of stars look up in the sky, that's peace. There's no turmoil, there's no storm. It's quietude In our society today, it is very challenging to find that peace because we are at every turn given something we can distract ourselves with, something we can find comfort in. Whether it's scrolling social media, whether it's a constant connection with somebody via text, whatever that is for you know, that it is simply a teacher. It is simply there to help you recognize where you are out of peace. And you are indulging in the storm. You are staying in the storm voluntarily. Now, you may not think of it as being voluntary, but you have a decision to make at every single turn, turning down the block I had a decision to make.

 

Do I go and seek comfort and have that beautiful cup of coffee with a croissant? Or do I move myself towards peace, which is sitting down and helping some people with this podcast, which I had committed to creating earlier in the week. So I had that choice in that moment. So for you, you have those choices too. Bringing it back to the trial situation, I could have stayed in that frustration, in that anger and said, you know, I am going to just have to find a new job because clearly it's the job that's doing it to me. But it was not the job. It was me doing it to me. I was choosing this. So what choices did I have available to me? Well, I had the choice to design my day differently, to allow myself to feel more peace. This is something that you can do too.

 

And this is what I do with so many lawyers. So what I did for me is not gonna be something that works for you. You have to find the thing that works for you. But I had to sit with myself and say, what do I want? How do I want to design this? What do I think could be helpful to me? What will help me move forward this week? And that's something we're gonna be talking about in the workshop for specific things going on in your life, in your law practice. So be sure you register for this workshop because when you do, we're gonna be doing this work together, we're, I'm gonna be asking you questions that are gonna help point you in the directions you need to see to help you reconnect with that higher part of yourself who already knows solutions. It's just that you haven't given yourself the space, the time, the quietude to connect with that part of yourself so that you can solve for these things.

 

So if you haven't already, go to dina cataldo.com/frustrated lawyer register. So let's keep going. So that was me with the trial situation, right? You've heard me talk about this in relationship to my calendar just happened this morning, right? These are things that we face every single day, other things that we face every single day. We face the choice to watch the news and indulge in that storm by going down the rabbit hole. I hear so many people say that, oh, well it's the responsible thing to do, but is it, is it responsible if it's taking you out of peace, if it's an action that's taking you out of harmony. Because when you're out of harmony, how do you show up in the world? Do you show up in the world you way the way you want to when you are in a storm, when you are feeling like you're fighting for sanity?

 

Of course not. But when you show up the way you want to, you'll notice more and more that it is when you are in peace and not following comfort, not following what everybody else is doing in the world around you. So this is another example I wanna talk to you about, is I also attract a lot of lawyers who want to do something different. They want to start a new business and they're super scared. And I get that 'cause I have been there. They're scared and their brain's telling them all the reasons why they shouldn't do it, why it's irresponsible, why <laugh>? You know all the things. And I want to offer to you that when you are in turmoil, you are not following your peace. You're not asking yourself what will bring me more peace long term? And then you gotta follow it. And so how do you follow it, right?

 

That's the big question. How do I do that? How do I follow that? Well, you are not gonna like my answer, but I will tell you my answer. You have to want peace more than comfort you. You have to want that long lasting peace that you're not even with right now, right? Because you haven't experienced it with your fingers, with your hands. You have to have faith in that sense of peace. So for me, when I was deciding I was going to leave the legal field, it was hard. It was scary. I was making really good money. Everything was really certain. It felt really like stable. Like, okay, if I, if I shake anything up, this could be bad. I mean, that's what the brain is constantly telling us because it's trying to protect us. Protection is a beautiful thing when a bear is chasing you.

 

Yes, absolutely. But when it comes to your peace, what do you need? So for me, I had to make the decision that peace was more important to me than comfort because all of my signals, all of the spidey senses were telling me, wait a minute, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared. This is bad. Don't do this. This is really bad. What are you doing? You spent so much money on law school, you shouldn't do anything different. And then it was, and then I was faced with these investments because I wanted to invest in learning how to coach with clarity and be the very best master coach I could be. And I had investments, $25,000 here, $5,000 here, $10,000 there, you know? So I was looking at my circumstances, my three dimensional world, and I felt discomfort. I felt fear. And remember, fear doesn't go away.

 

It's part of the package deal we get when we come into this planet in this three-dimensional world where we've got a body that's part of the package. So what you've got to do is want to get th you have to want the peace so much so that you're willing to go through the discomfort. So how do you do this? This is the question. How do you want peace more than comfort? When your physical body always wants comfort, it always wants safety. Your brain's always trying to say, no, no, no, no, don't do anything different. Well practice. And that's the answer. I know you don't wanna hear, but you've gotta practice. You've gotta be in peace more and more. And the more you experience peace, the less comfort, right? The less that comfort, the less that your physical body, the less that your lizard brain is going to control you.

 

Because that's what's going on when you are not following your desires. That is what's happening. And there's a link between what we desire, not urge not, not like, um, comfort, like Oh I really desire a cup of coffee and a croissant. No, it's not like that. There's a link between our larger desires, for instance, the desire to grow your practice, the desire to start a new business, the desire to do something that all logic tells you, makes no sense. The desire to do something that your lizard brain is flashing all of these signals saying, no, no, no, no, no, you gotta make sure that you have X amount of dollars in the bank before you make that investment. That was what I always was telling myself is like, no, no, no, no, you've gotta have more. You've gotta have more. It was always this vague, more <laugh>. There was never a specific amount. And that's how you know that you lizard brain is controlling you and you're not going after what is going to ultimately bring you peace. And it's scary, it is not comfortable.

 

But I knew that through all this discomfort, there was something else on the other side of it. I couldn't tell you what it was. I couldn't tell you, oh yes, you will have a coaching business and you're gonna help hundreds of lawyers and you're gonna have a podcast that hundreds of thousands of people have listened to like you. You just won't know the details, you won't know the specifics. You will just know the right thing to do because you practice so much getting into peace over and over again, over and over and over again. And so when lawyers come to me and they're specifically focused on, let me get outta overwhelm it, it is a process for them because they're scared to use a calendar, which is normal. Maybe they've never used one before, they've definitely never used one in the way that I teach it.

 

And that feels scary. And so they have to know and want peace more than the comfort of not using a calendar. They have to desire the peace on the other side of knowing how to use a calendar, knowing how to follow through on it, right? Not to mention when you come to a strategy session, like we'll talk through everything what you need and what you want and all of that. But at some point we do talk about whether or not you want to work with me. And then we talk about money. And money can feel like such a triggering thing for people. And so then you gotta get past that next level of discomfort of thinking about, okay, well what is gonna bring me more peace? Am I looking for comfort and certainty? Which doesn't exist in this world, by the way, if you want to live and grow, it does, does not exist.

 

But if you want that, then you will never make the choices that lead you to peace. You will never make the choices that are going to allow you to reconnect with that higher part of yourself. And the only way to do it is to feel discomfort and choose peace, feel discomfort, and choose peace over and over and over again. So with the calendar, it's okay, I don't wanna do the calendar, I do the calendar, I don't wanna do the calendar, I do the calendar and you go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because that's human nature. That's our experience in this 3D world. And then you experience the result after you've completed the calendar and you're like, whoa, wait a minute, I feel so much peace right now. And then the lawyer goes back, well, okay, well I think I'm gonna do it again.

 

And they do it and they feel good and then they forget the next week. 'cause they forgot to remind themselves that they're in charge of creating their piece. And so then they go back and they're like, wait a minute, why didn't I do my calendar this week? Oh my gosh, it must mean I'm a horrible person. No, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the realities of this three dimensional world where our bodies seek comfort. Our brains are pushing us towards comfort. And so in every single moment it's up to us to decide do I want comfort or do I want peace? And sometimes during a day, you can choose both, right? So I might choose, I might choose, um, peace right now, you know, during my workday, peace, I wanna feel peace. This is what is required of me to feel peace, follow through on what I said I was gonna do on my calendar, complete all of these things.

 

And then at the end of the day it's done. And then I might say, okay, well tonight I had a sauna planned, but is a sauna gonna bring me peace or or is watching tv, do I want that more? Do I want the comfort of watching TV more and then I'll have another decision to make. There's no right or wrong decision, it's just the decision that you make. What will bring you more peace? And you might feel sick and you want chicken soup, you want to have some comfort. Like that's a comfort and that's okay. But are you choosing comfort at the expense of your peace? Are you choosing all of the things? Are you choosing the coffee and the croissant over getting stuff done and helping people in this world? And if you're listening to this and you're somebody a, a lawyer who wants to start a business or you wanna grow your practice and you are not doing it because you're stuck in comfort mode, I want to offer to you that you are depriving people of your help.

 

You are depriving people of what they need in in this world. And when you have a desire to expand, when you have a desire to go in another direction, there's a reason for it. And then it's up to you to decide, hey, you know, I know this is uncomfortable, but do I think I'm gonna have more peace at the end of this when I have the business I want, when I have the overwhelm under control, when I am following through on what I say I am gonna do, what do I think is gonna bring me more peace? And yeah, I'm gonna have to do some uncomfortable things. Just like everything in this world. We're gonna face deaths in our lives. We are going to face hardships, we are gonna face uncertainty every step of the way. That doesn't change because that's the nature of this planet.

 

That's the nature of this world that we came into. And then we get the opportunity to reconnect with who we really are. That higher aspect of us that inspired part of us that knows we're so much more than this physical body. And the only way to do that is to practice getting more into peace and practicing being more in peace than not. Like I had, um, Shannon Clark on this podcast, she was one of my clients and she had, she was a trial attorney. She had the experience of having trials back to back in her civil practice and she had never had that before. So she really got to see firsthand how practicing peace helped her calm the storm and allow her to be even better in the next trial. She could problem solve better. She, she was able to calm herself, she was able to delegate better, she was able to connect with her associates better. She was able to do all of these things better because she was able to reconnect with that part of herself. That part of herself that is pure peace. But we can't do that unless we practice it. And that was just one way that you can see how that is in practice. The calendar is another way. You walking down the street and noticing that your brain is like, I don't wanna do anything. Let's just go get coffee and a croissant <laugh>.

 

So that's what you need is you need to continue to come back to that question, what would bring me more peace? And then you keep practicing it. You just, that's how we learn in this world is it's consistency, repetition, keep doing, keep failing. 'cause that's part of this 3D too. Nobody tells us about that. 'cause we're supposed to just get straight A's in school and everything's supposed to be great all the time. We're just supposed to be just straight A plus students. And if you fail, you've done something wrong and you should be ashamed of yourself, you, you're bad, right? But that is not it at all. That's not it at all.

 

All it is is that we are here to learn and we're supposed to learn from the times we fall on our face too. If we're not learning from the times that we're falling on the face, we're not getting all of the learnings that we could be getting from this experience. Alright, so I'm gonna wrap this up here. I wanna remind you of that question that you can access anytime you're noticing that split, right? That dichotomy between you and the higher self. So you're walking down the street and you notice yourself saying, oh my gosh, I'd rather do anything but what's on my calendar. I'm sitting at my desk, oh my gosh, I'd rather check some emails instead of doing the priorities on my calendar, right? I'd rather have an argument with this person than sit calmly and have a a more difficult conversation where we have to go in depth on some things because I'm choosing comfort over peace.

 

And yeah, an argument can feel like comfort because it's the same thing as relief. It's like you're getting something off your chest. You are now saying something out loud in a maybe harsher way than you mean to say it and it feels good in the moment. But is it bringing you ultimate peace? And a lot of times we avoid those difficult, difficult conversations because we're afraid of how the other person is gonna respond. We're afraid where this is gonna go. And it's okay to feel fear. It's okay to feel frustration about those things. But what are you doing that is at the expense of your peace? And it may be that you don't even need to have a conversation with somebody, you just let that person go, right? A lot of times we think that that's the way is that we need to have the conversation.

 

Sometimes we just let the person go. I had somebody in my life for a very long time and I felt very guilty about needing to leave this person because they were not good for me. They were not loving, they were not kind. They were not somebody who treated me with the respect that I was due. And I felt very attached to this person because we had some really great experiences. There was love there. There was some really some really beautiful things that happened in that relationship. But it got to the point where I was in the storm instead of in my peace and I had to walk away from that. It was not easy. There was a lot of back and forth and that's okay. But boy would it have been so much easier if I had just had this question <laugh> that I came up with, which is what would bring me more peace. Oh, I'm in the comfort of this relationship. And the comfort for me was drama. It was heartache. It was the back and forth. Oh my gosh. It felt so comfortable because I was used to it. It was something I had grown accustomed to. It felt normal to me.

 

And that norm normality. That normalcy. I thought that was peace, but normalcy, comfort is not peace. And the only way I could go after that peace, 'cause it was up to me to go after it, was to walk away and keep walking away. And every once in a while, this person still contacts me and I just don't respond. And that is how I maintain my peace. So that is something that each one of us has access to when we consciously decide we want peace more than we want comfort. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is a choice that each one of us has. Alright my friend, I wanna invite you one last time, come to my workshop. If you're listening to this on Thursday in real time, then it might be happening right now and you can just jump on in. So you can register at dina cataldo.com/frustrated lawyer. And if you can't make it today, that's okay because I'm gonna send you the replay. Alright my friend, I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week. Bye.